Why B2B Content Is So Boring + How to Fix It

I vividly remember the first B2B blog post I ever read.

10 years ago, I’d been hired for my very first content writing gig by a professional services firm. I took a look at their blog to see the kind of thing they were looking for.

The shock was immediate.

“What…is this?”

It was like one of those “sponsored articles” in women’s magazines in the 90s, where the heroine’s problems are all solved by the purchase of a new face cream.

Only as though it had been written by a committee of middle managers.

In their second language.

While they were asleep.

It was buzzwords tied together with keywords, presented in long, run-on sentences. A lot of things were getting streamlined and unlocked.

Revenue was being increased. Significantly.

We were invited to dive into a place that none of us really wanted to go.

Pretty sure it had footnotes.

I thought, “Well, I may be a total content noob, but I feel like I can probably do better than this.”

Since then, I have read a lot of B2B content. Some of it is amazing. Well-written, packed with insight. Even if it's dry, it’s clearly created by experts, for experts.

And some of it hasn’t changed since that first piece I read all those years ago.

10 years on, I still don’t really understand why this happens.

More importantly, I want to know what we can do about it.

Because from what I can see, it’s making a lot of content marketers kind of…jaded. And sad. The majority of content marketers aren’t creatively fulfilled. Many are unhappy with their work.

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And also, this kind of content doesn’t actually…you know, work.

So I went and asked the experts — writers, agencies, in-house content leads, industry experts — what they think needs to change, and how we can change it.

Let the deboringification commence!

What do we mean by boring content?

By boring content, I absolutely don’t mean content that’s technical, formal, or jargon-heavy.

I agree with fractional Director of Content Marketing Erin Balsa when she says,

“It's tiring to hear marketers judge other brands’ content marketing — "this is dead" or "this is boring" — based solely on their subjective personal opinion.

I'm like, ‘Cool, YOU don't like PDFs or a professional tone of voice or whatever, but that doesn't mean it's automatically boring to the intended audience.’”

What I do mean by boring content is:

Content that fails at its job.

It doesn’t inform, educate, connect, or entertain. It doesn’t resonate with the people it was made for.

In content strategist Lee Densmer’s words:

“Boring means your market doesn’t respond to it, your sales team doesn't want to share it, and it has no point of view.”

The opposite of boring content isn’t “fun.” I’m not saying every piece needs a story arc and literary flair (though more wouldn’t hurt).

Effective, non-boring B2B content fulfills three conditions, regardless of your tone, market, or content strategy:

It’s original.

As Erin puts it, “Originality is the foundation for everything else so you can't skip it.” By originality, we mean a clear, distinctive point of view and brand voice. You are the only people who could have created it exactly the way it is.

It’s backed by real expertise.

Edelman’s 2024 report found that most B2B buyers rank expertise — alongside originality — as one of the two most important qualities of persuasive content. Paying a writer to waffle about a topic they know nothing about except what they’ve picked up on Google Is. Not. It.

It’s useful.

As Ronnie Higgins, Senior Content Production Manager at Freshpaint, puts it: “The opposite of boring content? Useful content. Content is a product. It has a job to be done. If it fulfills that job to be done, it's useful.”

If your content hits all three, boring won’t be a problem.

Why does boring content happen, and how can we make it stop?

The short answer:

The systems in which content gets made reward “boring” over “resonant.”

That’s the structural problem.

And there’s also a human one.

A lot of the time, boring content isn’t the result of bad writing or even bad strategy. It’s the result of teams being completely overwhelmed.

Many content teams are tiny. The requests pile up. The deadlines never stop. When you’re constantly sprinting just to keep up, the quickest, safest content becomes the default. Not because you don’t care, but because you don’t have the time or headspace to do anything else.

And while you can’t always fix that overnight — short of hiring more people or buying yourself a time machine — there are things you can change.

Here are the factors that content marketers told me are really holding them back — and some suggestions for how to fight back against boring.

We’re treating SEO as the strategy, not the channel

Here’s a story from Mary Scott Manning, Senior Content Manager at Domo. Tell me if it sounds familiar.

“When I started in content in 2018, our content director was a former journalist. All the writers strived to make our pieces like investigative journalism with catchy leads and multiple voices. That type of work was valued as a brand asset.

Over the years, SEO considerations started creeping into our briefs. For example, we started adding FAQs at the end to try to land in Google's People Also Ask.

Eventually, whole pieces got structured around SEO, and the journalism-inspired stories became less and less. The former can be quite boring, because you're just plugging in keywords and checking header boxes.”

