“Let’s get that contract signed over the holidays. I’d hate for you to wait till January to start benefiting from our product!”
An AE sent me that note in December 2019, back when I was heading up marketing at a fast-growing SaaS company. We were about to buy their sales enablement software; the deal was basically a slam dunk. All we needed was one last meeting to clarify a few details, then we would sign.
But as you can imagine, our year-end was already hectic. Half of us were frantically trying to get everything wrapped up before the holidays. The other half were already out on PTO. For everyone’s sanity, I punted that meeting to January.
That’s when I got that note.
I was annoyed. Actually, I was upset. Because I knew—and knew that he knew—that I’d get no real “benefits” from the product the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Our office would be closed, for crying out loud!
That note had nothing to do with our needs, but his. He needed to hit his quota and to do that, he needed a signature on or before December 31st.
With one reply, he made his priorities clear. And much of the trust he’d built evaporated in an instant.
B2B marketers get sold to all the time. We’re well acquainted with pushy sales reps. And we know these approaches are often counterproductive. 80% of business executives are more likely to buy after a consultative, not transactional, sales experience (Forrester), while 89% of buyers want the salespeople they work with to be “trusted advisors” (LinkedIn).
However, when it comes to our content marketing, we often default to the same poor tactics. We post fluffy blogs that are thinly veiled sales pitches, “thought leadership” that lacks depth or strategic value, and listicles whose “Top Tips” conveniently align with our product capabilities.
And like those pushy sales reps, this approach to content undermines our credibility. The #1 criticism buyers have of marketing content is that it reads too much like a sales pitch (DemandGen Report). No wonder most marketers feel their content strategy is underperforming (Content Marketing Institute).
For a while, we’ve all gotten away with it. But as AI revolutionizes how B2B buyers consume content, trust and credibility are quickly becoming the biggest benefit that content marketing offers to businesses (Statista). Optimizing for trust and credibility isn’t something we can put off any longer.
The first step toward building that trust: recognize that buyers buy when they’re ready. Stop pushing them. Instead, make yourself the obvious choice when they’re ready to make a decision.
The data around modern B2B buying journeys
Google a standard B2B turn of phrase, like “B2B lead generation strategies.” The search results will reveal a series of articles, all of which follow the following broad outline:
→ A banal introduction with a shoe-horned SEO keyword
→ A section introducing the problem, with varying degrees of insight
→ Some ideas for how to fix the problem with limited takeaway value
→ A section on “what’s missing” from all these solutions—all of which conveniently align with the product’s capabilities
→ A section that conveniently positions the company’s product as the one-and-only way to fill those gaps
→ A demo or consultation request
I know this format well. Because (full transparency) I’ve used it in over a thousand articles. So if there’s a problem around how we do content marketing, I’ll admit I’ve contributed to it.
In our defense, this blog template didn’t just fall out of the sky. Like every common business practice, it’s based on a set of assumptions:
- The only value of this content is to rank for a keyword. It doesn’t matter how rote or banal it is, because the goal is to write for Google, not the user.
- When a user clicks through to the blog, that’s our one and only opportunity to sell them.
- The goal of this content is on-page conversion; otherwise, it has no real business value.
- As long as the content is hitting certain narrowly defined KPIs, it’s good for our business. There are no unintended consequences of bad content.
Just for a moment, I’d like you to think of these assumptions not as a marketer, but as a B2B buyer. Because when we’re the buyer, our behaviors don’t neatly align with those assumptions:
- We’ll click away from a website because you know their content was only written for SEO.
- We almost never fill out a conversion offer directly on a blog page. Either we click through several pages, or leave the site and come back later.
- Our favorite articles from our favorite brands are often those with no explicit CTA at the end—and many of us have gone back to buy products or services from these brands.
- We’ve read the #1-10 articles on Google, only to walk away disappointed that our problems haven’t been solved.
Turns out, recent data supports the idea that those knee-jerk reactions aren’t unique to you and me. In fact, they’re common across all types of buyers.
Customer journeys are non-linear (and non-trackable)
B2B marketers are obsessed with tracking customer journeys. We want to know every decision a buyer makes, the inputs that informed that decision, and our role in guiding that decision along the path to purchase.
However, in our zeal to quantify our efforts—and, let’s be real, justify them to the C-suite—we’ve lost sight of an important truth: Buying decisions never happen online. They happen in boardrooms, at water coolers, on private Zoom calls, and, most importantly, in the buyer’s own headspace.
We can track the effects of that decision: verbal agreements, signed contracts, payment, onboarding. But we’re not in the room where it happens. We don’t know everything the buyer is thinking when they make the decision.
