Last year I published a post that had nothing to do with marketing.
No bold take. No data. No carefully crafted hook designed to stop the scroll. Just something that happened to me on a Tuesday and a thought I couldn't shake on the way to a café in Porto.
It's still my most engaged post and I've thought about why a lot since then.
My best bet may be a bit uncomfortable for anyone who makes content for a living, including me: the post worked because I wasn't trying to make it work. I was just being specific about something real.
That's harder than it sounds. Especially in B2B.
There's a lot of content on LinkedIn right now. More than there's ever been, and most of it is fine. Competent. Well-structured. It makes a point clearly and moves on.
It's also completely forgettable.
Part of this is an AI problem. When generating a coherent paragraph became as easy as it is nowadays, the bar for "good enough to post" dropped. The feed filled up with content that's technically correct, reasonably well-written, and utterly interchangeable.
You can't tell who wrote it. You can't remember it five minutes later. And for B2B audiences like CTOs, VPs of Engineering or CMOs doing vendor research, that sameness is especially damaging.
These are skeptical, research-driven people who are not scrolling for entertainment. They're forming opinions about whether you know what you're talking about. Generic content doesn't just fail to impress them. It actively works against you.
But here's the part I find more interesting than the AI argument: most B2B content was forgettable long before AI. The volume just makes it harder to ignore now.
The real problem is that most B2B content is written to be correct rather than to be remembered.
I used to think memorable content needed to be contrarian. A bold take. A hot opinion. Something that made people uncomfortable enough to engage.
Friction does work, sometimes. But it's not what made my most engaged post land and it's not what I see working most reliably for the B2B CEOs and founders I work with.
What actually works is specificity.
Not "here are three ways to improve your content strategy." But "here is exactly what happened to me at 9am on a Tuesday, described with enough precision that you feel like you were there."
Specificity is what makes content recognisable. When you write about a thing that happened like a specific conversation, a specific number, a specific moment of realisation, your reader can't find that anywhere else. It can't be generated. It can't be repurposed from someone else's blog. It exists because you were there.
For B2B content this matters more than most people think. Your buyers are reading a hundred pieces of content about the same topics. When one of them contains a detail they've never seen before such as a specific client result, a specific failure or a specific question someone asked in a sales call that changed how you think about your product, it stops them. Because it's real.
The skirt post didn't go anywhere near marketing. But it was specific enough that over 400 people recognised something in it. That's the mechanism.
Here's the question I now ask before anything goes out: would my ICP bookmark this? Not like it or comment "great post." Actually save it to come back to later.
It's a useful filter because saving is a different behaviour to engaging. People like things that feel good in the moment. They save things they think they'll need. A post that makes someone think "I want to come back to this when I'm briefing my CEO" or "I need to show this to my CMO" is doing something fundamentally different to a post that gets a polite thumbs up.
For B2B technical audiences, the save test separates content that informs from content that's merely pleasant. Your buyers are research-driven so if your content doesn't give them something they'd want to reference again like a framework, a specific data point, a way of thinking about a problem they haven't seen before, it probably won't survive their attention longer than the scroll.
The mistake I see most often in B2B CEO content isn't that it's badly written. It's that it's written to represent the brand rather than to be useful to the buyer.
There's a difference between a CEO sharing a polished take on industry trends and a CEO sharing the specific thing they learned from a sales call last Thursday that changed how they think about their ICP. One sounds like a press release with a personal byline. The other sounds like someone who knows something.
The second one gets saved. The first one gets scrolled.
Most CEO content strategies are built around consistency and topics and formats. Very few are built around specificity. And that's the gap. Because specificity is the one thing that can't be templated, can't be generated, and can't be replicated by a competitor. It's the thing only your CEO knows because only your CEO was there.
Friction does have a place. A well-argued contrarian position will stop people who wouldn't have stopped otherwise.
But there's a version of this that has become its own form of sameness. The "hot take" post that manufactures controversy for the engagement. The "unpopular opinion" that turns out to be fairly popular. The "everyone is wrong about X" that turns out to be a minor semantic disagreement.
B2B audiences see through this faster than most. These are people who spend their days evaluating arguments and vendors. They know when a take is genuine and when it's performed. Specificity without friction will outperform friction without specificity almost every time.
B2B content fails because it could have been written by anyone.
The content that gets saved, forwarded, and remembered is specific enough that it couldn't have been. A moment only you observed. A number only your company has. A question that only comes from having done this exact work for exactly this kind of client.
Before you publish, ask: is there anything in this post that only I could have written?
If the answer is no, you know what to do.
At MKTK we help B2B marketing leaders build CEO content strategies that their buyers actually remember. If this resonated book a call with us.
.svg)
