Pretend it’s late 2024. Oh, wait, it is. How time flies.
As you plan your marketing strategy for 2025, think about the team you’ll be part of or that you’ll build.
When considering your next hire or agency option, would you prefer someone with deep expertise in a specific niche or someone driven by curiosity to deeply understand the topic areas your company specializes in?
Your initial response might be, “It depends.” And that’s perfectly valid.
But I’ve noticed something troubling in recent years. Many B2B marketers who work for brands with highly specialized or technical topics aren’t trying to understand those subjects.
For example, I recently worked with a new CMO at an engineering-focused B2B technology company. When I asked how well the marketing team understands the solutions they sell, he told me he wasn’t sure. And he admitted he didn’t yet fully grasp them himself.
But here’s the thing: He was trying to learn. He dove into the industry, learning about the customers, the competition, and the technology.
Yet, he hadn’t brought his team along for the ride. The real kicker? When he offered them an opportunity to learn, almost no one took him up on it.
They didn’t care.
Does anyone care about what we do?
Over the years, buckets of tea have been spilled over how customers don’t care about our products. The jobs-to-be-done framework explains this perfectly: Customers focus on solving their needs, not on the products themselves. The adage often attributed to Theodore Levitt captures this well: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
Some of CMI’s earliest posts about content marketing discuss how customers care about their needs, not yours. David Meerman Scott has been writing for the last decade about how no one cares about your product except you.
Lately, though, it seems marketers have stopped caring about their products. They’ve become more like special agents — laser-focused on optimizing their pieces of the customer journey without ever asking what real value the widget holds for the market. The product is just a prop in their mission, not the star of the show.
I recently asked a senior marketing director at one of the largest cloud infrastructure companies in the world to give me a primer on the space and the company’s competition. He replied, “Oh, I don’t know much about that. My job is to make sure leads get into the funnel. I could put you in touch with one of our subject matter experts.”
He wasn’t trying to be difficult. He didn’t consider having that depth of product knowledge essential.
Increasingly, I find B2B marketers view their efforts as an intellectual puzzle. Fitting together the internal and external pieces of the creative, process, data, and measurement is an intellectual challenge they must solve to level up (or stay) in the game. They lack emotion about and interest in the products or the industry they work in.
B2B marketing used to be a team sport
I don’t blame marketing practitioners. The reason many of them don’t seem to care has just as much to do with most companies’ lack of investment in fostering that curiosity as with their reluctance to dive deeper into learning.
Businesses often see content and marketing practitioners as replaceable chess pieces. Then they’re surprised when their practitioners feel like pawns — unmotivated, disengaged, and unwilling to learn the details of the game.
Maybe I’m longing for a version of marketing that no longer exists. I remember the passionate debates among marketing teams 15 or 20 years ago. Back then, B2B marketers were passionate about their industries. In highly technical companies, the marketing teams felt excited about what their companies did. Marketing leaders made sure of it — they ran training, brought in guest speakers, and provided journal subscriptions and continuous industry education to keep everyone engaged.
Product marketing would evangelize the innovative new features of the product to an excited sales-enablement team. Brand and demand-gen teams constantly learned the finer details of the industry; everyone became (at some level) a subject matter expert in the topic. Marketers attended retreats where they made fun of the competition and brainstormed ways to compete against them as if they were a rival sports team.
Marketing teams cared. Deeply.
But that brings us back to the question: Do we care? As you plan your marketing for 2025, would you prefer to work with people with specialized skills or the curiosity to become an expert? Does that difference matter?
I think it does.
B2B customers demand better
Caring about your company’s business topic should matter.
The findings in Marketing Week’s recent State of B2B Marketing report (subscription required) show why. According to the research, the most sought-after skill for B2B marketers is customer insight, with 54.4% of respondents placing it at the top. Close behind are commercial focus at 46.9% and creativity at 30.3%
Empathy ranked at the bottom.
At first glance, this seems at odds with the idea that caring about your company’s business topic matters. B2B marketers in this study seem to prioritize data-driven customer insights over emotional understanding of the topics and the customer experience.
Then I remembered this eye-opening article from B2B marketing expert Ardath Albee. She highlighted research that shows only 1% of C-level buyers believe the B2B marketing they encounter demonstrates a “meaningful understanding of human experience.” Essentially, none of them feel understood. There is no empathy.
When you compare Marketing Week’s findings with CMI’s latest B2B research, the picture becomes clearer.
The content-creation challenge B2B marketers cited most is “producing content that actually drives action.” Meanwhile, the top use for generative AI among B2B marketers is to “brainstorm new topics.”
Most tellingly, 88% of B2B marketers who see themselves as successful say the key to that success is “understanding the audience.”
When you put it all together, things start to make a bit more sense.
Today’s B2B marketing is as dry, beige, and bland as a bowl of unsweetened oats. We’ve data-driven all the emotion and empathy right out of our content. We don’t know what topics will resonate because we’ve stopped trying to understand them ourselves.
Instead, we rely on generative AI to tell us what to write about topics we barely grasp.
If successful B2B marketing should have a point of view, consistently generate emotion, and demonstrate an understanding of the human experience, shouldn’t our marketing teams have at least a little of the same?
Fighting inadvertent indifference
Again, I don’t blame content and marketing practitioners, though we are the only ones who can fix this. And I’m not suggesting “quiet quitting,” where people put in just enough effort to get by, is at play. I know many B2B marketers who go above and beyond, solving complex intellectual puzzles about topics they don’t care about at all.
The issue is that many don’t understand why it’s important to explore the details of their industry.
I call it “inadvertent indifference.” It’s a chicken-and-egg circumstance. Does it happen when companies no longer try to get marketing teams excited about the business’s topics? Or is it a lack of interest from the marketing employees? Is it both?
One mid-sized tech company gets its marketers engaged and interested by hosting a training program. It runs formal internal campaigns and provides all marketing teams with access to industry conferences.
When I was the CMO of a small but technical software company 20 years ago, enterprise web content management wasn’t the most exciting topic for me. I had just come out of the world of movies and TV.
However, I believed the marketing team needed curiosity, a willingness to learn, and industry knowledge to connect with our customers. We held regular sessions to help them (and me) understand the industry, the technology, and why competing in this space should be challenging, fun, and engaging. I immersed myself in learning everything I could about enterprise web content strategy and management. It turned out to be the foundation for the career I have today.
Interest, not fanaticism
You don’t need to build fanaticism around your brand. Nor do businesses have to build this into the DNA of the company. But, they should provide a thorough education about the space.
For example, Salesforce sends all new hires through a yearlong marketing cloud education program about the software-as-a-service world.
But I’m less concerned about brands’ efforts and more focused on content and marketing careers. I can’t imagine working for a company where I didn’t care — or at least try to care — about its business. That’s why I love my job now. I get a front-row seat to many industries and their key players.
I’ve also realized that I’m not as effective when I don’t care about the product or the industry. Marketing leaders should feel a greater responsibility to teach and inspire their teams to be as excited (and as connected) as possible about their business and marketing’s place in it.
You spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make customers care about what you do. But if the content and marketing teams don’t care at least as much as your customers do, you won’t succeed.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute