What are the Content Marketing Challenges B2B Companies Commonly Face
- Last updated on: July 23, 2025
Content marketing is at the forefront of B2B growth. It has the capability of being utilized to build authority, generate leads, and influence purchasing decisions. Yet, most B2B companies continue to fail to optimize it.
The test is not as much about creating content as it is about creating the appropriate content. Presenting it in the right way, and effectively gauging its true influence. Even seasoned marketing teams face repeat obstacles, from strategy misalignment and distribution gaps to ROI tracking and scalability.
Here, we discuss the five most critical content marketing challenges faced by B2B organizations and why they persist despite new tools and techniques arising. Understanding these challenges is the stepping stone in building a stronger, leaner content marketing machine.
1. Misaligned Content Strategy With Buyer Needs
One of the greatest challenges for B2B companies is developing content that doesn’t necessarily connect with what their buyers need. Many teams are busy scheduling a publishing calendar, writing blogs, whitepapers, and videos just to ensure levels of output. But if the content doesn’t directly speak to an altered set of priorities for a buyer, it creates noise rather than value.
This gap is often the product of an out-of-date notion of the audience. Purchaser personas may be created once and never revisited, or else they rely too heavily upon internal suppositions instead of concrete purchaser intelligence. In sectors like SaaS, cybersecurity, and financial services, purchaser needs are in high-speed change, driven by emerging technologies, regulatory shifts, and altering marketplace forces. Material that cannot rapidly adapt becomes stale.
Consider a SaaS business continuing to publish content about legacy on-prem installation when its market has long since moved on to cloud-native solutions. Or a cybersecurity business focusing on ransomware whitepapers when target buyers are trending toward compliance automation. These content silos lead to wasted effort, reduced engagement, and angry sales teams that cannot effectively leverage those materials.
The impact is high. The Content Marketing Institute states that 63% of B2B marketers admit to finding it challenging to create content that resonates with their audience. That failure leads to weak lead generation, longer sales cycles, and, for most, a loss of credibility to buyers.
To avoid this, B2B companies need to shift from a volume-forged to an intent-based approach. That means continuously editing buyer personas, listening for market cues, and creating all content around a specific point in the buying process. If content explicitly speaks to actual buyer problems, it ceases to be a marketing brochure; it’s a useful tool that sparks conversation and genuine interest.
2. The Quality vs. Quantity Trap
Another frequent problem for B2B companies is the right balance of content amount and quality. All marketing teams are forced to produce content in volume, a few blogs each week, countless social media updates, new landing pages, and frequent email campaigns, all in an attempt to stay visible and drive traffic. But when content takes a back seat to velocity, the result is usually meager, vomitous, or tasteless copy that fails to gain trust or command the right audience.
The issue typically stems from assuming that “more content = better results.” While in some situations volume can build reach, not often does it stimulate meaningful engagement without depth, originality, and expertise. B2B audiences are discerning. Decision-makers expect content that offers real value, whether new research, industry insights, or useful advice. Publishing large quantities of low-value content merely induces fatigue and lost credibility as readers soon screen out repetitive or superficial messaging.
Consider Salesforce, for instance, switching from broad marketing blogs at high frequency to producing less-frequent but richer, research-driven content pieces. Their “State of Sales” and “State of Marketing” reports, for instance, became benchmarked shared assets since they delivered novel information underpinned by real data. The result was higher engagement, more backlinks, and more brand authority compared to when they were publishing fast and furious.
The moral? Content marketing is not a race to get there first, but an exercise in creating something worthwhile. By prioritizing depth over frequency and focusing on content that solves pressing buyer problems, companies can build a consistent presence that drives sustainable growth rather than fleeting clicks.
3. Content That Fails to Reach the Targeted Audience
Even when companies produce great content, it might never actually find its audience. Far too many B2B marketing teams are so fixated on content creation that distribution is an afterthought. The mentality is simple: publish it on the site, share it on social, blast it out on an email list, and be done. Without a solid distribution plan in place, though, even high-quality content can sit idle in the dark, generating little or no ROI.
The complexity of distribution in B2B marketing has grown exponentially. Buyers are consuming information across a range of touchpoints LinkedIn, industry forums, partner newsletters, paid search ads, and even specialist podcasts. Without a clear multi-channel approach, companies are more than likely to be pushing content into digital black holes rather than targeted buyer systems. Furthermore, most of the teams are utilizing old or too vague targeting, so the content is being delivered to an audience, but maybe not the right audience.
A perfect example of how to overcome this hurdle is Adobe. Instead of relying solely on its owned media, Adobe built a targeted content distribution platform utilizing LinkedIn’s advanced targeting and strategic partnerships with industry publishers. Its content, role-customized by job title such as creative directors and marketing leaders, boosted engagement and generated qualified leads that corresponded directly to their core products. This step did not equate to creating additional content; it just implied that existing content be delivered to the appropriate people in the appropriate places.
