Why Most B2B Content Doesn't Know Who It's For

Here's a question most marketing teams can't answer cleanly: who, specifically, is this piece of content for?

Not "our buyers." Not "decision makers in the mid-market." Not "engineers and procurement professionals." Those are categories, not people. And content written for a category lands with the force of a company-wide email — technically addressed to everyone, genuinely relevant to no one.

I've sat in enough content planning meetings to know how this happens. Someone proposes a topic. It sounds broadly useful. Nobody pushes back on who exactly would read it and why. It gets assigned, written, published, and added to the library. And six months later someone asks why the content isn't converting and the answer is always some version of "we need better distribution" when the real answer is "we wrote something nobody specifically needed."

The uncomfortable truth about B2B content is that most of it is written for a fictional composite that doesn't reflect how purchase decisions actually get made.

B2B buying is not a solo sport. It's a committee. And every member of that committee has a different job title, a different set of concerns, and a different definition of what "good" looks like. The engineer evaluating your product cares about specs, integration, and whether it's going to create more work for them. The procurement manager cares about price, compliance, and vendor risk. The executive sponsor cares about strategic fit and whether this decision is going to come back to haunt them in a board meeting.

Those are not the same person. They do not want the same content. And yet most B2B content tries to speak to all of them at once — which means it's written at an altitude where it's too vague to be useful to any of them individually.

The symptom is content that feels technically correct but somehow hollow. It covers the right topics. It uses the right terminology. It's professionally written and properly formatted. And it doesn't move anyone because it isn't trying to move anyone specific anywhere specific.

I've seen companies publish entire content libraries built on this model. Hundreds of assets, all vaguely aimed at "the buyer," none of them written with a clear picture of who would read them, what that person already believes, what they're worried about, and what they need to think differently about by the time they reach the last paragraph.

That's not a content strategy. That's a content inventory.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does require a level of specificity that most content planning processes don't naturally produce.

Before any piece of content gets written, someone needs to be able to answer four questions without hedging:

Who is reading this? Not a persona name from a deck nobody looks at anymore. An actual role, with an actual set of responsibilities, at an actual stage in a buying process. "A procurement manager at a mid-size EMS company who has been burned by a supplier reliability issue in the last eighteen months" is a person. "A supply chain decision maker" is not.

What do they already believe when they arrive? Content that ignores existing beliefs doesn't change them. It just slides off. If your reader thinks your product category is more complicated than it's worth, your content needs to address that directly — not assume a neutral starting point that doesn't exist.

What do you need them to think differently about by the end? This is the one most content briefs skip entirely. Every piece of content should be trying to move someone from one belief to another. If you can't articulate the shift you're trying to create, you don't have a content strategy. You have a topic.

Why are you the right voice for this? Credibility is not assumed. It's established. What gives you the right to say this thing to this person? Your data, your experience, your proximity to the problem? Say it, and let it do the work.

The hardest part of this isn't the writing. It's the discipline to stop before you start and actually answer those questions instead of reaching for the comfortable vagueness of "our target audience."

Your buyers are not a monolith. They're a room full of people with different jobs, different concerns, and different reasons to care about what you do. The content that earns their attention is the content that was clearly written with one of them specifically in mind.

Everything else is just filling the library.

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