by: Ronnie Higgins

Here’s something that shouldn’t work as a premise for a B2B content framework: Buzzfeed.

And yet. The company best known for turning “which type of bread are you?” into a viable business model also built one of the most rigorous psychological frameworks for understanding why people consume content. 

They called it Cultural Cartography. It mapped the motivations underneath sharing behavior — not as a favor to marketers, but because understanding human psychology at scale was literally their business model.

It turns out those motivations apply just as much to a CFO evaluating marketing technology as they do to someone forwarding a quiz to their group chat.

Breaking news: B2B content has a job myopia problem

Here’s the diagnosis hiding underneath most B2B content strategies: they default to the same two or three psychological jobs — inform me, guide me, advise me — and treat every other reason an audience might seek out content as someone else’s concern.

The result is what it looks like. Every company’s blog explains best practices. Every newsletter rounds up expert perspectives. Every webinar walks through a framework. The content isn’t bad, exactly. It’s just all performing the same function, for an audience that arrives with a much wider range of needs than “please explain something to me.”

This is the actual engine of content entropy — not lazy writing or small budgets, but a collective failure of imagination about what audiences are actually hiring content to do. When everyone optimizes for the same jobs, everything starts to look the same. And when everything looks the same, nothing gets remembered.

Developing: Your audience doesn’t arrive as a blank slate

Before we get to the framework, there’s a more fundamental shift in how to think about your audience.

They don’t show up to your content waiting to be filled with information. They show up in a specific psychological state — confused about how to solve a problem, anxious about a decision they need to defend, skeptical about claims they’ve heard too many times before, overwhelmed by a category that seems to get more complex by the quarter. That state isn’t background noise. It’s the whole ballgame.

Content that speaks directly to where someone is, not just what they need to know, but how they’re feeling about it, creates a completely different kind of impact than content that simply delivers information into a vacuum. One moves people. The other gets scanned and forgotten.

This is what Buzzfeed’s Cultural Cartography was actually mapping: not topics or formats or distribution tactics, but the psychological needs that make someone stop, engage, and share. And when you look at those needs closely, the inform-guide-advise menu that dominates B2B content looks less like a strategy and more like a very narrow slice of what’s actually available.

Help wanted: Your content’s roles and responsibilities

Over the years I’ve mapped eighteen distinct jobs audiences hire content to perform. This isn’t an exhaustive taxonomy — there are likely more, and the right framing probably shifts by industry and audience. But these are the ones I’ve observed repeatedly, built formats around, and seen work.

What matters more than the number is the principle underneath them: each job corresponds to a specific psychological state. Your audience isn’t a uniform group of people who all need the same thing from your content. They’re individuals who show up carrying something — confusion, anxiety, skepticism, urgency — and the job your content performs either speaks to that state or it doesn’t.

So as you read through these, don’t think about coverage. Don’t ask yourself how many you’re currently using or how many you could add to your content mix. Ask yourself which one describes where your audience actually is right now — and whether the content you’re creating is designed to meet them there.

• Inform me: Deliver facts, research, and explanations that help the audience understand something new.
• Guide me: Provide structured steps, best practices, or frameworks to help solve a problem.
• Advise me: Offer expert recommendations, strategic perspectives, or insider insights.
• Orient me: Help the audience make sense of a situation, market shift, or complex topic.
• Prepare me: Get the audience ready for something upcoming — an event, a shift, or a decision.
• Comfort me: Ease anxieties by addressing fears, objections, or industry uncertainties.
• Empower me: Provide tools, knowledge, or strategies that make the audience feel capable and confident.
• Accompany me: Serve as a trusted companion during a task, decision, or learning process.
• Nudge me: Subtly prompt action or remind the audience of something important.
• Energize me: Inspire action through motivation, encouragement, or momentum-building narratives.
• Excite me: Generate anticipation and enthusiasm through teasers, reveals, or exclusive access.
• Surprise me: Challenge assumptions, present unexpected insights, or flip conventional wisdom.
• Connect me: Facilitate relationships, foster discussion, or highlight shared experiences.
• Represent me: Reflect identity, values, or beliefs that the audience strongly resonates with.
• Schedule me: Help the audience organize, plan, or stay on track.
• Wow me: Deliver an extraordinary experience that leaves a lasting impression.
• Transport me: Take the audience into a different perspective, reality, or immersive experience.
• Entertain me: Engage through humor, storytelling, or compelling narrative.

The range matters. A CFO anxious about defending a purchase decision doesn’t need to be informed — she needs to be comforted. A VP of Marketing who feels behind on a regulatory change doesn’t need a thought leadership essay — he needs to be prepared. A content team that’s been told to “be more innovative” doesn’t need another guide — they might just need to be surprised. Same audience. Completely different jobs. Completely different content.

Apply now: Two fields that change how you plan and review content

The most practical place to embed this thinking is in your content brief, in a field called the begin/end state.

It works like this. Before anyone writes a word, you define two things: 

1. Where the audience is when they encounter the piece, and 
2. Where they are when they finish it

Not what they’ll learn — where they’ll move. 

The begin-state captures their current psychological condition: what they believe, what they’ve already tried, how they’re feeling about the problem. 

The end state defines what’s different after they’ve consumed the content: what shifted in their thinking, how their confidence changed, what they’re now equipped to do or say.

The non-negotiable: both states must describe cognitive or emotional change, not information transfer. “They understand our three-tier pricing model” isn’t a transformation. “They move from sticker shock to confidence that the ROI case is defensible” is. One tells you what the content covers. The other tells you what job it performed.

This is also what makes the field useful for review, not just planning. 

When a piece comes back for feedback, you’re not just asking whether it’s well-written — you’re asking whether it actually moves someone from the begin-state to the end-state. That’s a much more useful editorial standard than “does this feel right” or “is this on-brand.”

Opinion: Job clarity is the last uncrowded advantage in B2B content

In an environment where everyone has access to the same tools, the same formats, and increasingly the same AI-generated prose, job clarity is one of the few genuine differentiation levers left. It doesn’t require a bigger budget or a better writer. It just requires asking one question before you start creating: what psychological state is my audience in, and what do they need content to do for them right now?

It just requires asking one question before you start creating: what psychological state is my audience in, and what do they need content to do for them right now?

Most content marketers never ask it. Which means the ones who do are operating with a significant and surprisingly uncrowded advantage. ■

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Ronnie Higgins is a B2B content strategist and marketing leader with nearly two decades of experience. He’s led and built content programs for brands like Eventbrite and Udemy, where he focused on the intersection of media, culture, and demand generation. He’s based in San Francisco.