Why You Must Care Sufficient to Ship the Greatest in B2B Advertising

Imagine it’s the end of 2024. Oh wait, it is. How time flies.

When planning your marketing strategy for 2025, think about the team you will be a part of or build.

When considering your next hiring or agency option, would you prefer someone with deep expertise in a specific niche or someone driven by curiosity to deeply understand the areas your company specializes in?

Your first answer might be, “It depends.” And that’s perfectly valid.

But I’ve noticed something worrying in recent years. Many B2B marketers who work for brands on highly specialized or technical topics don’t try to understand these topics.

For example, I recently worked with a new CMO at an engineering-focused B2B technology company. When I asked how well the marketing team understood the solutions they were selling, they said they weren’t sure. And he admitted that he hadn’t yet fully understood them himself.

But here’s the thing: he was trying to learn. He immersed himself in the industry and learned about customers, competition and technology.

However, he had not taken his team with him. The real kicker? When he offered them the opportunity to learn, almost no one accepted it.

They didn’t care.

Does anyone care what we do?

Over the years, buckets of tea have been spilled about how customers don’t care about our products. THE work framework to be accomplished Explains it perfectly: customers focus on solving their needs, not the products themselves. The adage often attributed to Theodore Levitt illustrates this well: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.

Some of CMI’s earliest articles on content marketing explain how customers care about their needs, not yours. David Meerman Scott has been writing for a decade about how no one cares about your product, except you.

But lately, it seems like marketers have stopped caring about their products. They have become more like special agents, focused on optimizing their elements of the customer journey without ever questioning what the widget’s real value is to 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 world’s largest cloud infrastructure companies to give me insight into the company’s industry and competition. He said, “Oh, I don’t know much about that.” My job is to make sure prospects enter the funnel. I could put you in touch with one of our subject matter experts.

He wasn’t trying to be difficult. He did not consider such in-depth product knowledge essential.

More and more, I find that B2B marketers view their efforts as an intellectual puzzle. Putting together the internal and external elements of creation, process, data, and measurement is an intellectual challenge they must solve to get to the next level (or stay) in the game. They lack emotion and interest for the products or industry in which they work.

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 as much to do with most companies’ lack of investment in fostering that curiosity as it does with their reluctance to delve deeper into learning.

Companies often view content and marketing practitioners as replaceable chess pieces. Then they are surprised when their practitioners feel like pawns — unmotivated, disengagedand doesn’t want to learn the details of the game.

Maybe I long for a version of marketing that no longer exists. I remember the heated debates between marketing teams 15 or 20 years ago. Back then, B2B marketers were passionate about their industry. In highly technical companies, marketing teams were excited about what their companies were doing. Marketing managers made sure of that: they hosted training, brought in guest speakers, and provided journal subscriptions and ongoing industry education to keep everyone engaged.

Product marketing would evangelize the innovative new product features to an enthusiastic sales enablement team. The brand and demand generation teams have constantly learned the finer details of the industry; everyone has become (at some level) an expert on the subject. Marketers attended retreats where they mocked the competition and brainstormed ways to compete with them as if they were a rival sports team.

Marketing teams cared. Deeply.

But that brings us back to the question: do we care? When planning your marketing for 2025, would you prefer to work with people who have specialized skills or the curiosity to become an expert? Is this difference important?

I think so.

B2B customers demand better

Caring about the business topic of your business should be important.

The findings of the recent Marketing Week report State of B2B Marketing Report (subscription required) show why. According to the study, the most sought-after skill among B2B marketers is customer knowledge, with 54.4% of respondents placing it at the top. This is followed by commercial orientation with 46.9% and creativity with 30.3%.

Empathy is ranked low.

At first glance, this seems at odds with the idea that it’s important to care about the business subject matter of your company. B2B marketers in this study appear to prioritize data-driven customer insights on the emotional understanding of topics and the customer experience.

Then I remembered this revealing article from B2B marketing expert Ardath Albee. She emphasized research that shows only 1% of C-level buyers believe that the B2B marketing they encounter demonstrates a “meaningful understanding of the human experience.” Deep down, none of them feel understood. There is no empathy.

When comparing Marketing Week results with CMI results latest B2B searchesthe image becomes clearer.

The most cited content creation challenge by B2B marketers is “producing content that actually drives action.” Meanwhile, the top use of generative AI among B2B marketers is to “brainstorm new topics.”

Most tellingly, 88% of B2B marketers who consider themselves successful say the key to that success is “understanding the audience.”

Once you put it all together, things start to make a little more sense.

Today’s B2B marketing is as dry, beige and bland as a bowl of unsweetened oatmeal. We extracted all the emotion and empathy from our content using data. 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 understand.

If successful B2B marketing must have a point of viewconstantly generating emotion and demonstrating an understanding of the human experience, shouldn’t our marketing teams have at least a little of the same?

Combating involuntary indifference

Again, I don’t blame content and marketing practitioners, although we are the only ones who can solve this problem. And I’m not suggesting that a “quiet stop”, where people try just enough to get by, is in play. I know many B2B marketers who go above and beyond, solving complex intellectual puzzles about topics that don’t interest them at all.

The problem is that many don’t understand why it’s important to explore the details of their industry.

I call this “unintentional indifference.” It’s a chicken and egg situation. Does this happen when companies no longer seek to enthuse marketing teams on topics that concern them? Or is it a lack of interest on the part of marketing staff? Is it both?

A mid-sized technology company engages and engages its marketers by organizing a training program. He runs formal internal campaigns and provides access to industry conferences for all marketing teams.

20 years ago, when I was the marketing director of a small technical software company, enterprise web content management wasn’t the most exciting topic for me. I had just come out of the world of cinema and television.

However, I believed the marketing team needed curiosity, a willingness to learn, and industry knowledge to connect with our customers. We ran regular sessions to help them (and myself) 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. This turned out to be the foundation of the career I have today.

Interest, not fanaticism

You don’t need to create fanaticism around your brand. Companies are also not required to build this into their DNA. But they should provide in-depth education about space.

For example, Salesforce sends all new hires through a 1-Year Cloud Marketing Training Program about the world of software as a service.

But I’m less concerned about brand efforts and more focused on careers in content and marketing. I can’t imagine working for a company that I didn’t care about – or at least try to care about – about its business. This is why I love my job now. I have a front row seat to many industries and their key players.

I also realized that I’m not as effective when I don’t care about the product or the industry. Marketers should feel more responsible for teaching and inspire their teams be as excited (and connected) as possible about where their business and marketing fit into it.

You spend an awful lot of time trying to convince customers to care about what you do. But if the content and marketing teams don’t care at least as much as your customers, you won’t be successful.

It’s your story. Say it well.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute