Picture the room where your content actually lands. Not the LinkedIn feed. The meeting on Thursday at 2:15pm, where the VP of Fleet Operations sits across from a CFO who has read the quarterly numbers and has questions. The VP has a folder. In the folder is a piece of content his team printed out last week. He is going to either cite it or not cite it, depending on whether he can make it sound like it matters.
That is the room. Most B2B content was not written for that room. It was written for a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is the ICP document. Job title, company size, industry vertical, budget authority, pain points ranked one through five. Every B2B marketing team has one pinned to a Miro board. Every B2B content brief starts by referencing it. And every piece of content written to satisfy one comes out sounding like it was written by a committee of people who have never sat in the 2:15 meeting.
Titles do not buy anything. People who happen to have titles buy things. The difference sounds like semantics until you read two pieces back to back. The piece written for "VP of Fleet Operations at mid-market logistics companies" reads like a LinkedIn bio. The piece written for the VP who has to defend last quarter's diesel spend reads like it was written by someone who knows the VP.
Only one of those pieces gets forwarded.
I write for buyers across the OEM world, Acura to Volvo. Fleet operators moving hundreds of units a quarter. Regardless of what the engineers put on the Excel file, nobody ever bought a fleet because of the torque spec. Engineering assumes that because they thought of it, the buyer will care. The buyer cares about whether the Monday call with procurement is going to be survivable.
None of this is mysterious. It is the same thing that makes any human being make any decision under pressure. Fear of being wrong. Fear of being blamed. Desire to look competent to the people above you. Desire to not work weekends. Most B2B content ignores all of this and pretends the buyer is a rational agent who wakes up thinking about efficiency gains.
No one wakes up thinking about efficiency gains. People wake up thinking about whether they are going to get fired in Q3.
Writing for the person instead of the title changes what ends up in the piece. You stop leading with the category. You start leading with the situation. You cut the first three paragraphs that explain why the category exists, because the buyer already knows why it exists. That is why she is reading.
You name the meeting she is dreading. You name the stakeholder she is trying to convince. You name the number on the spreadsheet that is about to get her in trouble. When a buyer reads a piece that names those things, the piece stops being content and starts being useful. Useful is what gets forwarded. Useful is what gets cited.
The other thing B2B content gets wrong is the funnel. Content gets assigned to a stage. Top of funnel. Middle of funnel. Bottom of funnel. The buyer is assumed to move through the stages in order, like a parade float. Actual B2B buyers do not move in order. They land on your site at 11pm because their boss forwarded something in Slack and they are trying to sound informed on tomorrow's call. They read a bottom-of-funnel page first because it has the answer they need. Then they go looking for the top-of-funnel primer because they want to know what the category is called before they say anything out loud in the meeting.
The funnel is a map for the marketer. It is not a map for the buyer. The buyer is making stops in the order her real life demands.
The best B2B content I have ever written was written for people trying not to get fired. It did not assume the reader was a rational node in a funnel. It assumed she was a human being who was going to be held accountable for something on Thursday, and she was reading because she wanted to sound like she knew what she was doing.
That is the audience. Not the title. Not the ICP. Not the stage.
Everyone else is writing for the persona document. The persona document never signed a contract.