As companies publish more research into the actual patterns of the average B2B buyer, we’re learning just how difficult it is to get a comprehensive, data-backed picture of the customer journey. Most B2B buyers engage in 27 touchpoints along their buying journey, highlighting a complex web of interactions leading up to a purchase. Channel-switching is equally common, with over half of all interactions with buyers taking place across multiple channels.
This trend has resulted in the shift from the linear “funnel” to what Boston Consulting Group (BCG) calls the “influence map.” They write, “Unlike the rigid, sequential approach of the funnel, where each of these behaviors is confined to specific stages, the influence map recognizes that they occur across the entire journey, often overlapping and influencing multiple stages simultaneously.”
Source: Boston Consulting Group
As content marketers, we’ve often assumed a strategic model where a given piece of content fits neatly into an “awareness” or “consideration” stage in the journey. As this data shows, people are too unpredictable for that. A buyer’s headspace is an enigma, one that even the most advanced predictive model will struggle to crack.
Sales are asynchronous
Talk to any B2B sales rep, and they’ll tell you that traditional sales tactics have become less effective in recent years. The data bears out that claim:
- Average cold calling success has halved over the past year, sitting at just 2.3% (Cognism)
- Cold emails, on average, only have an 8.5% response rate (Backlinko)
- Face-to-face engagement is still effective, but interactions have declined in frequency (Spotio)
The fact that this decline is widespread across companies, industries, and sales teams seems to indicate a wider shift in buying behavior. Indeed, 72% of B2B buyers prefer not to engage with a sales team at all. The typical buyer has now completed between 70-90% of their research before talking to sales, entering the pipeline at a later stage in the journey.
In other words, there are as many versions of the buyer’s journey as there are buyers. The goal of a modern B2B marketing operation shouldn’t be to force-fit leads and prospects into a predetermined, formulaic funnel. Instead, recognize that the sales process starts long before that first conversion, and every genuinely helpful, thoughtful piece of content you share with them will guide them through their own sales journey—whether or not it aligns with your “pipeline.”
Trust and credibility are key
Most performance marketing metrics are inherently flawed; not incorrect, but incomplete. Metrics like reach, CTR, conversions, page traffic, bounce rates, etc. are all helpful and important to track, but they miss the defining trait of effective marketing and sales: trust.
Trust isn’t quantifiable. We can try to get at it through intermediary metrics like “reach,” but “reach” and “influence” (which is an indicator of trust) aren’t the same. As BCG explains:
“More than just visibility, influence is determined by three factors: the level of attention paid by a consumer at any given moment; the relevance of the marketing content to the consumer’s needs; and the consumer’s degree of trust in the touchpoint or platform. These factors, combined with reach, should guide marketers in prioritizing touchpoints.
“While reach is still essential, it is crucial to keep in mind that different types of reach do not have equal value in terms of influence. High-reach touchpoints give brands wide exposure, but they don’t always drive influence…For example, marketers focused solely on reach may incorrectly assign equal value to an ad that consumers scroll past quickly, to a 15-second nonskippable video, and to content that captures minutes of attention and creates a lasting impression.”
Image source: Boston Consulting Group
Although this example uses ad-specific language, the same principle applies to content marketing. A single piece of content could rank for a high-volume keyword and get thousands of page views. But if that article is poorly written, delivers limited value, and undermines the trust you’ve built with your audience, can you really say it’s “performing” well?
Overall, 2025 is seeing a 25% drop in consumer brand trust (Forrester). People are skeptical of the information they receive from companies with commercial interests. As such, the battle for trust is steeper than ever. We should stop considering “performance” without also considering the opportunity cost of low credibility.
Zero-click is the rising norm
When Google rolled out AI Overview last year, they started a chain reaction that’s transforming the way consumers engage with online content. Nearly 60% of all Google searches end without a click (Search Engine Land). Plus, over half of consumers (52%) are using LLMs to engage with content (Elon University).
Whether we like it or not, the default form of content consumption won’t be directly on websites, but through summaries provided by LLMs—Google AI Overview or AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. Content marketing strategies that don’t adapt to this “zero-click” environment will find their performance slipping.
Although we’re in the early stages, a few trends are starting to emerge. First is the shift to Language Model Optimization (LMO) vs. traditional SEO. In other words, rather than writing for search engines, we write for LLMs. The best person I’ve heard on this is Tyler Cowen in a recent interview on the How I Write podcast:
“I like to think the AI will have a better model of me than most other humans… I’ve done many hundreds of podcasts, blogged every day for 22 years… I’m trying to think, well, what does the AI still need to know about me? So it’s a kind of intellectual immortality I’m close to already having achieved.”
