#1 The state of content
Increased scrutiny from B2B buyers continues to shape stakeholder expectations as the B2B buying experience evolves and becomes increasingly complex. This, combined with AI's impact on content production and perception have renewed the focus on content quality and its role in delivering seamless buying experiences.
During its inception and the hype cycle that followed, generative AI resulted in a flood of derivative and low-value content as organizations and their buyers alike sought to identify the best uses for AI beyond content production.
Indeed, 51% of buyers reported that content was too generic and irrelevant to their needs, up from 38% in 2023 (Demand Gen Report, 2024). This marks a concerning trend of how buyers view the content they receive, and heralds a challenging environment for content marketers striving to drive buyer engagement.
Why the future of demand content is buyer-led
The complexity and difficulty of the B2B buying process have highlighted the importance of facilitating the buyer’s journey through enablement. Indeed, buyers navigate 69% of this process on their own terms, before ever engaging with sales (6sense, 2024).
Therefore, ensuring that buyers have access to the right content throughout their journey is the primary way that organizations can deliver the support they need to facilitate their decision making, while adhering to their research preferences.
These factors indicate that success in 2025 will be achieved via a renewed buyer-centric approach, which is personalized and informed by buyer needs for a seamless experience.
The dissonance between how marketers and buyers perceive the value of content types is just one example of the change that needs to happen to better serve buyers with content that enables them to make decisions—in other words, crafting content that is demand-ready.
This Outlook 2025 chapter explores how content marketing strategies should evolve to align with buyer preferences and support greater buyer enablement and performance.
“Content is a critical element in demand generation to drive engagement and conversions—especially when considering the prevalence of buyer-led research.
The need for buyer enablement places a heavy emphasis on the role of content in the buyer’s journey. Poorly planned or executed content marketing strategies are, therefore, a major reason demand generation programs fail.”
INFUSE
#2 How to create buyer-led content
What is buyer-led content?
Buyer-led content is demand content that is informed by the behavior, preferences, and intent of prospective buyers. At the core of this principle is buyer centricity and prioritizing buyer enablement to ensure that content contributes to a richer, more valuable buyer experience.
Adopting a buyer-led content strategy involves analyzing the behavior and unique preferences of your buyers, to enable you to shape content to meet buyer needs with greater accuracy. This will also avoid a prescriptive approach to content creation.
Leverage data insights to inform your buyer-led content
Activating buyer-led content strategies requires translating buyer insights into actionable intelligence.
Below are some data sources to consider for informing your content strategies:
Leveraging a combination of these insights helps to anchor the development of your buyer-led content strategies with performance data from a wide variety of channels and target audiences/accounts.
This will enable you to develop granular strategies that are aligned with each buying group member’s unique challenges and needs, thereby enhancing your content’s role in facilitating the buyer’s journey.
Commonalities can also inform this process and serve as an effective measure for managing your team’s capacity to craft a library of buyer-led content. Once you achieve initial engagement with this content, your strategies can then be further refined and tailored as necessary, to meet granular buyer preferences at high-value target accounts.
“Buyers continue to place a higher value on buying experiences that are hyper-relevant to their needs and facilitate their decision making. The pressure is on demand marketers to leverage their data to create optimized, relevant, and valuable content that can be activated to enhance the buyer’s journey.”
INFUSE
“The long development cycles of demand content can often result in content being created in isolation from buyer preferences. This ultimately results in a prescriptive approach that has the potential to not only harm performance but also weaken brand positioning through a failure to align with specific needs. Adopting a buyer-centric approach that is rooted in demand intelligence is far more likely to be effective.”
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#3 How to launch a buyer-led content strategy
Aligning content with the needs and preferences of buyers is essential for enabling their buying journey and yielding optimal demand outcomes.
Below is a five-step framework for developing your buyer-led content, as well as two examples of strategies to meet the specific needs of different buyer personas:
"Buyers don’t just consume content—they rely on it to navigate complex decisions. A tailored, data-driven content strategy ensures your brand is their trusted guide."
INFUSE
#4 Content for brand positioning
The impact of the continued scrutiny of B2B buyers has led to the “brand-to-demand journey” resurfacing as a popular topic of debate, as organizations explore how to engage buyers as they face increasingly complex buying processes.
This has led to a refocus on the role that brand plays in creating a foundation of demand and de-risking solutions to deliver the seamless experiences that buyers have come to expect.
Given this emphasis on buyer-led research, content is at the heart of this process and a key driver encouraging prospective buyers to make contact with the vendor of their choice.
How to orchestrate your content
In order to support the best buyer and brand experience, content must be tailored to the unique role each buying group stakeholder plays, and the stage at which they enter the buying process. This includes matching the content being shared with their unique priorities and needs.
Not only does this refer to the type of content, but also to the focus of the content, and is essential for cementing your value with respect to their specific goals and pain points.
Content as a competitive advantage
Buyers are under immense pressure to make correct purchasing decisions. Therefore, brands that facilitate and remove stress from the buying process are likely to secure a competitive advantage. Given its buyer-centric nature, buyer-led content is ideal for achieving this, as it contributes to your brand identity, authority, and value while also supporting buyers.
Important note
Each buying group is structured differently. The model below is based on responses from our INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer research.
“Creating engaging and valuable content requires a clear understanding of your target buyers and how they navigate their buyer’s journey. By gaining insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can tailor content to meet that at each stage of the process. This is key to providing the right information and incentives towards completing a purchase.”
INFUSE
#5 AI content
The advent of generative AI in late 2022 had an instantaneous impact on B2B content marketing, as organizations sought to harness LLMs to scale their content strategies. This has remained prevalent, even amidst the scrutiny AI-powered solutions have triggered for B2B buyers looking to optimize their tech stacks.
While AI can be used to augment strategies to enhance business outcomes, the emphasis on its use for content creation has resulted in the B2B space becoming flooded with AI-generated content. Indeed, despite 72% of content marketers confirming its usage in their strategies, a shocking 61% reported that they lack guidelines for AI use (CMI, 2024).
This, along with the increasing speed and ease of AI content generation, has contributed to the sheer volume of content that is often low-quality, derivative, and devoid of the value that buyers are looking for.
“Content produced with the assistance of AI must be unique in order to adequately serve buyers. AI content that is derivative has a relatively short shelf life as both marketers and buyers alike quickly become more discerning.
Marketers need to be mindful of the increasingly complex journey their buyers are facing and expand their use of AI beyond automating processes to augmenting outcomes. This includes how content is activated, optimized, and promoted across marketing channels. AI has the potential to contribute to greater demand content performance, if used correctly.”
INFUSE
The prevalence of AI content has only reinvigorated the focus on content quality, prompting marketers to invest in the proper application of AI for content marketing to avoid losing out on valuable opportunities for their organization.
Read our Outlook 2025 AI chapter for more insightsKey takeaways
- For content marketing to effectively drive demand, organizations must invest in innovation and buyer-led strategies that effectively de-risk their solution
- Buyer-led content strategies should leverage a variety of the latest data insights to align with buyer needs and preferences. Campaigns should feed into this pool of data to fuel an iterative process that improves over time
- If successful, demand content can play a vital role in supporting the brand-to-demand journey, contributing to valuable brand positioning
- Content marketers must approach AI’s application to their content strategy as an optimization tool, rather than a replacement for production
LAUNCH DEMAND-READY CONTENT THAT GENERATES QUALIFIED ENGAGEMENT
INFUSE demand experts develop custom-tailored content that matches the unique needs of your key buyers, and activates demand through a proprietary first-party 252+ million B2B profile database.
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