It might sound counterintuitive: B2B content would be more effective if companies stopped talking about themselves so much. But all these feature announcements, product comparisons, company milestones - it's like showing up to a first date and talking exclusively about yourself.
Focusing on your product is fine when it’s done in the right place. Think about your marketing funnel. At the bottom, you have buyers actively evaluating solutions - they want to know your features, your pricing, how you compare to competitors. Product-focused content belongs here. But at the top, you have people who aren't shopping yet. They're wrestling with their problems, thinking through how to solve them, and learning what good looks like. They don't care about your product because they're not sure they need a product.
Most marketing teams treat all the funnel stages the same way. They push product messaging everywhere and wonder why top-of-funnel content underperforms. Writing content that’s better tuned to the reader’s needs is the single highest-leverage change a marketing team can make - and at the top of the funnel, the reader is focused on their problems, not your product.
Most marketing teams churn out solutions-focused content. This feels productive - you're shipping something that touches some of the bases - but it’s only relevant to buyers who are already evaluating you.
Problem-focused content does something different. It names the specific pain that prospects are feeling, and describes the workaround they're currently living with. It quantifies the cost of doing nothing and sometimes even articulates the problem better than the buyer can themselves.
Take a look at the difference in approach for these two pieces, about the same product and from the same company. DemandScience published a piece called "The Marketing Data Mirage: Why Your Dashboards Lie." It opens with the line: "The lines are green, but the impact is gray." That's a hook for marketing leaders who've felt that exact dissonance between their metrics and their actual results.
Compare that to their press release: "DemandScience Launches Ionic, Labs, and Central to end the Data Mirage” which opens with "DemandScience, a global leader in B2B performance marketing solutions, today announced..."
The first evokes the problem that the ICP is grappling with. The second is only relevant if they’re already looking for a solution or an existing customer. If you’re looking to grow your audience (versus nudge someone down the very end of the sales pipeline), you should be looking to connect with them on what they’re currently thinking about - that is, their day-to-day challenges.
The traditional marketing funnel starts with awareness, then moves to interest to consideration to decision. Problem-focused content inverts this. You start with the problem, stay with the problem, and mention yourself later in the process - or not at all.
Top-of-funnel content that mentions your product isn't truly top-of-funnel. At this stage, content should help the buyer understand their problem more deeply without any expectation of conversion.
This may feel counterintuitive, and certainly it’s not what most marketing organizations are doing today. Why would you create content that doesn't sell? Because trust builds up over time when you continue to help your audience without being asked. Every time you provide genuine value without a pitch attached, you build credibility. When that buyer is finally ready to evaluate solutions, you're the one who's been helping them all along - and you’re top of mind. You're the expert who's already earned their attention by adding real value.
If you want to make a shift to problem-focused content, it helps to start with seeing where you are now. At PiratHat, we like using a content audit. Count how many posts are about "us" versus "them." A good place to start is your headlines- is the subject of the sentence you or your buyer? Then look at your CTAs - do they serve the reader or just aim to capture leads? Most teams discover 80% or more of their content is product-focused. They've been loud, but not resonant.
The next step is research. Product-focused content often comes from not knowing the buyer deeply enough, and using what’s at hand: their company jargon and features. Writers can’t talk fluently about problems if they don't have the customer language or mindset. If that’s the case, it's time to go get it - by reading customer interviews, sales call transcripts, support tickets, and mining reviews. The best content marketers are like anthropologists. They study how buyers talk and what keeps them up at night. Once you have this depth of understanding, problem-focused content stops being hard since you’re reflecting reality back to the reader.
Your ICP wakes up thinking about their problems, not your product category. They're worried about their quarterly targets, their team's bandwidth, and their boss's expectations. Your product is a means to an end - if it even crosses their mind at all.
This is why aligning your content strategy with your GTM funnel matters. At the top, you're competing for attention against everything else in their inbox and feed. You win that competition by being useful, not promotional.
Write about what keeps them awake, and you become the person they trust when they're ready to buy. The audience you build at the top is the pipeline you close at the bottom. Problem-focused content is how you earn the right to eventually talk about your product - at the point when they truly want to hear it.