For Cowen, writing and podcasting is a way of providing a rich, unmediated data set for future biographers and interpreters—including AIs—to learn from.
In a similar vein, companies should think about their content less as a series of individual posts targeting individual keywords, but as a body of literature that helps not only define who the brand is, but provides a rich library of knowledge from which LLMs and future AI models can pull.
If this holds true, then the value of volume and quality has just increased exponentially. Volume, because LLMs work best with larger datasets. And quality, because poor content will give the LLMs a false picture of your brand. In some ways, this is simply the natural progression from keyword to content cluster to, now, off-site visibility.
Abandoning outdated content writing methods
In light of those data, it’s obvious that every single one of those assumptions is incorrect:
- The primary value of this content is to rank for a keyword. It doesn’t matter how rote or banal it is, because the goal is to write for Google, not the user.
False. Getting your content to stick in a reader’s mind is immensely more valuable than getting it to rank on search. And if it ranks on search, you’ll only get them to come back if it sticks with them.
2. When a user clicks through to the blog, that’s our one and only opportunity to sell them.
False. Users don’t progress linearly through funnels anymore (if they ever did). Assume readers, especially first-time readers, won’t convert from your content. The trick is to make the content so thought provoking that they’ll come back in the future.
3. The goal of this content is on-page conversion; otherwise, it has no real business value.
False. “Performance” considered in a vacuum can be detrimental to your business. Generating clicks while losing trust will kill your marketing success.
4. As long as the content is hitting certain narrowly defined KPIs, it’s good for our business. There are no unintended consequences of bad content.
False. The goal of content isn’t on-page conversion, but purchasing real estate in your buyer’s headspace.
So if the assumptions are demonstrably false, then the tactics built on those assumptions are, likewise, problematic. Here are four areas where I think we can improve.
Aggressive selling
According to research from Adobe, 71% of customers are driven away by content with aggressive sales claims. Yet the content we consume online is riddled with it. Why the disconnect?
Obviously content can and does drive business value. Otherwise, there would be no reason to invest in it. Whether we’re talking thought leadership (shifting the terms of argument in your market), lead gen (attracting new buyers to your business), or SEO (getting picked up on Google), content needs to result in dollars—direct or indirect.
The disconnect isn’t around that content should drive business value. It’s around how content should drive business value.
If you’re engaging in a tactic that runs counter to buyer expectations, how much value is that content generating? Or put another way: you may be generating a few leads here and there, but how much money are you leaving on the table because of the buyers you’re driving off?
Presumption
I’ll grant that a good number of marketing organizations are leveraging intent data to target content directly to users at every stage of the buying journey. But so many organizations aren’t doing that, simply because intent data is expensive and they don’t have the budget.
For most marketers, their “personalization” strategy is to presume that if a buyer is interested in X type of content, they’re in X stage of the buying journey. Given the data on non-linear buying journeys we discussed above, we have to treat that as an unfounded assumption:
- An 30,000-foot thought leadership piece (awareness-level) may engage a buyer who’s in active conversations with a competitor—they haven’t reached out because this is the first they’re hearing of you
- A how-to-guide meant to elevate switch forces (consideration-level) could engage a buyer who’s not even aware of their problem in the first place
- A pricing guide (decision-level) may engage a member of a buying unit who’s putting together a stakeholder proposal, but won’t reach out to sales until they have stakeholder buy-in
People engage with your content at every stage of their buying journey, simply because their journeys don’t follow a linear path.
Lack of balance
As a B2B buyer, there’s nothing that grinds my gears more than these “X Best [Product/Service]” comparison guides. Not because I don’t need curated lists of features and benefits, but because every article claims the #1 tool is…their own.
Confession: I’ve written content like this for clients. It went against my own instincts as a marketer, but their SEO agency suggested it, so we went along with it. All this to say: I empathize with the impulse to “bias” your content toward your own product or service.
But 70% of buyers want content that’s truly educational—not promotional. They want content to build their knowledge and solve problems. And they want to trust (there’s that word again) that the information they’re receiving is accurate.
The impulse to bias our content may be strong, but that doesn’t mean we should give into it. If we—and I do mean we—are going to create meaningful content that actually adds business value, we should be balanced, rigorous, and authoritative.
Sales pitch story structure
Since Aristotle wrote his Poetics in the 300s BC, every successful human writer has followed the same storytelling structure: intention → obstacle → resolution.
The hero has a stated intention, or a tangible, high-stakes goal. There’s an obstacle in the way of that intention. During the course of the story the hero overcomes that obstacle, resulting in resolution—often in a way the hero didn’t anticipate at the beginning of the story.
Likewise, most marketing content writers follow a similar blueprint: problem (intention), agitation (obstacle), and solution (resolution). It’s a good model, and you’ll notice that I’ve followed a similar pattern in this article.
But the slippage from a good story to a sales pitch is easy to do, especially when you fall into a fallacy: that the purpose of your content is to position your product as a solution to the buyer’s problem. When this happens, your content devolves from story to pitch, and—as I’ve documented extensively above—kills your credibility.
One of the things I try to remind clients (and myself, frankly) is that when you’re proposing a solution to the buyer’s problem, the solution isn’t your product. The solution is the content itself. The buyer should be able to walk away from reading the content with everything they need to solve the problem at hand. Then, when they’ve exhausted that solution, they’ll come back to you for the next one.
How to capitalize on positive attention in your content
Enough about the problems. Now let’s look at possible solutions. If the goal of your content is truly to capture and capitalize on your buyer’s headspace, here are some solutions you can start implementing today.
1. Stop with the standard CTAs
By “standard CTAs,” I mean turning your conclusion into a 1-2 paragraph sales pitch that’s ostensibly connected to the article topic. Instead, use that space to re-hook the reader and keep your content memorable:
- Reinforce the urgency around the problem
- Reiterate the value of the article in solving the problem
- Use a helpful anecdote or story to make the ending memorable
- Create a next step for continuing a relationship (not a pitch) with your company
What about conversions, lead gen, and all that? I’d say you should still use CTAs, but build them around your content, not in it. For example:
- Retargeting ads
- AI agents to scrape visitor data and send personalized email workflows to them
- Newsletter subscription or gated high-value content offer (make sure it’s actually high-value) via exit intent pop-up ads
Media companies have a principled “Great Wall” between editorial and advertising—so one is not corrupted by the other. Although such a strict division isn’t practical in most B2B marketing teams, I think it’s a good principle to follow.
Let your content stand on its own. Use other marketing tactics to build contextual, personalized, and relevant CTAs around it. In that sense, you get the best of both worlds: memorable content that your buyers love + a repeatable system for generating leads.
2. Write to the buyer, not the stage
When writing content, you shouldn’t presume to know the exact buying stage a reader is at. Even if your intent is to speak to a particular segment of the audience in the content, it doesn’t follow that the reader shares that same intent.
But personal and contextual content is more effective at converting buyers. So how do you square that circle? The key is to focus on the buyer, not the stage.
For example: Scott Varho’s LinkedIn article on “How I Wasted $95M of Other People’s Money Building Digital Products” speaks to specific issues his core audience faces and takes a semi-controversial point of view on the topic. However, the advice is valuable regardless of where they are in their own journey.
If your goal is to generate positive attention, don’t try to force-fit the buyer into an outdated funnel. Just communicate with them as a person. When people develop enough affinity for a brand and need your product, they’ll come to you.
3. Be objective and even-handed
Modern content succeeds when it builds trust and credibility among your buyers. Generic information is more accessible than ever, thanks to LLMs and AI-powered search engine functions (AI Overview and AI Mode in Google, for example).
Unfortunately, AI faces a credibility problem. For example, Wikipedia paused its AI-generated summaries pilot after editors warned that these summaries lacked proper sourcing, introduced mistakes, and could damage the site’s credibility. Other tech companies have had similar blunders.
As a result, people are craving credible and dependable sources of information. You don’t build trust and credibility by tilting your arguments in your own favor. You build it by doing the opposite: being honest about your strengths, weaknesses, and treating your competitors fairly.
Here’s an example of how to do this:
Support your arguments with either logic or evidence. Best case scenario, do both. Don’t rely on your opinion only.
- Don’t focus on “best.” Focus on “best for.” E.g. each product is best for specific use cases, which in turn helps buyers self-qualify.
- Consider objections to your argument. Don’t ignore them. Tackle them head-on.
- Treat ideas ruthlessly. Treat people (and companies) with kindness.
For example: this in-depth guide from Keebo on a Snowflake vs. Databricks: 2025 Complete Cost & Performance Comparison, while it verges on technical and academic, is comprehensive and evenhanded in its analysis.
4. Focus on storytelling, not pitching
Finally, don’t turn your blogs and articles into sales pitches. Remember, buyers are already hesitant to jump on a sales call—the last thing they want is a so-called “helpful” article to be a veiled attempt at pushing them toward a sale.
