‘There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all’ said the great Peter Drucker. Now there’s an adage everyone would all do well to bear in mind when planning their 2025 content strategy.
I was in a meeting recently with a marketing director at a client organisation, discussing elements of a content strategy that would render it fit for purpose to deliver on ambitious lead generation goals. He was right to be concerned. Many companies struggle to establish a clear content marketing strategy, and even fewer stay on course with them despite shifts in short-term priorities.
In fact, a McKinsey survey of senior executives found that less than a quarter of them believed that their strategic planning processes led to major strategic decisions. Less than a quarter!
The strategy must be agile, practical and simple: here’s a content strategy template that might help. To be effective however, they must stay rooted in strong fundamentals and an understanding of your customers’ purchase cycles, avoiding hype and short-termist ‘miracle cures’. So here are my top 5 strategy pitfalls, with ideas about how to avoid them and create a strategy that delivers results. How many of these pitfalls do you recognise?
Pitfall 1: Create your 2025 content strategy in a vacuum
Time spent benchmarking ahead of creating a 2025 content strategy is time well spent. Leading tech B2B businesses do it continually and are creative about it too. We find content benchmarks extremely useful while establishing content strategy – they help identify best practice, spot gaps in the market, and give you an indication of what your prospects are used to. So, while we do not advocate getting excessively caught up in the details of it, you ignore benchmarking at your peril. Make it a part of your routine and workflow in the planning stage.
For example, a content benchmarking report we published recently of 50 of the world’s leading tech B2B brands showed that these market leaders published on average more than two long-form pieces of content in a year.
Pitfall 2: Focus your efforts on downloadable PDF white papers
White papers are an essential part of the tech B2B purchase process, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. However, bear in mind that your prospects are being bombarded with a deluge of information in response to search queries, on social channels, and in their inboxes. Downloadable pdfs of long reams of copy heavy content, no matter how useful or insightful, are no longer as engaging as they used to be.
Think about embedding long-form content on page – this guide from Brightcove showcases how content can be embedded on the page to extract the most SEO benefit from it.
What’s more, content that drives interest and engagement leads to the highest goal conversions. This Isoline report on content preferences among tech B2B buyers showcases how interactivity can improve engagement significantly.
Pitfall 3: Use gating as your primary lead generation tactic
Gating, once the key method that marketing used to collect leads, has been steadily falling out of favour over the past six years. In fact, only half the long-form content produced by 50 of the world’s top tech B2B brands last year was gated, according to our content benchmark report.
Gating as a strategy is not the best method to drive ‘real’ leads. The reason is that only a very small proportion of your buyers are in-market at any given time. Instead of focussing on gating to drive leads, consider other methods of intent tracking.
Buyer intent tracking technologies are improving significantly and we are seeing a number of solutions launching in the market. These tools help you capture signals that allow you to understand exactly when your prospects are exploring solutions your business offers, and contact them with tailored messaging when they’re the most likely to buy. You can also share timely buyer insights with sales teams, and drive high-quality conversations and revenue pipelines.
Pitfall 4: Approach SEO in the traditional way
Of all aspects of analytics and technology that marketers need to invest in keeping up with, SEO is the most dynamic.
As AI becomes more integrated into search engines, especially with Google’s AI Overview, businesses need to rethink their content strategies. It’s no longer just about traditional SEO but also about how AI interprets and ranks content. Ensuring your content aligns with these advanced algorithms is crucial for maintaining visibility in search results.
“In 2025, optimising for Google’s AI Overview is essential. As AI reshapes search, businesses must focus on delivering value-driven, well-structured content that AI can easily interpret,” says search expert Sophie Roberts, Managing Director of the Koozai Group Ltd. “Start with the basics – create clear, focussed paragraphs that address specific topics, using logical headings and ensuring easy to read formatting with bullet points and lists where appropriate. Understanding how to rank in AI-powered results will be key to staying ahead.”
Pitfall 5: Use generative AI content to pad out your resource centre
Generative AI based content has led to ‘content overwhelm’ on social platforms and more generally across the internet. As a result, your prospects are being deluged with a flood of content. However, content generated in this manner does not achieve even basic marketing KPIs related to engagement and goal conversions. The reason? Off-the-shelf generative AI tools have not yet received datasets large enough to train them to generate high-quality, in-depth content about complex tech B2B fields.
However, generative AI does hold out transformative potential in the medium to long term future. Use cases include short form content scalability, analytics, programming, and content creation.
Our advice? Stay tuned. Explore and stay abreast of the developments in the generative AI field and test out the potential with pilot projects. Meanwhile, focus on quality, not quantity.
If you’d like help crafting your long-form strategy, get in touch on hello@isolinecomms.com.