This isn’t an anti-SEO piece.

SEO is a great distribution channel for content (yes, still), and can be a useful framework for thinking about your content, too:

• It tells you what people are actually looking for. Without that, you’re guessing — and that’s how you end up with beautifully written content no one reads.
• It has staying power. A high-ranking article can bring in value for months or years. Social fades fast. SEO sticks around. So far, people are still googling — and SEO performance plays a role in LLM visibility, anyway.

But SEO needs careful handling.

Writing for search engines first is a fast track to being forgettable. SEO is reactive by nature.

“Everyone's following the same formula, using the same data sources, using the same template,” says Ronnie.

Worse — it pulls your focus to what’s easy to measure, not what actually drives the business.

Even if you don’t mean to, SEO can push you to focus on rankings, clicks, and traffic at the expense of things that actually move the needle: trust, demand, revenue.

You can win the SERP and still lose the sale.

How to fight keyword-first thinking:

The answer isn’t to ditch SEO. If you’re in a market where people are actively searching for your solution — and your competitors haven’t fully dominated those search results — then SEO can still be a smart move.

As Ryan Law put it:

“Here are two ideas that can be true at the same time:

• SEO offers worse returns than it used to.
• SEO is still one of the best marketing channels.”

If you’re using search as a distribution channel — and you want your content to actually get found — then yes, SEO needs to inform what you say. But it shouldn’t dictate what you say.

Michael Ofei, Managing Editor at Backlinko, suggests we should use the SERPs to guide format and structure, but then “dig into real pain points to find our angle.”

In other words, SEO helps you meet the reader where they are. But it’s your understanding of their actual problems that gives the content substance.

Start with:

• What do we know that’s valuable?
• What’s the real pain point here?
• What’s missing from the conversation?

Then optimize for search.

That’s why Michael starts not with keywords but with real audience research.

“For headhunting, instead of generic tips like ‘leverage your network,’ I'd hit Reddit, Quora, and talk to actual recruiters to find out what they're really struggling with:

• ‘How do I reach executives without looking desperate?’
• ‘What do I say when they're happy in their current role?’
• ‘How do I compete with in-house recruiters who have bigger budgets?’

It’s the same listicle format, but completely different (and more relevant) content.”

Other good sources of reader insights? Michael recommends “3-star book reviews, YouTube comments, and customer calls.”

We’re incentivized to be boring

It’s not that content marketers want to create bland, forgettable work. It’s that the systems around them push them in that direction.

Kiran Shahid, a B2B SaaS content strategist, admits:

“I’ve definitely optimized for ‘visibility + volume’ in the past because that’s what was rewarded.”

If you’re rewarded for surface-level metrics — traffic, downloads, arbitrary lead numbers — you’ll end up creating surface-level work.

In the Contentious newsletter, Lauren Lang calls this the KPI Death Spiral:

1. “Team identifies a metric that seems to indicate success
2. Metric becomes a target with quotas attached
3. Team optimizes for the metric at the expense of actual impact
4. Quality suffers; audience engagement drops
5. Leadership decides it all ‘doesn't work’
6. Budgets get cut; layoffs follow”

How to fight the wrong incentives:

As Lauren puts it, “Your content strategy is only as good as the incentives that shape it.” If you measure and reward the wrong things, you’ll end up with content that looks productive on paper but fails to do much of anything.

Here’s where to start:

Articulate the real incentive structure

Incentives aren’t always obvious — or even conscious. Lauren suggests we start by mapping out what the incentives actually are.

What is your North Star metric — and is it an outcome you can actually control?

“If content is measured on MQLs but you have no control over which assets are gated — or the entire marketing team is assessed by SQLs but has no say in how SDR follow-up happens — that's a misalignment.”

Also look at what gets celebrated in your organization. Is your content team praised for delivering content at pace, regardless of results? Do leaders clearly value short-term wins over long-term brand equity?

Take a clear-eyed look at what you’re really being incentivized to do.

Track resonance, not just reach

Next, check your metrics — because what you measure shapes what you create.

Too often, content teams are stuck chasing clicks, downloads, or impressions. These are easy to track, but they only capture a fraction of content’s potential value. They tell you whether someone saw your content, not whether it influenced how they think or what they do next.

Layer in metrics that reflect the full impact of high-performance content:

• Brand trust: Sentiment analysis, reviews, social mentions, and return visits
• Engagement over time: Scroll depth, time on page, repeat visits, email open and unsubscribe rates.
• Lead nurturing: Multi-touch attribution, click-through rates on gated content, conversion rates on downloads, content mentions in sales calls
• Authority building: Media mentions, backlinks, industry recognition, speaking invitations
• Retention and loyalty: Customer lifetime value (CLV), content touchpoints tied to renewals or upsells, ongoing engagement metrics

Get buy-in by linking content to organizational goals

To shift the way content is valued, you need more than better metrics. You need buy-in from the people who hold the budget and make the decisions.

That means speaking the language of the business. Show how your content contributes to OKRs or outcomes that leadership cares about — whether that’s pipeline growth, customer retention, revenue expansion, or brand differentiation.

For example:

• Tie top-of-funnel content to lead quality and pipeline velocity, not just MQL volume.
• Connect customer education content to churn reduction or expansion revenue.
• Link thought leadership to sales enablement and market positioning.

Sometimes, content marketers know they ought to do this, but it gets put off as more urgent (and, frankly, more enjoyable) tasks come up.

But selling your content internally isn’t extra credit — it’s the job. It’s how you earn the right to create content that matters.

For more guidance on metrics that track the real impact of content, check out our article: “Why Your Content ROI Metrics Aren’t Telling the Full Story—and What to Measure Instead.”

We’re forced to play it safe

Content teams don’t want to create boring content. But layers of stakeholder feedback can grind the edges off even the best ideas. And after a while, you stop fighting it.

I think every content marketer has watched a punchy, original idea become progressively blander with every round of approvals.

In his blog, “Decision Tax is Draining Your Content ROI,” Anton Rius, the Senior Director of Content Marketing at Corporate Visions, recalls that his team once spent 14 days — yes, 14 days — getting a single homepage headline approved.

What started as a clear, compelling vision was thrown into what he calls “the corporate blender” of stakeholder reviews and conflicting feedback.

The result was a watered-down headline no one loved but everyone could tolerate — burning 120 hours of company time along the way.

“The cruel irony is that we pay Decision Tax twice — once with time and again with quality.”

The root cause of this content crappification is fear. As Growth Consultant Ryan Baum puts it, decision makers are “planning scared.”

Kathleen O’Donnell, a B2B SaaS writer and editor, agrees: “All it takes is one exec who is afraid of doing something new/interesting/not exactly identical to what all their competitors are doing, and boom. Boring AF.”

It isn’t only fear of not doing the conventional thing. It’s also what Anna Tankel, fractional B2B head of growth, calls “death by a thousand ICPs.”

She explains, “Some B2B businesses are so scared of NOT resonating with one of their many ICPs, their approach to content turns into a race to the lowest common denominator.”

How to fight frightened execs:

“The sad truth is that we are not in an economic period where leaders want to take a lot of risks, and there’s nothing that marketers can do to change that. If that’s the case, you have to do what you can within the boundaries you’re given,” says Lauren.

Here’s how to take control of the process and create space for better content, no matter how risk-averse your stakeholders are.

1. Have the hard conversations up front

The best way to avoid progressive rounds of enblandification is to “front-load the input,” says Chris Gillespie, CEO and Creative Director at Fenwick.

Too often executives say “do whatever you want,” only to step in at the 11th hour and question the entire premise of the piece — when it’s already fully built. “It’s like everyone assembles the entire car and then they say, ‘Actually I would have preferred a motorcycle.’”

When teams can push for those conversations earlier — getting stakeholders to engage meaningfully at the outline stage — it saves everyone time and protects the integrity of the original idea.

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Lock in the big ideas first (the audience, the core message, the call to action), then the style (voice, tone, format), and then the details (examples, stats, polish). And explain that these will not be changed once agreed upon.

2. Set up gatekeepers

To keep your content process on track, you need clear gatekeepers—people who control when and how feedback is introduced.

A gatekeeper filters external feedback, ensuring that only the right voices weigh in at the right time.

A RACI matrix can be a useful tool here. If your name’s not on the list, you’re not getting into the content feedback club. And if you don’t understand content strategy, your name really shouldn’t be on the list.

For more tips on content ownership, check out our guide: Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen? How to Define Content Ownership and Protect Your Strategy

3. Make the “decision tax” visible

To help stakeholders see the hidden costs of endless feedback loops, try running a simple “Decision Tax Audit”, suggests Anton.

• Pick a recent content project — something that felt like a slog.
• Lay out every version, from the first solid draft to the final signoff.
• Compare them side by side and ask: Did all those rounds of revisions make the content better, or just different?
• Next, tally the hours spent on feedback, rewrites, and meetings. Then ask: What else could we have accomplished with that time? (You may also wish to include an opportunity to sob quietly at this point.)
• Finally, challenge your team to create a decision-free zone for one upcoming project: limit stakeholders, streamline approvals, and commit to the process.

