I’ve always based my understanding of content marketing on a fairly simplistic set of assumptions:  

1. Good B2B content = content that delivers the desired business result. 
2. How you get that result = make content that’s more useful to the target reader than anything else out there.

That’s why, when I write for the Relato blog, for instance, I focus on giving a real answer to a real problem content marketers struggle with every day, and avoid “state of content marketing” takes.  I try to make it as actionable as possible, answering questions like “How do I stop my content from being boring?” or “How do I use AI for research without tanking quality?” 

And in general, I stand by that. Most readers are here to do their jobs better, not to admire your big philosophical views. If you want your content to land, you need specific, practical takeaways — “How to pull accurate analytics from a messy B2B marketing mix,” not “B2B marketing is getting more complicated *strokes beard wisely*.” 

But I’ve recently noticed that I’ve been making another implicit assumption:  

Useful content = tactical content 

And that one, I’m realizing, doesn’t hold up. 

But not for the reason you might think. It’s not because you need “strategic content” for “strategic roles.” I’ve had clients who wanted to create “strategic vision”, thought-leadershippy content because it would “appeal to the C-suite.” But I usually disagreed.

Not because strategic content is inherently pointless, but because the assumption behind it was wrong: most companies like to pretend they’re marketing to the C-suite when they actually aren’t.

The CFO isn’t stumbling across your blog post and storming into the leadership meeting shouting, “We need this ERP!” We all know that’s not how buying works.

The real target for B2B marketing content is the buyer champion – the person who feels the problem your solution solves. And they will usually benefit from actionable frameworks over hand-wavy “evolving landscape” type stuff. 

As for the C-suite — that’s what your sales collateral content is for. To get into the hands of your buyer champion so they can make your case to the C-suite in internal meetings you’ll never be invited to.  

It’s more that I realized that “useful” doesn’t always mean “tactical” 

For starters, people also read content to sound smart. 

We all love being the person who brings the killer stat into the meeting, or who seems plugged into “what’s going on in the market.” We borrow certainty from other people’s thinking to support our own decisions. That’s where “strategic” content may actually play a role: explaining market shifts, synthesizing patterns, providing broad-strokes data. 

I noticed this when I was writing the Dock newsletter, for instance. I was writing how-tos about managing ridiculous rocket-ship growth, or enterprise-scale CS functions. They’re still how-tos, but they help the reader solve bigger, more difficult problems. They give leaders rules of thumb, or practical examples of how major strategic decisions play out in the real world. 

It’s still actionable — just at a different altitude.

What makes content IC-level or C-suite level isn’t that you need to be broader and less actionable for the C-suite. It’s that the problem your content solves needs to match the level of your audience. 

So yeah, I think my original “good content = useful content = actionable content” equation holds up. As long as I remember that “actionable” means “helpful at the level the reader actually operates.” And that sometimes, I’m helping them feel smart, or solve a big strategic problem, rather than complete a task. ■

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Rosie Campbell is a B2B content marketer who works with clients like Relato, Animalz, Bigtincan, Beam Content and Lattice. She also teaches LinkedIn writing and strategy to solos and teams. She lives in Spain with her husband, her son, and a tiny beagle that eats her furniture.