From Copycat to Category Leader: Creating Bold B2B Content

I had the pleasure of joining Jenn Mancusi on the Marketing Demystified podcast. We dove deep into a challenge facing so many B2B marketing leaders: how to stop creating lackluster, copycat content and start producing bold, category-defining work that actually makes an impact.

Jenn kicked things off by asking me why so much B2B content fails. My answer was simple yet bold: most of it is completely forgettable.

We now live in a world where an estimated 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced every single day. This firehose of information makes it incredibly difficult to stand out. The research paints a stark picture:

• A NP Digital analysis of over 5 million social media posts found that 59% received zero engagement.

• According to a study from Knotch, 60% of content fails to meet audience expectations, and a startling 30% of it is actively damaging your brand’s perception.

These findings confirm what many of us feel intuitively: most content is either ignored or, worse, generates a negative sentiment for your brand.

The High Stakes of Invisibility

What happens if your content fails to resonate? The risks are significant and directly undermine core business goals.

• You become invisible and unmemorable. You cede thought leadership to competitors and fail to build the brand authority needed to become a market leader.

• You get cut from the buyer's journey. B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. If your content is forgettable, you are effectively excluded from their research.

• You ignore 95% of your market. Only 5% of your potential customers are ready to buy at any given moment. Ineffective content fails to build trust with the other 95%, so they won't even think of you when they are ready.

  
  

Why Most B2B Content Fails to Resonate

In my work with clients, I’ve found that the reasons for forgettable content often fall into a few common categories. 

The Symptoms of Forgettable Content

• You’ve fallen into the commoditization trap. The vast majority of B2B content is generic and indistinguishable. If you swapped your logo with a competitor's, would anyone notice? In content marketing, imitation isn’t flattery. It’s the fast track to obscurity.

• Your content isn't actually helpful. It fails to address your audience's pain points, needs, or desired outcomes with any real nuance. Or worse, it only talks about your company and your solutions, ignoring the customer altogether.

• It’s filled with gobbledygook. Your content is packed with industry jargon and acronyms that alienate the very people you’re trying to connect with.

• It never sees the light of day. Your team spends all their time creating content, but no time promoting it. A brilliant, perspective-driven narrative is useless if it’s buried in a white paper.

The Root Causes: Strategy and Operations Blockers

These symptoms are usually caused by deeper issues that I group into two categories: strategy problems and operations problems. The first step to fixing your content is holding up a mirror and honestly identifying what’s holding you back from creating your best and boldest work.

Strategy Blockers:

• The Google-First Trap: Many companies equate content with "blogs written for Google." This immediately puts you at a disadvantage, as SEO algorithms often reward a certain structure, pushing marketers to create copycat content just to fit the mold.

• The Hamster Wheel of Volume: When teams are judged on the quantity of content they produce rather than its quality and impact, they never get the "think time" needed to create something truly distinct.

Operations Blockers:

• Siloed Content Creation: I see it over and over. Content teams are disconnected from the business at large. Without a direct line to business strategy and cross-functional teams, your content is guaranteed to be uninteresting because you don’t have the insights from the collective braintrust of your organization. Thought leadership lives within every nook and cranny of the business. Alignment with these stakeholders is key to translating original thinking into bold content.

• The "Order-Taker" Model: I often see content teams stuck in a reactive workflow, serving as an internal agency for one-off requests from other teams. This prevents them from building a cohesive customer journey and ensures their work has no long-term strategic value.

The Path Forward: A Framework for Bold Content Ingenuity

The path forward begins with a mindset shift. Successful B2B companies create content not for a transactional click, but to build a meaningful relationship with their audience. They understand the landing on their webpage isn’t the end of the journey; it’s the beginning.

Their primary performance indicator is resonance. They measure it by looking beyond traffic and examining metrics that signal deeper engagement: conversion events, scroll depth, pages per visit, pipeline, and revenue metrics.

Brands that earn this resonance are leaders of good ideas. They produce distinct, differentiated content with insights so refreshing that their audience can't help but pay attention. The ideas they offer change the way their audience thinks.

B2B brands that produce category-defining content consistently do the following:

• They are expert storytellers who build their narrative around specific customer needs.

• They have a distinct point of view.

• They challenge the status quo by offering a unique perspective on a known problem.

• They share the collective wisdom of their internal thought leaders to address the audience's problems.

• They develop original research.

• They care deeply about quality because their purpose is to build trust by delivering unmatched value.

• They strive for the kind of resonance that leads to memorability, building the know, like, and trust factor for the entire market.

This content builds trust and creates loyalty more deeply than content created purely for immediate transactional outcomes (like a strategy developed solely on SEO keyword research). This is where you can use a structured approach, like my Content Ingenuity Framework, to move from copycat creator to category leader.

Phase 1: Research & Discover

You can't stand out if you don't know where the opportunity is. The goal of this phase is to find your unique position in the market so you can break through the noise.

• Uncover Deep Audience Insights: Go beyond basic personas. Your goal is to understand the real-world challenges, motivations, and language of your target audience.

• Expose Competitive Whitespace: Analyze the market to see what conversations your competitors are owning, and more importantly, what they’re ignoring. This is where you'll find your opening. A common blind spot I see in my work with B2B clients is that they only analyze what competitors are doing, not what they're failing to address.

• Reveal 'Copycat Content' with a Content Audit: Analyze your existing content to see where it's generic. This establishes a baseline and clarifies the work needed to become truly original.

Phase 2: Craft Your Unforgettable Narrative

This is where you build the category-defining narrative that reflects your unique expertise and makes your brand memorable.

• Define Your Point of View: What do you stand for? What is your unique perspective on the industry that no one else has? This is the core of your differentiated voice, and it's often uncovered in the research of phase one. In this phase, you develop it.

• Build Your Narratives: Create core narratives that marry your unique expertise and point of view with your audience’s real-world needs.

• Weave in Powerful Storytelling: Facts tell, but stories sell. The human mind is hardwired for narrative. Consider these statistics: One study found that 63% of attendees remembered stories from a presentation, while only 5% remembered a statistic. We are 22 times more likely to recall facts when they are embedded in a narrative. Storytelling has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 30%.

Phase 3: Build Your Content Impact Plan

This phase translates your unique insights and narratives into a tangible execution plan. This is your strategic blueprint for turning expertise into influence. Here, you design the tentpole campaigns, thought leadership platforms, and evergreen content engines that will make your audience stop, think, engage, and act. The goal is to build a connected ecosystem of content that tells a strategic story, builds brand authority, and generates long-term demand.

The AI Elephant in the Room: Threat or Tool?

We ended our conversation by discussing how AI is forcing an evolution in content marketing.

AI is supercharging the creation of commodity content. This is a conversation I'm having with clients constantly. Brands that use AI as a total replacement for human creators are in a race to the bottom. Gen AI generates generic content based on existing patterns; it cannot create insight-driven content from lived experience or a unique perspective. Your customers can spot this inauthenticity from a mile away.

The winning strategy is pairing human creativity with AI efficiency. Use AI as a tool to support your team, not replace them. In this new landscape, originality and a differentiated human voice are your most valuable assets.

There’s so much more in the full interview. I hope you’ll give it a listen and share your thoughts! 

What’s one new insight you learned? What’s one that you’re actively implementing in your business right now? What’s a strategy or tactic you’ll take back to your team?

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Hi! I’m Kristen Rocco. My mission is to help ambitious B2B marketing leaders escape the minefield of content commoditization and start creating bold, category-defining work that catapults them from copycat to standout. Contact me to start.