Who has time to read?
For years, we’ve heard variations of this question from business leaders. The assumption is always that content, no matter how well it’s written—or how relevant its ideas—sits on your website unread. But good content, even longer content, tends to find and engage its audience.
Hubspot reports that the average blog post is now around 1,400 words long. Longer content consistently outperforms shorter pieces in search rankings, earns more backlinks, and generates higher engagement. More importantly, today’s buyers—especially in B2B contexts—are doing extensive independent research before ever speaking with a sales rep.
Those readers are not looking for superficial overviews. They want real answers that help them make informed decisions. Content that truly addresses their questions naturally requires more depth, more examples, and more nuance. These audiences aren’t avoiding detailed content. They’re actively seeking it out. And because B2B purchases today can involve sprawling buying committees with a dozen stakeholders, with each requiring different information to support their evaluation, it’s often a good idea to have multiple pieces of content available to them when they go looking for it.
If you want to understand why long-form content still matters across B2B—regardless of what product or service is being sold—start by looking at companies that face the most complex sales: tech and software vendors. The buying process for enterprise software is a kind of template for complex B2B selling across industries—and for good reason. Software implementations often touch every department, require significant budget allocation, and carry long-term consequences for organizational efficiency and execution. That complexity makes IT purchases among the most committee-driven buying processes in B2B.
When you watch how tech companies supply IT leaders and their committees with the information they need to make decisions, you’re watching B2B content strategy at its most evolved. Simply put, the most successful companies in that space invest heavily in substantive content.
Technical Buyers Read More Than You Think
The myth that busy CTOs and CIOs don’t engage with written content persists despite ample evidence to the contrary. A study examining C-suite social media habits found that IT and tech buyers are more likely than other executives to consume work-related content use it to position themselves as thought leaders within their organizations. In short, they read because their reputations depend on making smart and informed decisions.
According to Gartner research, the average B2B purchase now involves between 11 and 20 stakeholders. These buying committees include finance executives evaluating ROI, procurement specialists comparing vendors, end users assessing usability, and internal influencers with deep domain expertise.
Forrester’s 2021 Content Preferences Survey found that nearly 90% of tech decision-makers want relevant content at each stage of the buying process. An ebook might get skimmed for key statistics. A solution brief becomes ammunition for an internal champion making your case to skeptical colleagues.
How Documents Function in the Research Ecosystem
The breadth of such materials simultaneously serves multiple functions. You educate buyers who want deep technical detail, provide talking points for champions who need to sell your solution internally, and signal your expertise to evaluators who are comparing multiple vendors.
Case studies continue to rank as the most valuable content type for making purchase decisions, according to 54% of B2B buyers, followed by business case/ROI content (51%) and white papers with supporting data (47%).
Because every reader is looking for specific information, it’s rare for a document to be read from start to finish by every member of its audience. Headings, bullet points, callouts, and other visually-driven elements allow different audiences to find what they need. If they do, of course, then they’re more likely to read the rest. But if they don’t devour every word, the content has still successfully engaged them, which is the goal. Plus, depending on which tools you use to track leads, this type of engagement is also measurable, showing you which sections capture attention and where readers spend their time.
All of that can help your marketing and sales teams work together to better connect what you offer to the specific challenges your prospects are facing and demonstrate how yours is the ideal solution to address them.
Buying Committees Demand Varied Content Types
Consider what happens when a mid-sized company evaluates new cybersecurity software. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) needs technical specifications. The CFO wants to know about ROI and the total cost of ownership. The IT team requires implementation guides. The compliance officer is concerned about regulatory demands. And the internal champion of this software—the one who pushed for it in the first place—needs all of this to build consensus across these stakeholders.
With nearly half of software buying decisions now made by committees, winning these deals requires content that addresses each stakeholder’s concerns. Solution briefs work well for busy executives who need quick answers, and ebooks can provide the depth demanded by more technical evaluators. Different formats earn their place in your content strategy by serving distinct audiences with different needs.
The SEO Foundation: Why It Still Matters
Beyond their direct value to buyers, substantive content assets continue to deliver organic traffic through search. Content exceeding 2,000 words generates 56% more social shares and 77% more backlinks than shorter pieces. For companies competing in crowded markets, this SEO advantage translates to qualified traffic from prospects actively researching solutions.
The numbers reinforce this pattern. Top-ranking results average 1,447 words—a similar length to what Hubspot reports at the “average” length for a blog post today—which is one reason we often recommend a pillar page strategy to many of our B2B clients. Richly detailed and engaging content educates buyers, but more importantly, it helps to get them to your website in the first place.
With AI-provided answers leading to the rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) over the last few years, we’ve found that it’s useful to continue to write for humans first. Traditional SEO targets specific keywords, while AEO aims to answer a cluster of related questions. Putting the human reader at the center of any content approach is still the right move, rather than trying to game Google’s algorithm or otherwise “outsmart” the system.
Sales Teams Need Reference Materials
After there’s initial interest in a product or service, a sales team schedules calls, sends follow-up emails, and answers technical questions. They often need materials to support these interactions with leads or prospects. It’s a nice bonus that many content pieces created for lead-gen purposes can also double as supporting documents to help sales teams.
Having a well-crafted solution brief to share is a nice occasion for reaching out again a few days after a discovery call, for example. Such assets reduce friction in the sales process by preemptively answering questions that might otherwise slow down a deal.
No content can replace an actual sales conversation, but good content makes those conversations more productive.
Building Credibility Through Demonstrated Expertise
Regardless of industry or market sector, audiences now conduct more extensive research before contacting vendors, so being an authoritative source that educates them is itself a powerful piece of positioning. When your ebook becomes the resource that technical evaluators reference in internal meetings, you’ve earned the kind of credibility that competitors can’t easily replicate. When your solution brief clearly articulates problems that procurement teams are struggling to define, you’ve demonstrated the type of understanding that opens doors.
Salespeople often have at least one anecdote about a customer who said, “You weren’t the cheapest, but you really seemed to understand what we’re trying to accomplish here.”
The Content Marketing Institute surveyed 266 technology marketers and found that 60% reported improved content strategy performance, with content quality and relevance identified as the primary driver of effectiveness. Quality matters because buyers can tell the difference between superficial content and genuine expertise, which is why companies of all sizes—from enterprise operations down to the scrappy team of five winning against all odds—know better than to entirely outsource their content to Copilot or another AI interface.
What This Means for Your Content Strategy
With all of this in mind, perhaps we should stop assuming audiences won’t read, and start creating materials that address specific stakeholders within those buying committees. An ungated blog post can capture an audience’s initial attention, but offering a downloadable ebook or white paper—or any more substantive format—at the bottom of that post can help convert that initial engagement into a qualified lead.
The most successful companies in tech (and beyond) use long-form content strategically across the buying process. Early-stage ebooks addressing industry challenges capture leads and begin relationship-building. Mid-stage solution briefs show how your specific platform solves those challenges. Late-stage case studies and implementation guides reduce purchase anxiety by presenting proven success.
When your competitors are already providing the substantive content that buying committees need, and when those committees are actively searching for detailed answers to complex questions, the real risk isn’t that your content goes unread. It’s that you’re not producing any content worth reading in the first place.
The buyers are out there and doing their research, with or without you. The only question is whether they’ll find your expertise when they go looking—or someone else’s.
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