Struggling to think of just one? You’re not alone. From the braggarts on LinkedIn to fluff whitepapers trying to nab your email to low-quality articles answering common search queries just to compete for SEO clicks—the overwhelming majority of B2B content online today lacks substance, let alone a compelling story. Just trying to track down the answer to a basic question can feel like wading through a muck of vagaries and business jargon in the hopes of finding the tiny pearl of insight you need. 

It’d be easy to point the finger at generative AI, but the truth is, this downward spiral started long before ChatGPT came on the scene. As we’ve already written about, the growth of digital channels in the early aughts turned every marketing team into a mini media company, focused on broadcasting their message widely rather than defining their ideal customers and how best to reach them. 

In this nascent era of search engine optimization (SEO), marketers quickly learned to hack their way up Google’s rankings, with tricks to improve their content’s discoverability, but not necessarily its quality. For instance, longer blog posts that could contain more relevant keywords tended to get better results, whether or not all that extra info was even relevant. That’s how we got so many recipe blogs that tell you the chef’s entire life story before what temperature to heat your oven.

But we’re no longer in this era of marketing. Google has cracked down on spammy, low-quality content. Your buyers are used to tailored, algorithmic feeds that show them exactly the kind of content they’re already interested in. Shallow, generic content is no longer going to cut it. Yet so many marketers are still so hyper-focused on “gaming the system” that they neglect quality—and wonder why their basic explainers and stats roundups are not getting real results. 

Here’s our moment of confession: We’ve been guilty of this too. And sure, we could claim the excuse of being too busy focusing on our clients’ programs to invest as much as we wanted in our own content (true), but we knew we needed to do better. We wanted to be a shining example of what marketing can do, given the right tools and creative ideas. 

It would take nothing short of a total content overhaul—starting with a creative campaign to launch our new content brand. Here’s how we did it.  

Surveying the content landscape

To be able to transform our content, we first needed to understand how the content landscape had changed. Because the truth is, great content today looks very different than it did a few years ago. And social media is only accelerating the pace at which your buyers’ tastes change. In the good ol’ days of early digital marketing, you could spin a few exciting stats into a cool-looking infographic and presto, you’d have a hit on your hands. Not so much anymore. 

These days, people are tuning into deep dives on the latest niche tea (aka online drama, sometimes involving actual tea), getting excited to learn about spooky lakes, or forming what basically amounts to a cult of personality around a baby pygmy hippo. The bar for content is so much higher—and weirder—than it’s ever been. 

The bar for content is so much higher—and weirder—than it’s ever been.

Lest you think this just applies to B2C content, remember that those same buyers who are binge-watching Moo Deng TikToks are the ones evaluating your software solution, service offering, or whatever your company is selling. To get their attention, you need to meet them on their level. That means investing in your content is even more critical than ever. It all boils down to something our cofounder Kathy Macchi is fond of saying: “If you stopped sending content tomorrow, would any prospect call and complain? If not, rethink your content strategy.” 

"If you stopped sending content tomorrow, would any prospect call and complain? If not, rethink your content strategy.” —Kathy Macchi

In order to meet our own high standards, something needed to change—and fast. 

The idea 

Luckily, we had a starting point. We knew we wanted to write about account-based marketing (ABM). It’s something we work with every day at Inverta and see the results firsthand. There’s a reason it occupies such a large part of the Demand Continuum. When it comes to building out your demand strategy, there’s little you can do that will get such reliable results. 

But we also knew that ABM’s star had been falling for some time. We saw so many companies abandoning it because they were struggling to make it work—for them, it just wasn’t living up to its promise. As a friend and advisor told us in an early ideation session, “Everyone’s tried sixty-two different things. Everyone knows they have a problem. They know they need to do account-based, but it’s not working for them. You can go through the checklist and people already know all these things. They live them every day.” 

He had a point. Even though we had insights we thought could help some of these frustrated marketers, we knew that if we packaged them up that way and wrote an ebook titled “The Seven Ways ABM Programs Fail,” we wouldn’t get the traction we needed to distribute it to a wide audience.

It’d be Yet Another Whitepaper Nobody Sees (YAWNS).

So, we approached our content partners at Fenwick to give us some ideas—and well, we’ll let them share their side of the story. 

Mixing marketing and…murder?

Hey, it’s Carina from Fenwick here. If you haven’t caught on yet, we’re talking about Inverta’s incredible campaign: Who Killed ABM? Along with my talented design counterpart Clarissa, I had the privilege of helping bring this campaign to life. 

When Jessica approached us, she and Kathy had been working on an ABM ebook—a kind of follow-up on everything that came before. Why ABM hadn’t worked for some companies, why it worked so well for others, and the concrete strategies that made a difference. It was great, insightful stuff. But figuring out how to package it so folks would be interested in reading it—that was the challenge. “We know an ebook isn’t quite the right format,” she said. Then, she turned the question back to us: “How would you make ABM seem exciting to our audience?”