This small shift can help break the cycle and build momentum for faster, better content.

4. Show them what they should really fear

Safe content is often a bigger risk than bold content.

When the stakes feel high, it’s natural to fall back on what’s worked before or copy what seems to be working for others. But the most likely outcome of playing it too safe is no outcome at all.

The content does nothing. Nobody cares. You all wasted your time.

As content marketers, we feel that in our gut. But many managers don’t. Your job is to give them a more realistic idea of the actual risk: throwing away time and money on pointless, drab content.

If you want to pull out the big guns, Chris has a suggestion for you:

Take some examples of bland content — your own, if that’s all you’ve been allowed to do. Or someone else’s, if the decision-maker is one of those charmers who's all “But that’s not how [competitor] does content. I want to do it like [competitor].”

Find people who are a lookalike of the target buyer.

Show them the boring, terrible content, and record their reactions.

In Chris’ experience, that tends to “reset” the discussion.

For more tips on dealing with recalcitrant leadership, check out our guide: Why Getting Internal Buy-in for Content Feels So Damn Hard (And How to Do It Anyway)

We’re following a “here are some words” non-strategy

A lot of B2B content is boring because it’s not actually content. It’s…words.

Nobody really knows why the words are there, or what they’re supposed to do.

As Chris explains, clients will often come in asking for “40 articles,” but when his team presses them — asking “why” five times — the real reason surfaces: they don’t know. “They just need their executives to see that there’s something out there.”

This is how teams end up on what Chris calls the content treadmill: they create something forgettable, but it doesn’t work. And instead of fixing the root cause, they try to make up for it in volume.

Conversion copywriter Kallie Fallandays calls it “forgetting the why.” What’s the job the content is doing? Why does the asset exist?

It’s easy to get tunnel vision, too. After a while looking at mediocre content, it all starts to seem…OK. Good enough.

This “eh, it’s fine” attitude also plays out as a “lack of depth,” says Kallie. “If you're reading a piece on enterprise accounting software, you should be able to nerd the heck out on the little details that make that specific software interesting. I think a lot of companies mess this up by going too high-level when they should go deeper.”

How to fight content for content’s sake:

If this is hitting a bit too close to home, here’s what to do about it:

Actually HAVE a strategy, for the love of all that’s holy

This shouldn’t need to be said, but here we are: only 40% of content teams actually have a documented content strategy.

If you don’t have a strategy, you’re not doing content marketing. You’re just producing words and hoping for the best.

Here’s a content strategy template to start you off.

Ask why. Relentlessly.

Why are you making this specific piece of content? Why this format? Why this message? Why now? Why for this audience?

If no one can answer those questions, you shouldn’t be making it.

Chris shared an example where his team analyzed the content hubs of a client’s top competitors.

All of them looked the same: polished, expensive, and completely forgettable. None of them had a mission. None of them gave the audience a reason to care — or a reason to come back.

As Chris puts it: “All we have to do to beat them is have a mission.”

In this case, the mission became: Finance is difficult. But does it have to be that way?

By framing the entire content experience around that question, the content had purpose. It spoke to a real frustration. It created something people could actually connect with.

Real content solves real problems for real people. Otherwise, it’s just noise.

Think like a product team

Tom Rudnai, the co-founder of content measurement platform Demand-Genius, believes that content teams need to operate like product teams:

“Build a clear, transparent roadmap and strategy, backed up by data where possible, and a framework for weighing suggestions quickly to decide what gets onto it.”

Once you get intentional about what you make, and why, you can finally escape the content treadmill. And start creating work that actually means something.

We’ve fallen into bad writing habits

We can’t pin this all on AI.

B2B marketers have been cranking out boring content for years — long before ChatGPT showed up. I know. I was there.

The whole “it has to sound professional and enterprise-y, which obviously means wordy and pompous” thing?

That’s been around forever.

Blame the legacy of stuffy industry publications.

Blame the fact that being remotely entertaining about, say, enterprise accounting software is…kind of hard?

Either way, the bad habits were already there. AI just made it faster and cheaper to crank out more of the same.

And there’s also the part about who’s doing the writing.

Oftentimes, it’s freelancers.

And often, those freelancers have received minimal onboarding.

There’s nothing in the brief about your unique takes on the topic at hand, or your internal expertise.

There’s nothing about the specific pain points that your customers experience or what those look like in real world terms.

The writer often hasn’t been given access to the tools they’re writing about, or even seen them in action.

