by: Rachel Bicha

I am going to come out swinging a bit in this piece, so if you are feeling a little sensitive today, you can stop reading now and you won’t hurt my feelings. But there’s something we need to talk about more as content marketers: 

Nobody (external) cares about your content because nobody (internal) cares about your content. 

Good content has care behind it. Perhaps not in every instance, but in most. And “care” can look like many things, right? 

• Care can look like effort. Someone put a lot of thought, effort, initiative, research, etc. into this piece of content. Someone really cared about getting this right. 
• Care can look like earnestness. Someone really cared that this thing existed, that this idea was shared, that someone learn from their mistakes, etc. etc. 
• Care can look like emotion. Someone felt strongly about this topic, issue, idea, outcome, etc. They made this content out of that emotion.

You can probably think of other examples, and they often overlap. But for this moment, I want to focus on that last one, emotion, because it’s the thing that B2B content is way too afraid of, and for the worse. 

Emotion is almost non-existent in B2B content. There might be some acknowledgement (i.e. the good ‘ole “You might be feeling…” or “Doing xyz is so [emotion]!” but rarely is there felt emotion within the piece itself.

And so what? Well, think back over the last month or so. What content do you remember, what comes to mind right now, regardless of format, medium, topic, length, if it was for work or for fun, whatever?

Whatever it is, underneath it is probably an emotion. It made you feel something. 

And I’m not talking about manufactured emotion, because that’s super easy to exploit for virality: ragebait, fear-mongering, clickbait, hype, etc. The world needs less of this. 

I mean real, genuine emotion, maybe one of these core ones: 

• Happiness (or joy)  
• Fear 
• Anger (some therapists would argue this is not a core emotion, but usually a cover-up for something else, which is fair, I’m still including it here though)
• Sadness 
• Surprise 

Lots of content marketers are pushing back against boring B2B content, which is wonderful. I’ve been part of that crew myself. But now that everyone’s talking about that, we need to go a step further: 

Your B2B content may be more interesting now, but still, nobody really cares or remembers it because there is no real emotion behind it. 

There’s no buy-in. No stakes. Drama. Intrigue. Mystery. Delight. Fear. Humor. Surprise. Frustration. Joy. There’s nothing. It’s a buttoned-up tech exec who’s saying all the right things from the stage but with a manufactured cadence and inflection that screams “None of this matters to me but I hope it will matter to you so you buy my product!!” 

Because that’s all most B2B content is: a thinly-veiled, very long advertisement. It doesn’t get made because someone has something they really want to say, that they really care about, or that they feel some kinda way about.

It gets made to check a box, promote a product, get visibility, make a sale.

And we all hate to be sold to. Mostly, we learn to tune out ads, which is also what happens to most of our B2B content. 

But. 

There are some ads we don’t tune out, right? Often: ads that make us feel something (good or bad). 

Which is to say: your content can exist for a business purpose *and also* make people feel something (!!!!) 

I want to reiterate that care and emotion can look so many different ways, so I want to break down a couple of examples:

Care as effort: Rand Fishkin’s latest report on LLM visibility 

Rand’s (great!) research on LLM visibility and search sparked a huge response — hundreds of comments and reshares on LinkedIn and 30K views in the first 24 hours. For B2B content, that’s pretty phenomenal.

One could argue that this level of engagement is merely a result of Rand’s “status” within the content world, or the hot-button topic, or a myriad of other things. But if you read through the nearly 4,000 word article, I think you’ll feel similarly to how I did, which was: wow, a lot of effort went into this, he really cared about doing this well. 

In fact, many of the comments on his LinkedIn posts about it echo that same emotion: surprise. As in, “wow, this is amazing,” “wow, i’m surprised by this data” or “wow, thank you for your effort on this”

Effort-ful content means that someone really cared, which often feels like a gift to the reader. Of course, merely spending more time on something does not make the content necessarily more impactful or more full of care, but they are related.

Care as earnestness: Collaboration sucks 

This piece was written for the Posthog substack by the GTM manager, Charles Cook, and this is a great example of emotional earnestness. As in:

It’s very clear that Charles Cook actually thinks collaboration sucks. 

