Why Your Buyers are Not Reading your Content
We work with technology companies every day. And almost all of them produce content. Blog posts go up regularly, LinkedIn posts are happening, and a whitepaper gets written, designed, and published. The content team pats itself on the back. Three months later, when analytics is looked at, and the question gets asked: why is nobody reading this? It’s rarely one thing. In our experience, it’s usually three problems happening at the same time — and most companies fix none of them because they’re too busy producing more content to stop and ask why the existing content isn’t working. Problem one: you are writing about yourself The most common content failure we see is not bad writing. It’s the wrong subject. A typical technology company content calendar looks something like this: a post about a new service offering, an announcement about a partnership, a piece on “our approach to cloud transformation,” a recap of the conference the team attended, and a case study that leads with the company’s name rather than the client’s problem. None of it is about the buyer. Research from Edelman and LinkedIn’s B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 71% of decision-makers say less than half the thought leadership content they consume gives them valuable insights. The reason isn’t that the writers lack expertise. It’s that the content is oriented toward what the company wants to say, not what the buyer is trying to figure out. Your buyer is not searching Google for “why [your company name] is a great implementation partner.” They’re searching for “why do ServiceNow implementations fail in year two” or “how to build a business case for AI investment when the CFO is skeptical.” They have a problem. They want someone who understands it better than they do. Content that talks about your company instead of their problem is not useful for them, so they don’t read it, don’t share it, and don’t remember you when the RFP conversation starts. The fix is obvious: write about your buyer’s problems, not your company’s capabilities. But it requires a discipline – build a clear map of what your buyers are actually worried about at each stage of the journey and write toward those worries instead of toward the service list. Problem two: “thought leadership” that has no actual thoughts in it There’s a particular kind of content that technology companies produce endlessly and that buyers have learned to skip at a glance. It goes like this: “AI is transforming the enterprise. Companies that invest now will be well-positioned for the future. Here are five ways to leverage AI in your organization.” It’s not wrong. It’s just completely empty of anything a senior buyer hasn’t heard fifty times already. We call it consensus content – writing that exists to demonstrate presence rather than to say something. It’s the corporate equivalent of nodding along in a meeting without actually contributing. Safe and inoffensive, but completely ignorable. The same Edelman-LinkedIn study found that 48% of decision-makers spend an hour or more per week consuming thought leadership but that poor-quality thought leadership is more damaging than none at all, with decision-makers actively losing respect for companies that produce it. The standard is higher than most companies realize. A CTO reading your content has seen every AI trend piece, every “digital transformation” framework, every “top five considerations” listicle. What cuts through is specificity: a point of view that only someone who has actually done the work could have. “Why your AI pilot worked in testing and fell apart in production” is a real article. “Five ways AI is transforming manufacturing” is not. The question to ask before publishing anything is: could a competitor have written this? If the answer is yes, the piece has no differentiation value. It will not make a buyer trust you more than they trust anyone else. It will not make you memorable. And in a market where buyers are doing 8 months of research before they call anyone, unmemorable content is the same as no content. Problem three: content is written for search but not for humans We see this pattern often with companies that have invested in SEO. They have identified the right keywords. The articles rank. Traffic comes in. And the pipeline doesn’t move. The problem is that ranking and resonating are two different things. A piece optimized for the search term “managed services provider India” will pull in traffic. But if the article reads like it was written to satisfy an algorithm, the buyer reads 200 words and leaves. You can spot such articles with headers that mechanically repeat the keyword, content covers the topic broadly without saying anything specific, no actual point of view anywhere in the piece. According to Nielsen Norman Group research on B2B content, the average reader spends less than 60 seconds on a blog post before deciding whether to continue. The determining factor isn’t the topic – it’s whether the first two paragraphs signal that the writer actually understands the reader’s situation. That first signal is everything. A buyer who feels understood in the first paragraph keeps reading. One who feels like they have landed on a generic industry overview closes the tab. The difference between those two outcomes is whether the writer started from the buyer’s actual experience – the specific frustration, the real question, the thing they have been trying to figure out – or started from a content brief and a keyword. Problem four: the distribution problem nobody talks about Let’s assume that you have solved the first three problems. The content is genuinely useful, specific to your buyer’s situation, and well-written enough that a CTO would forward it to their team. It still doesn’t work if the buyer never sees it. Most technology companies publish content on their website and wait. They share it once on LinkedIn, the company page, and it gets 40 impressions – mostly employees. They move on to the next piece. The content dies in a folder somewhere