As B2B writer Aishat Abdulfatah puts it,

“If you don't understand a tool well, it's just harder to play around with how you position it in content.

Combine that with siloed content creation and lack of SME collaboration, and you have writers creating content full of explanations (because they are trying to make sense of it all themselves), not fun interpretations and unexpected correlations.”

How to fight poor writing:

Don’t blame the writer, blame the process. To take your content from boring to brilliant, you’ll need to do the following:

Articulate your point of view

A good brief includes the things that the writer can’t figure out on their own. In other words, all the ingredients of original content: your unique insights and opinions, how the product connects to the topic at hand, your internal expertise.

That means actually defining those things for yourselves first. Lee Densmer suggests you “get some help to do this (probably with a content strategist) because you’re too close to it to know if it’s unique, interesting, useful. Often brands DO have unique thoughts but they think they are not, or they have no unique thoughts, and have to be pushed to develop them.”

Then make sure you’ve trained your writers on those messages and opinions, and include them in the briefs.

Speaking of briefs, they’re also often a factor in boring writing. The best writer can’t outwrite a boring brief.

If you don’t feel confident that your briefs are getting the best out of your writers, try our B2B content brief template.

Develop a content rubric

Even the best writers need guardrails. A content rubric gives your team a simple, shared benchmark to define what “good writing” actually looks like — so you’re not relying on gut feel or vague ideas about “quality.”

A rubric helps you check the fundamentals:

• Are we saying something that matters to the reader?
• Are we saying it clearly, in as few words as possible?
• Are we making it easy (and ideally enjoyable) to read?

If you don’t have a rubric yet, I shared a few ideas and examples in this article.

Here’s how Michael applies Backlinko’s content rubric when he’s editing. He uses a real example to illustrate the point.

Original boring intro:

"I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say that finding high-quality candidates isn't always a simple task for businesses. Traditional recruitment techniques, publishing a job advert and waiting for people to come to you, don't work when you're trying to fill a senior role like CEO, CFO or MD."

Michael flagged several problems here:

• It starts with a weak assumption ("I'm sure you'll agree")
• Third person throughout (formal and creates distance)
• No proof points (why should I trust you?)
• Generic advice anyone (or AI) could write

I’ve seen a million intros like this one. Here are some of the ways Michael would tweak this to make it far less boring and generic:

• Open with a proof point and use second person.

"Last month, I helped a SaaS company fill their VP of Sales role in 18 days. And this perfect candidate wasn't even looking for a job.

It may sound impossible, but it's not.

Because here's the thing:”

• Instead of generic tips, acknowledge their real pain.

“I know what you're thinking: "This sounds like a lot of work."

You're right. It is.

But here's what I learned after 15 years of executive search:

Spending 3 hours researching the perfect candidate beats spending 3 months interviewing mediocre ones.”

• Add specific examples and human connection.

Instead of:

"By contacting people who the recruiter already knows, the process becomes much easier."

Try:

“Here's a mistake I made early in my career: I spent weeks crafting the "perfect" cold outreach message to a CMO I'd never met. Zero response.

Then I remembered Sarah, a marketing director I'd placed two years earlier. One text message: "Hey Sarah, quick question about someone in your network." She made the introduction that afternoon.

Your existing network is your secret weapon. Use it.”

Where do we go from here?

B2B content is boring because the systems that shape it are designed to produce boring work.

As Lee says, “Even though everyone says they want more bold content, not everyone wants to pay for it or take the real time to create it.”

But there are teams pushing back. At Domo, Mary Scott’s team separates out the SEO explainer pieces from the stories that deserve a deeper, more human approach. She’s hopeful that “maybe a brand renaissance is coming.”

AI can scale the problem — but it might also force a fix.

When everyone can generate the same bland, surface-level content at the push of a button, the only way to stand out is to offer something AI can’t: actual opinions, real expertise, and a distinct point of view.

It raises the bar. Not right away, and not for everyone. But the brands that want to stay relevant will have to move beyond the copy-paste sameness that AI makes so easy.

Not every brand will do this. But you can.

Push for ideas that matter. Refuse to publish work that doesn’t make sense to you. Make the case for content that actually says something.

Or as Ronnie puts it:

“We need to stop looking at what our competitors are doing, what other marketers are doing, and just give a damn about what needs to be done.”

At Relato, we believe better content starts with better foundations. You can’t expect magic when your team is stuck working from scattered notes, outdated templates, and inbox chaos.

When your tools support clarity, creativity, and collaboration, the content gets better. Period.

Curious? Get in touch to see for yourself.