The piece isn’t what you might call “emotional,” in fact, it’s quite logical (lays out a clear argument) and practical (here’s how to collaborate less). But it still is emotionally earnest about its argument, and perhaps even frustrated, annoyed, confused, or overwhelmed. And it works. 

(Note in particular the comment, “You put words to my feelings” !!!)

Care as emotion: Anthropic’s Superbowl ads 

If you work in marketing, I’m going to assume you’ve already seen these, but here they are just in case you were OOO in Cancun last week: 

(Wait, are these B2B? Yeah, I think these are more B2C too, but cut me some slack here because examples in the B2B world are *HARD* to find, okay?!)

These ads (there are 4) each have between 200k – 500k views on YouTube (!) and hundreds of comments saying things like: 

• “Never thought an ad would actually work on me 😂” 
• “Why would Claude not show ads when they are so good at making them?” (LOL) 
• “I can’t believe I just willingly watched 4 ads in a row. absolutely amazing lol” 
• “I literally just watched four ads, enjoying it. I would watch four more.” 

So… why are these ads so good? Because they make us (say it with me now, class…) feel something. 

Obviously, they’re funny (we feel happy).
Or they make us feel terrified for the future, one or the other. 
Or… they indulge our pettiness (feeling = smugness, pride). Who doesn’t love a good roast? 
Or… they’re satisfying. The format, the music, the tagline, the diss track… you watch it and you feel satisfied. 

A side note on acting vs. reacting

Speaking of Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads… I don’t hear anyone talking about OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad (I won’t bother linking it here because I just watched it and it was… not great). 

What people are talking about is Sam Altman’s 5-paragraph essay response on X to the Claude ads, which… wasn’t a masterclass in PR, one might say. 

And I think this provides a helpful layer to this conversation: 

Your content needs some emotion. But you should be acting with emotion, not reacting out of emotion. 

Anthropic’s ads use emotion quite skillfully — and they probably FELT emotion as they were making them! You don’t think the marketing team over there didn’t feel so smug and petty making those? 😂 You know they did; you felt it through the screen! 

You also felt Altman’s emotion through the screen, too… and it felt bad. He was reacting out of emotion (fear, anger, pride, jealousy? etc.). The difference is slight, and the line can feel tough to tread, which is probably at least part of why B2B has such an aversion to emotion at all. 

Acting with emotion cares for your audience (see what I did there?) by bringing them into a (possibly shared) emotion in a meaningful way. Reacting out of emotion projects your (usually negative) emotion onto your audience in a way that feels… gross. 

So where can we get some more emotion?

There’s lots I could say here, but I’m going to land on a single point: emotion comes from people. 

Brands can’t care about things. But the people inside them can. 

And (one of) the jobs of the content leader is to find that care and put it in your content. 

• People within your company have things they really care about (earnestness) that are relevant to your company and brand. Internal SMEs, the founder / C-suite, any employee probably has something they care about, like actually care about, not that “this is an interest of mine professionally” care. They probably even have some emotions about some aspect of their work or the industry that would be shared by others in your industry or audience.
  
• Your customers have lots of things that are important to them, and also, they like to occasionally feel things besides tiredness at work. They like to laugh, they like to be delighted, surprised, excited, relieved, etc. etc. Good content can come out of customer emotions — i.e. telling customer stories, highlighting things they care about — or it can spark emotion in them (like the Anthropic ads).
  
• People in your audience or industry (non-customers) also have lots of things they care about, and your brand is probably not one of those things (sorry). BUT they might begin to care about your brand a bit more if you have other mutual cares.

There’s loads of pressure on content teams right now, so it’s hard — perhaps impossible — to personally care about every piece of content you’re making or overseeing get made. But as much as possible, make sure that someone’s emotion gets into it or that someone cares about it.

Not just the job it’s going to do. Not just the results it’s going to get. But the content itself. Because when your content starts to have some emotion within it, it’ll create some emotion in the person reading it — and that’s how you start to make content that gets remembered. ■

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Rachel Bicha is a freelance content writer and strategist who helps teams create meaningful, memorable content. She’s also the creator of a number of “content experiments,” including organizing this blog and her print newsletter.