Takeaway: great content only works when it reaches the right people at the right moment. Adding distribution to the strategy from day one through targeted paid initiatives, syndication agreements, SEO optimization, and audience segmentation ensures content performs as intended.
4. Measuring Content ROI in Content Marketing
Perhaps the biggest source of angst for B2B marketers is reporting on actual return on investment (ROI) for content. Companies invest significant dollars in hiring writers, creating video, and producing campaigns, yet can’t prove how those efforts influence revenue or pipeline growth.
This problem is usually a problem of scattered data and poor attribution schemes. Marketing teams will track vanity metrics such as page views or social shares, but the metrics do not always mirror valuable business outcomes such as qualified leads or closed deals. Sales teams will credit a deal entirely to an outbound call, without because a prospect interacted with multiple pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. Without ongoing alignment on what matters and how it’s measured, content gets undervalued.
The size of the issue is significant. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B Report says that 51% of B2B marketers report measuring content effectiveness as their biggest challenge, and only 39% believe in their ability to accurately measure ROI. Another recent poll conducted by HubSpot (2025) identified that 61% of marketing leaders have content bridging to revenue impact their number-one priority in the next 12 months. The numbers prove that marketing technology might have advanced, whereas analytics maturity lags.
A strong example of transcending this challenge is LinkedIn’s own. The company paired its own LinkedIn Insights Tag with a multi-touch attribution model so that it could measure the impact that content such as thought leadership pieces and industry reports had on conversions on the way to purchase. This shift allowed LinkedIn to provide transparent ROI, resulting in more efficient budget allocation and a 15%-20% increase in content-driven pipeline contribution within one year.
5. Scaling Content With Limited Resources
For the majority of B2B companies, producing amazing content regularly is not the issue. But rather a deficiency of resources to go after it at scale. Marketing personnel overwhelmed by demands are usually asked to implement full-scale content operations, from research and writing to designing, video creation, and deployment. In bigger companies, even budget limitations exist, with high-level talent being limited in supply.
This resource deficiency often leads to inconsistent publication schedules, too much reliance on freelancers, or content lacking a strong brand voice. Companies will start strong with some well-written content, but disappoint when bandwidth issues snowball. The result is usually a fragmented content experience that is disconnected and fails to build long-term trust with the readers.
Shopify is one company that did it right. First, their content group was not capable of developing industry-specific content in volume for their growing roster of enterprise merchants. Instead of radically recruiting to address the demand, Shopify took a hybrid path. That is leveraging AI-powered content tools for research and the first draft. But bringing on a good editorial team for the final look and brand fit. This tactic allowed them to triple the production of content without sacrificing the quality. Ultimately leading to a 27% boost in organic traffic and more sustainable engagement for significant accounts.
The lesson here is that scaling content isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing better. Leaning on technology, streamlining processes, and leveraging strategic outside partners can make it possible. For even lean teams to churn out consistent, high-level content. A scalable process allows companies to stay top of mind. And current without burning out their teams or diluting their message.
Conclusion
Content marketing is currently a must for B2B growth drivers. Yet even seasoned marketing teams still struggle with it.. It’s either creating content that resonates with buyer priorities, finding the right quality and quantity balance, sending it to the right folks, or showing its impact on revenue. Or sustaining it with available resources, and these have one thing in common: complexity.
The bad news is that none of them is impossible. Organizations that focus on aligning content with buyer intent, applying smarter distribution methods, and investing in better analytics. Additionally, leveraging scalable processes can transform content marketing into a high-performance growth driver. The key is to think about content as not a one-time act but as an evolving strategy. A strategy that adjusts to changing markets, shifting buying habits, and emerging technology.
Content that resonates with the right people, in the right place. Also, at the right time, in a competitive B2B market, is more than marketing. It’s a driver of sustained growth.
FAQs
1. What are the most common content marketing challenges facing B2B companies?
The most common are misaligned content and buyer needs. Additionally, quantity over quality content, weak distribution channels, inability to measure ROI, and scaling with limited resources.
2. Why are B2B companies struggling to measure content ROI?
Most companies have vanity metrics and poor attribution models. And therefore, it is hard to connect the content directly to revenue contribution.
3. How do B2B marketers scale content distribution?
By adopting a multi-channel tactic, using targeted paid campaigns, riding partnerships, SEO-optimizing, and specific buyer segment-optimizing content.
4. What is the secret to scaling B2B content marketing?
Through the utilization of automation tools, workflow simplification, and a hybrid model that integrates in-house capabilities with strategic external partners. They maintain quality while increasing volume.
5. Why is content alignment with buyer needs so critical?
Alignment of content with real buyer priorities builds trust, stimulates engagement, and drives growth in the sales pipeline. Misaligned content equals effort wasted and poor ROI.