Here’s how I would implement this tip:
- Remember that the solution is the content, not the product—this will motivate you to put as much “takeaway” value into the piece itself
- Strategically plan how a piece of content fits into the overall “body of work” you’re trying to build—the weight of success never falls on a single piece of content
- Ask yourself: what’s the person most likely to remember after having read this article? How do I draw that out?
- Nearly half of all B2B marketers are bored by the content and ads they see (WHM Creative). Think about how to make your content interesting, memorable, and, yes, entertaining.
For example, check out this article from Default: Frankenstack: How A Techstack Can Kill Your Pipeline. The problem is clear, the framing is memorable, and the positioning supports the business without being overtly pitching (there’s just one sentence at the end that mentions their product).
How to measure content ROI under this new paradigm
I can hear the big objection in your head right now, which is around this idea of measurement and ROI. Marketers can nod along to everything I’m saying in this article, but still face a major obstacle: securing budget for their content marketing operation when the ROI is vague and indirect.
Taking up the topic of content ROI is something that I can’t adequately address in this (already massive) essay. That’s going to be the topic of a future article. For now, I’ll just give a few thoughts.
Based on the data I’ve analyzed above, here are a few ways I would imagine some coming shifts in how we think about content marketing ROI.
Google clicks → Google impressions
As the majority of Google searches become zero-click, SEO “success” will be determined less by clicks or even rankings, but impressions. (Note: rankings will still matter, as 52% of sources cited in AI Overviews are in the Top 10 organic search results.)
SEO → LLMO
Search engine results will become less valuable in itself, but that doesn’t mean traffic is going to wane completely. LLMs that include Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode, as well as other tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, will be new sources of website traffic. Right now, this is still a “black box” and the tools available to track it are cost-prohibitive, but I’m sure that capability will grow over time.
Conversions → Reengagement
Instead of tracking on-page conversions, content marketers will need to track the ROI of their content by looking at engagement. How many times do particular visitors re-visit the website? Do they engage with re-targeting ads? Do they mention your brand on social media? Conversions will continue to be a bottom-of-funnel metric to track, but the top- and middle-of-funnel will take place outside your trackable channels.
Buying signals → Sentiment analysis
I do think that people will continue to track buying signals, so long as they’re aware of the limitations of those intent data. More valuable, I think, will be the use of AI-powered sentiment analysis in your communications with buyers. By the time they engage with sales, you can uncover some of what’s going on in their headspace—which can be valuable in moving the conversation forward.
Individual content performance → Holistic content performance
Stop thinking of each piece of content as the first step in a funnel. Start thinking of it as part of a broader “influence map.”
This new content marketing approach is different from the traditional structure, where lead gen and MQL targets define all marketing operations. It’s going to be a practical challenge to shift to this new reality, especially considering the long-term trust-building that inevitably grows slowly.
However, I think the days of traditional digital marketing are numbered. Without a proactive effort to redesign your content operation now, you’ll probably find your performance slipping in the future.
When buyers are ready to buy, who are they going to call?
When asked about their content challenges, more than half (55%) of B2B marketers say it’s challenging to create content that prompts a desired action, like a conversion (Content Marketing Institute). At the same time, however, 75% of decision makers say that a piece of thought leadership content has prompted them to research a product or service they hadn’t previously considered (LinkedIn-Edelman).
The disconnect is due to what I think is a misinformed approach to content strategy, one rooted in outdated ideas of how buyers buy.
In this article, I proposed the answer to be something like this: the goal of a content marketing strategy shouldn’t be to convince buyers to buy before they’re ready. It should be to engage, educate, entertain, and even provoke buyers with your content so that when they’re ready to buy, they remember you.
I’ll put it more succinctly: The battle for sales doesn’t take place online. It takes place in your buyer’s headspace.
And if the answer is meaning and memory, then that changes how we think about content performance. We’ve all read those articles on “5 Tips for Choosing a New Showerhead,” but do any one of those articles stand out in our minds? On the other hand, I read an article by Peter Leyden the other day titled “AI May Bring Civilizational-scale Change & The New Enlightenment” and am still thinking about it to this day.
When the battle is for your buyer’s headspace, which type of content do you think will win out?
I’ll close with this post from Brooklin Nash, the co-founder of BEAM Content and a voice for thoughtful, original, expert-driven content over on LinkedIn:
“Creating truly helpful content is like offering a freemium product.
It’s just engagement and reach instead of product usage.
If you guide folks on their journey, they’ll buy when they’re ready.
In contrast, creating content just to generate leads means pushing folks before they’re ready—and it’ll be hard to win back their trust.”
That way, when they’re ready to buy, you’re the first person they call.