We went back and ideated as a team. Our most exciting idea was a murder mystery. ABM was everywhere. And then it disappeared. What happened? And could we get it back?

This idea didn’t come out of nowhere—84 percent of the U.S. population regularly engages with true crime content (and it’s one of the top podcasting genres), so we figured there was a pretty good chance  there would be at least some overlap with our marketing audience. 

As a concept, we also thought the murder mystery element would relieve some of the pressure and self-blame that marketers had been feeling around ABM. Rather than sharing yet another list of things they “should” be doing or showing them how they’d gone wrong, we were inviting them on an investigation with us. It was a way to build intrigue and trust, all while sharing Inverta’s deep knowledge and insight. 

We went back and shared our proposal with Jessica—and she was into it from the start. She immediately started building on what we’d proposed. “This is great,” she told us, “but is it realistic? Let’s strategize it out.” As we built out the concepts for the story structure, design direction, and social media campaigns, she and the team grew more excited about the idea. 

Inverta’s co-founder, Patrice, decided to tease the story at a field marketing event to see how other marketers would react. We built the deck and awaited the response with bated breath. 

It went swimmingly. “This was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a preso,” Patrice reported back. With that glowing endorsement, we were sure this was the right campaign—and we continued to prep for our big launch. 

So did our bet pay off? I’ll let the results speak for themselves. 

The verdict 

This campaign is still active (we just released the final chapter a few weeks ago), but here are some early results from the first 100+ days of Who Killed ABM? being live in the world: 

More exciting than these stats though (and you know how much we love stats as marketers), are some of the intangible effects of this campaign. As evidenced by numerous love notes and off-the-record conversations, sharing Who Killed ABM? with our target audience resonated with our buyers and also inspired them. “We’ve gotta do a campaign like this” is a sentiment we heard over and over. This has helped with our overall name recognition and brand awareness. 

As an unintended side benefit, a lot of our partners also really enjoyed the campaign. They not only helped to amplify it while it was running, but their enthusiasm has also helped open up new opportunities to work together. So the next time we run something like Who Killed ABM?, we’ll have a whole network of partners we can rely on who are excited to participate. Which means that we’ll get more reach while spending a lot less money in the process—for us as marketers, that’s gold.

So what made this campaign work so well? Read on to see our analysis. 

The post-mortem

Who Killed ABM? was a huge success—both as a branding play and for our demand gen strategy. But what exactly about it worked so well, and how can you replicate that in your own content? Below, we’ll break it down. 

In my mind, truly breakthrough content shares three key characteristics: 

1. Real substance

If you’re going to create something, especially for a B2B audience, it should be worth the reader’s while. What will they learn from what you’re creating that will add value to their life? Busy folks are looking for real expertise to help them do their jobs better, not surface-level takes. 

Because we were able to leverage Inverta’s deep expertise on ABM for this series, we had this covered. You’ll notice that Who Killed ABM? is peppered with charts, questionnaires, templates, and real-life customer case studies—it’s all the first-hand knowledge that Inverta has accumulated over many years of doing this. That’s the real value of the series. 

2. A deep understanding of your audience

Knowing who you’re creating content for is critical: Who are they? What kind of content do they like to consume? What specifically will this content give them—a moment of respite in their busy workday, knowledge that will help them do their jobs better, maybe both? 

We knew that Inverta’s audience of marketers had all experienced frustration with how ABM had been going. They didn’t want another ebook that would tell them that what they were doing was wrong—they already knew that. We needed a series that would empathize with their pain and approach it with humor and curiosity. (Plus, who’s more inclined to call something “dead” than a marketer? I rest my case.) 

3. A new or innovative spin 

Content that stands out does so because it’s different. Ask yourself: How is this any different from the content that already exists on the subject? If you can’t articulate how what you’re creating is any different from what’s already out there, keep ideating until you can. 

Knowing that there were already tens (if not hundreds) of ABM guides in the market meant we knew we needed to do something different to stand out. A mystery to be solved created the perfect framing device—creating fresh intrigue about a topic that’s already been written about to death (pun very much intended). 

Quality content pays for itself

In this world of AI-generated sludge content, the smartest thing you can do as a marketer to boost the impact of your campaigns is to focus on improving your content quality. That might mean empowering some in-house creators (Who in your office knows who Moo Deng is and has opinions? That’s your person!) or enlisting the help of a trusted agency partner, like we did with our friends over at Fenwick. 

Unless you’re a really small startup, or you have a rare unicorn superstar who truly loves doing it all, don’t force your demand gen people to create content. Let your creatives be creative and let your demand and campaigns teams do what they do best by empowering them with exceptional content.

It’s really about doing less and doing it better. For marketing teams who have been so focused on volume for so long, this may be an uncomfortable adjustment. But when you spend more time and care at the ideation phase, you can come up with truly breakthrough ideas that don’t cost all that much to execute—and more than pay for themselves in the amount of interest they generate. Imagine not having to spend money on paid ads because your campaigns are that good. That’s what’s possible when you invest in great content.