Your B2B Content Absolutely Sucks, Issue #012

Most B2B content is written by people who are terrified of writing something wrong. Leading to endless, forgettable, milquetoast slop that nobody wants to engage with.

There’s a version of this essay that opens with a statistic about how many pieces of content are published every day. I’m not going to do that. If you’re reading a marketing newsletter, you already know the number is obscene. You’ve seemingly been on the internet before.

My belief system may be irrational but it is mine and it is true to my experience. I believe everyone has at least one redeeming quality. I believe that aliens exist & they just don’t give a single fuck about us. I believe if I just *think* hard enough, my brain will magically evolve and I’ll just stop being ADHD.

I also believe that we, the tech community, are under constant siege from a B2B content overlord who wants to forcefeed us from the milieu trough of garbage writing. The texture of this content is so consistent, so recognizable that it almost has to be intentional. It makes one want to shout “are you punishing us?” at a hapless god. Someone, somewhere, is choosing this again and again.

In the words of the late Billy Mays, there’s got to be a better way!

Unreadable, Corporate Slop

Bad B2B content has a tell. It opens with a question nobody has once asked. In today’s fast-moving landscape, how do you stay ahead? It uses the word “leverage” as a verb. It has an unreadable section called “Key Takeaways.” It treats the reader like someone who showed up to be educated rather than someone who showed up because they already have a problem and need to think it through. Worse yet, it treats the entire endeavor of writing as a box to tick on the marketing department’s ever-growing to do list.

The incentive structure that produces this content is not mysterious. People need to show they’re doing something at work, especially in marketing orgs. (Author’s note: Leadership is always skeptical of marketing, unless they came from it themselves. One feels the need to demonstrate their worth on repeat.) SEO rewards comprehensiveness & buzzwords over clarity. Lead gen rewards clicks over resonance. Sales enablement rewards overwhelming documentation over accessible comms. The result is content that is Dead On Arrival. It technically exists but nothing more. It’s been written by a machine to cater to a machine.

10 years ago, when corporate content was still on the rise, the intention was to reach a human. The goal was “usefulness.” As you can imagine from, I don’t know, literally every word I’ve written in this newsletter over the past few months, I loathe usefulness. Bring back the absurdist digression!

When I was 24, I got my first finance job in London. I worked at a trade association representing capital markets institutions to the European Union. We worked with regulators and lobbied them by vertical. We also produced reports. Endless, nauseating, uninspiring, and yes, useless reports. My boss was the best kind of whimsical Brit, always quick with a story of a book recommendation. But his red pen was vicious and my work usually came back to me looking like the scene of a stabbing. His biggest criticism, according to his copious notes, was my “excessively flowery vocabulary.” Imagine. Our content abused the word “robust,” as you can imagine. In one report, I replaced it with “formidable” ONE TIME in 40 pages. It was a blood bath.

All that to say, the point was never actually “usefulness,” it was perceived usefulness. The most dangerous kind.

Good B2B content, therefore, is a rarity of a different measure. It’s survived the gauntlet of SEO-optimized mediocrity, an undeniable achievement that can’t be faked. But don’t worry, there’s a playbook.

How To Write Things Worth Reading

I’m not Hemingway, Allende, Hugo, or even Nabokov, but to say I’m not a good writer would be disingenuous. You’re here, aren’t you? So pay attention, because I’m going to share some principles of how to write good B2B content.

Somebody can inherently find fault with the premise at large.

Shocker, I’m yammering on about the importance of controversy again.

This should sound obvious to you by now, but it’s almost never practiced. Most B2B content sings an aria closer to more information about a topic you care about or worse, something autobiographical that we care about and want you to care about so you’ll buy it from us. Yuck.

Often the content is almost good! It does actually have some (forgive me) key insights that land. But the content that gets liked, commented on, forwarded, cited, discussed — it takes a position. Not a hot take, mind you, a position. To me, a hot take is more superficial (insert some milquetoast opinion about pizza) and therefore not a core belief. A position is what you actually believe after spending serious time and effort with the topic. It’s more academic, more earned, and therefore, more ingrained.

Fintech people have always had an unquenchable thirst for Stripe everything (something I’ve definitely complained about before), but that admiration was earned through their formidable (see what I did there) documentation. The documentation has a philosophical sensibility: developers deserve writing that respects their intelligence and their craft. That sensibility is, in itself, a position.

It picks a lane.

Good B2B content is bounded. It doesn’t try to serve the first-time visitor and the power user and the evaluating buyer and the curious journalist all at once, it simply can’t. It chooses a reader, writes for that reader, and lets the rest of the audience eavesdrop. The eavesdropping is actually the mechanism — when you write for someone specific, everyone else can tell. It feels like being let in on something.

The failure mode is the piece that tries to be comprehensive. Comprehensiveness is not inherently useful. Useful is useful. Those are different documents.

It doesn’t confuse length for value.

A 40-second TikTok of someone saying one true thing in the right way will outlast, outperform, and outrun a 5,000 word white paper on the same topic every single time. The mechanism of impact has never been volume. It's always been precision — the right idea, sharp enough to stick, delivered to someone who needed to hear it at exactly the moment they needed to hear it. Length is a container, not a credential. Yes, I recognize the extraordinary irony of me saying this. I am, at this very moment, several thousand words deep into an essay about B2B content, in a newsletter you voluntarily subscribed to, making the case that brevity is a virtue. I contain multitudes. But here's the distinction I'd ask you to hold: this is long because it needs to be (and I’m a certified yapper), not because length signals effort or seriousness or value. Every section is doing work. The moment it stops doing work, it should end. That's the test — not word count, not read time, not the comfortable feeling that you've been thorough. Does this sentence earn its place? If not, kill it. Your reader's attention is the most non-renewable resource in your entire strategy and they will not thank you for wasting it, they will simply leave.

