Gartner research suggests that around 70% of B2B content produced goes unused. 70%. Nearly three quarters of every whitepaper, video, case study, and blog post created by B2B marketing teams either never gets published, gets published and immediately ignored, or gets used once and never again.

I call this the Content Slop Problem. And it's not a production problem — it's a strategic one.

"The problem isn't that B2B brands don't create enough content. It's that they create too much of the wrong content, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong moment."

What content slop looks like

You know it when you see it:

  • Generic whitepapers that say nothing a buyer didn't already know
  • Case studies written for the client rather than the prospect reading them
  • Videos that exist to prove someone's budget was spent, not to move anyone forward
  • Blog posts that rank for keywords but contain no actual point of view
  • Social content produced to fill a calendar, not to earn attention

Each of these costs real money to produce. And most of it does nothing.

Why it keeps happening

Three structural reasons keep the slop machine running:

1. Production pressure without strategic clarity. Marketing teams are measured on output — number of pieces produced, cadence maintained, channels covered. When the KPI is volume, you produce volume. Whether it's good or useful is secondary.

2. No defined job for each piece. Most content is briefed as "we need a video about X" or "write a post about Y." Without a clear job — what should the person who consumes this do, think, or feel differently — there's no way to evaluate whether it worked. So nobody does.

3. Disconnect between marketing and sales. Content is created by marketing and used (in theory) by sales. When these teams don't talk, marketing produces what they think is useful and sales ignores it in favour of what they know actually works. The 70% sits unused because it was never designed with the user in mind.

The cost of content slop

This isn't just a waste of money, though it is that. The real cost is opportunity cost and trust erosion.

When a buyer encounters generic, undifferentiated content from your brand, they form an opinion. That opinion is: "this company is like every other company in this space." That's the opposite of what content is supposed to do.

Bad content actively damages your positioning. Silence would often be better.

The fix

It starts with ruthlessness. Before any piece of content is commissioned, three questions need clear answers:

  • Who is the specific person this is for?
  • What is the specific job this piece needs to do?
  • How will we know if it worked?

If you can't answer all three, don't make the content. Full stop. The discipline of saying "no" to bad content briefs is one of the highest-leverage activities a B2B marketing leader can practice.

Produce less. Make it better. Give it a job. That's how you get out of the 70%.