Lights! Camera! Content! Has B2B Marketing Forgotten the Story?

In the rush to publish more, faster, and everywhere, too many brands have mistaken execution for strategy. It’s time to put storytelling, not scheduling, back at the center of content.

On a set, everyone has a role to play—not just the people, but the tools themselves. Directors experiment with lights, gels, and composition to shape the subject with the right balance of illumination and shadow. Crew members mark the spots, measure the distances, and align each element so every take produces a consistent outcome.

It’s a machine with interlocking gears each tooth in sync. The only variable is the subject. That’s a framework—scalable and repeatable.

When a film or photo series is produced, the goal isn’t to recreate the same scene or emotion again and again. It’s to maintain a cohesive tone, lens, and direction that will frame the story being told.

Content, the Modern Consumable

For years, content gurus have evangelized one mantra: produce more. Publish. Post. Ship it.

That advice isn’t inherently wrong—it’s just misunderstood. The “publish more” message was meant for those still paralyzed at the starting line. If your content calendar is collecting cobwebs, then yes, anything is better than nothing. Consistency builds the foundation.

But scaling only frequency and quantity isn’t strategy. It’s execution without direction.

When you focus solely on impressions and engagement—measured through quantity and frequency—you’ve already stepped into a trap. Those KPIs become the only targets. “What can we do that’ll resonate this month? This week? This Season?”

You’ve started by designing the box—the wrapper, the inserts—before even deciding what should go inside. Your message, your story, your product now has to be squeezed into a pre-made container.

That model, your content becomes a consumable. Ephemeral. Forgettable. Single-use plastic.

And worst of all, your customers start forming emotional attachments to the packaging, not the story inside.

That might work in CPG. But in B2B? It’s a dead end.

Ask: Why Do You Exist?

When I worked as a freelance copywriter helping founders craft brand messaging, I always began with one question: Why do you exist?

More precisely: if your company disappeared tomorrow (poof), what vacuum would it leave behind? What would the world lose access to that no competitor could replace?

That question scales into product marketing, too. Beyond brand storytelling, it touches market fit, use cases, differentiators—an entire screenplay’s worth of scenes and dialog.

When product hands off to content, the script should already exist. Characters should be defined. The emotional beats planned.

Start with the story first. Then build a framework so you can shoot scene after scene with clarity and purpose.

Story-Led Content Marketing: Activation

There’s more than one way to cook an egg.

There’s no single formula. Create a framework that fits your brand, products, and customers—the problems you solve and the emotions you evoke. In film terms: are you a buddy-cop comedy? A thriller? A horror-mystery?

Just as your best salespeople learn their customers’ businesses before proposing solutions, your core stories should be build the same way. As Judith Charles once defined it (via Bob Bly): copywriters are sellers behind a keyboard.

Personally, I take a journalistic approach—observing from a slight distance, focused on providing value first. I think of myself as a detective working a case: exploring every angle, even those without an immediate answer.

Remember, you’re writing scenes, not entire films. Not every idea needs to fit into a 2,000-word article, a 4-minute video, or even a 20-minute podcast episode. Focus on one specific problem at a time.

As you outline your story—or your scene—think of your headlines and subheads (H2s, H3s) as your production notes. They aren’t just structure; they’re the creative blueprint for your activation team. Those cues dictate your carousel copy, your one-pagers, your 30-second video clips, your ad variants.

A single long-form piece—a 2,000-word article, a 20-minute podcast, a customer interview—can generate hundreds of derivative assets.

At that final stage, your activation team still builds the boxes and wrappers. But now, the packaging fits the story—not the other way around.

When you lead with story, impressions and engagement become byproducts, not goals. You’ll still achieve frequency and quantity—but they’ll serve the narrative, not replace it.

Your story, and your solutions, will take center stage.

Mapping the Maze Backwards

As marketers, we’re trained to reverse-engineer the maze—to understand how algorithms, feeds, and discovery mechanisms shape visibility.

That’s a valuable skill. It keeps us sharp, ensuring our work gets seen.

But increasingly, that activation engineering is driving content strategy itself—dictating what stories get told, and how.

That’s the tail wagging the dog.

AI tools, especially generative AI, will accelerate B2B content production. But we need to be careful what we accelerate.

Because even when you’re crawling at 5 mph, a pitfall is dangerous. But with your foot on the gas, it’s catastrophic.