(Author’s Note: Thank you to my 9th grade English teacher and lifelong friend, Dr. Daniel Collins, for the intensive lesson in the power of the succinct or laconic.)

It earns its framework.

Every time I sit down and attempt to codify one of my overarching, self-important philosophies, I’m engaging in a delicate dance that could very easily go wrong: the act of framework building. Frameworks should illuminate, not merely decorate. The difference is whether the framework is doing work that the prose couldn’t do alone, whether it actually collapses a complicated thing into a shape that holds.

Put simply? When it shows up in good content, you’ll find yourself borrowing it in meetings months later, without remembering where it even came from. You’ll find yourself thinking about it when you sit down to do something you’ve previously always done a certain way. Your mind will linger on it.

Therein lies the test. If you’re generating something someone will use, not cite, you’re making something good.

It sounds like a person.

Not a brand, a function, or the disingenuous use of the “royal we,” a person! A person who can opine on the topic and induce a sense of humor that isn’t performing “we’re the fun B2B company! See? We used a meme!!!!.” This person has a point of view that has been stress-tested against reality. Patagonia doesn’t sound like Patagonia because they have great values. They sound like Patagonia because there’s a coherent worldview underneath the values, and it shapes every sentence.

Most B2B brands write like a committee that has agreed to disagree. You can feel the red pen of some senior person in a totally irrelevant department. You can feel the places where the interesting thing got softened into something everyone felt comfortable with. If you remember one thing from my writing ever, never forget the danger of comfort.

Fear & Content in Las Vegas

Of course, in order to sound like a person with opinions, you must employ a person with opinions to spare. That leaves you two real options:

1. An external hire: An industry influencer who already has an audience they’ve earned through their opinions, their track record, their willingness to be wrong in public. (Someone like me. I’m not selling you anything, I swear, I just happen to illustrate the point: I’ve already bet on myself and you’re reading the proof right now.)

2. An internal microphone: Someone inside your organization who is decidedly not a writer but has earned their stripes. They’ve seen some shit and they know where the proverbial bodies are buried. They have hundreds of legitimate content ideas rattling around in their head, they’re just not used to the discipline of getting them out. That’s where your marketing and content team earns it keeps. They don’t generate all the ideas or write every word or script, they build the structure, the cadence, and the container for someone else’s hard-won perspective.

Notice what I’ve left off that list entirely: the content person or team you can hire from anywhere.

They got shiny degrees in English Lit or Journalism and now they write educational reports on disruptive cross-functional operating rhythms for lending and creditors, or whatever the brief says this week. The writing is clean, the ideas are safe, and predictably, nothing lands.

How could it? When your job security is tied entirely to the content you produce, you will never produce anything truly good. The incentive structure doesn’t lend itself to you taking a risk. In fact, in this economy, you probably feel like you can’t afford to take a risk. I don’t blame them.

The external influencer isn’t afraid of being fired, they have already proven people will pay for their perspective. They simultaneously have nothing to lose and a reputation to protect, which paradoxically makes them bolder.

The internal microphone isn’t afraid of being fired for the content, because content was never their core job. If a LinkedIn post bombs, they go back to doing what they were hired to do. The stakes are low, which keeps the voice honest.

The content hire, in comparison, is terrified. Every draft carries the weight of their continued employment and health insurance. The fear doesn’t sharpen the writing or the script, it completely sanitizes it. Rounding every edge and dampening every sentence with an almost ritualist “softening” of anything that might make someone uncomfortable. Which is to say, every part of the content worth imbibing from the audience’s point of view.

Fear and great content have only ever met at one nexus: war correspondence. Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Martha Gellhorn’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War, James Nachtwey’s written accounts alongside his photography. The deadline and the knowledge that a piece could get you killed has created so many legendary works because the correspondent isn’t afraid of their fucking editor, they’re afraid that without them, the story isn’t going to get out.

Comparatively, your stakes are laughably low. The risk you’re taking is potentially, maybe alienating someone important. But more than likely, by following my rules, you’ll attract the exact people you were hoping to when you started the whole endeavor.

You need to hire or recruit people internally who are unafraid and then you need to do a scary thing: you need to let them off the leash.

What You’re Signing Up For

The uncomfortable truth is that good B2B content requires someone to actually care — not about content as a function, but about the audience as a person trying to do a hard job. Caring is not a strategy and it cannot be systemized, it either shows up in the work or it doesn’t. Unfortunately for you, your audience has already developed an extremely sensitive detector for its absence.

You’re not signing up for a beautifully organized content strategy, an editorial calendar, or some kind of optimized workflow. Those things may follow, but they can pretty safely be ignored for now.

You’re signing up for the uncomfortable act of letting someone say something real under your brand’s name. Something that might ruffle a feather. Something that might make your board member’s husband’s second cousin send a sternly worded email. Something that, by definition, not everyone will agree with — because the alternative is content that everyone can agree with, which is to say, content no one will remember. Remember: a friend to everyone is a friend to no one.

The brands that have figured this out aren’t braver than you, they’re just more honest with their intentions. They’re not trying to produce content. They’re trying to produce trust, at scale, in advance, with people who haven’t bought from them yet. And they’ve understood that trust isn’t built through sanitized comprehensiveness. It’s built through recognition. The reader thinks: this person sees the thing I see and wasn’t afraid to say it.

That’s the whole mechanism. It is almost embarrassingly simple.

Find the person with something to say. Build them the container to say it in. Then get out of the way.

The content will follow. The audience will follow. And if you’ve done it right, the leads will follow too — though they’ll feel, to the people generating them, almost like a byproduct.

Which, for the record, is exactly how it should feel.

Today’s Lesson