Contently: Writing content that lands with decision makers
What the article covers
Ajith Babu published this piece on the Contently blog in May 2026 to address a specific failure mode in B2B content: articles and white papers that get produced, published, and quietly ignored by the executives they are meant to reach. The core observation is that most B2B content is not failing because of low production quality. It is failing because it is not anchored to anything the reader actually needs to decide.
Three content failure modes
The article identifies three patterns that cause content to miss senior readers.
Marketing disguised as thought leadership — product capability tours written in the form of opinion pieces. Executives recognize this quickly and stop reading.
Recycled trend summaries. By the time a roundup of emerging topics reaches a senior reader, they have seen the same information framed several different ways. Summarizing what is already known does not justify the time cost of reading it again.
Educational content pitched too basic for the audience. Content that explains fundamentals to readers who have already moved past them signals that the author does not know who they are writing for.
Reframing around decisions, not topics
The most actionable recommendation is to anchor content briefs to specific decisions rather than subject areas. Instead of commissioning “content about agentic AI in finance,” the brief becomes: “help a CFO decide whether to fund a pilot now or wait twelve months.”
This shift forces the content to take a position, surface trade-offs, and address the actual stakes of the decision — rather than describing a topic from a safe distance. Babu identifies four recurring decision types that senior buyers face: budget defense, build-versus-buy evaluations, the risk of inaction, and vendor differentiation. Content that addresses one of these directly is more likely to be passed along inside an account than content that describes a category broadly.
Structural practices
The article covers format. Lead with the conclusion in the first 100 words. Use subheadings that reveal the argument rather than label the topic. Make pull quotes substantive — the kind worth citing in a presentation — rather than decorative.
On measurement: the useful signals are whether content surfaces in actual sales conversations, whether it gets shared internally within target accounts, and whether sales teams cite it — not traffic or downloads.
Who it is useful for
Content strategists and writers who produce B2B content for enterprise audiences, and editors or content leads responsible for ensuring that content budgets produce business results. Relevant whether content is produced by human writers, AI tools, or a combination.