The uncomfortable truth about eBooks, company videos, and all the B2B content nobody asked for…
Let me describe a scene I’ve watched play out at least a dozen times.
A marketing team spends six weeks producing a 30-page eBook. A designer spends three days laying it out. Someone writes a landing page. Someone else sets up the email sequence. The whole thing goes live.
And then… 47 downloads. 12 are from colleagues testing the form. 8 are from competitors. The sales team never follows up on the rest because “the leads aren’t qualified.”
Six weeks. Zero results. And the conversation in the debrief is always the same: “Maybe we need to promote it more.”
No. You don’t need to promote it more.
Your content has a different problem. And it’s not the one you think.
The content marketing lie we all believed
For about a decade, the B2B content marketing playbook looked like this:
- Hand qualified leads to sales
- Create a gated eBook or white paper
- Put it behind a lead form
- Nurture the leads with an email sequence
It worked — for a while. Back when content was scarce and buyers were grateful for a well-structured PDF on a topic they cared about.
That world is gone.
Today, your buyer can ask an AI a detailed question and get a better answer than your eBook in about four seconds. They can find three competing blog posts, two YouTube explainers, and a Reddit thread full of real practitioner opinions before they even see your landing page. They are drowning in content.
So the problem isn’t that you’re producing content. The problem is that you’re producing content that behaves like it’s still 2016.
Let’s go through the specific mistakes — starting with the biggest offender.
Mistake #1: The eBook nobody wanted to read
The marketing eBook is, in 2026, one of the most reliably wasteful content formats in B2B.
Not because eBooks are inherently bad. But because of the way almost everyone produces them.
Here’s the typical pattern: you pick a broad topic that feels strategic (“The Complete Guide to B2B Customer Experience”), fill it with 25 pages of frameworks and advice, gate it behind a form, and expect leads to flow in.
The result? Most people who see your landing page bounce. The few who download it open it once, skim the table of contents, and close it. Nobody finishes it. And your sales team, if they try to follow up, is calling people who downloaded something out of vague curiosity six weeks ago.
The core problem: the eBook is built for the company, not the reader.
It’s long because length signals effort. It’s gated because marketing needs to show lead volume to justify the investment. It covers a broad topic because you want to reach as many people as possible. Every single one of those decisions makes it less useful to an actual human being who has a specific, urgent problem.
What actually works in 2026? Content that solves one problem, completely, right now — without asking for anything in return.
A one-page checklist on a very specific issue. A Google Sheet template they can use today. A short guide that answers exactly the question they were Googling. These convert better, get shared more, and build more trust than any gated PDF ever will.
The eBook is not dead. The lazy eBook is dead.
Mistake #2: The company video that cost €15,000 and got 200 views
While we’re here, let’s talk about company videos. Because the same logic applies — and the budget waste is somehow even worse.
You know the video I mean. The one with the drone footage of the office. The CEO talking to camera in a blazer. The stock-footage b-roll of people shaking hands and looking at laptops meaningfully. A voiceover explaining that your company is “passionate about delivering results.”
Three months of production. One round of agency revisions. A budget that made someone wince when they approved it.
And then you post it on YouTube, embed it on your About page, share it once on LinkedIn, and watch it accumulate 200 views — half of which are employees watching it on the day of launch.
The problem isn’t the production quality. It’s that the video answers a question nobody was asking.
“Who are we?” is not a question your buyer has when they arrive on your website. Their question is “can you solve my specific problem?” A beautiful brand video doesn’t answer that. A 90-second screen recording where you solve a real problem — in your own voice, without a script — does.
I’ve seen founders post shaky phone videos explaining a specific mistake they see their clients make. No logo. No agency. No drone. Just honesty and useful information. Those videos generate comments, DMs, and inbound leads. The polished brand film generates compliments from the board and nothing else.
The gap between what content costs and what it delivers is nowhere more visible than in the company video.
Mistake #3: Creating for SEO, not for humans
A slightly different failure mode, but one that’s becoming more common as AI content tools get cheaper and faster.
The approach: find a high-volume keyword, generate or write an article targeting it, publish, repeat. The articles are technically competent. They cover the topic. They have the right headings and word count. They rank — sometimes.
But they don’t convert. Because they’re written to satisfy a search algorithm, not to help an actual person.
Here’s what a real person needs: specificity, honesty, and something they can do after reading. “7 Tips for Better B2B Marketing” does not give them that. “How I got 3 inbound leads this week by commenting on 10 LinkedIn posts” does — even though it’s a niche story about one tactic.
In 2026, Google and every other discovery surface (AI Overviews, Reddit, LinkedIn Search) is actively rewarding first-person, specific, experience-based content. Not because the algorithms became more idealistic. Because they’ve gotten better at detecting generic.
If your content could have been written by anyone, about any company, in any industry — it will be ignored. By algorithms and by humans.
Mistake #4: Publishing into the void
You wrote the article. You published the eBook. You uploaded the video. And then you… moved on to the next piece.
Distribution is where most B2B content strategies completely fall apart. And I don’t mean “run paid ads to amplify your content.” I mean: did you actually put this in front of the specific people who need it?
Here’s what distribution looks like when you do it properly:
- You share it in the three communities where your buyers hang out, with a real comment about why you wrote it — not just a link drop.
- You write a LinkedIn post that tells the story behind the content, not just “new article out.”
- You personally send it to five people you know who have this exact problem.
- You reference it in conversations, replies, and DMs for the next three months.
- You repurpose one section of it into a short LinkedIn post two weeks later.
Most teams create content at a ratio of about 90% production, 10% distribution. It should be closer to the reverse.
A mediocre piece of content distributed well outperforms a brilliant piece distributed badly. Every time.
Mistake #5: Measuring the wrong thing
The final mistake — and the one that keeps all the others alive.
Marketing teams keep producing bad eBooks because they’re measuring downloads, not pipeline. They keep making brand videos because leadership sees view count as a success metric. They keep publishing SEO content because organic traffic numbers look good in the monthly report.
None of those numbers tell you whether the content is actually generating revenue.
The only metrics that matter for B2B content are:
- Did it start a real conversation with someone who could buy?
- Did it show up in a deal where the prospect mentioned it?
- Did it get shared by the right people, to the right people?
- Did it bring someone into your orbit who later became a client?
These are harder to track. They’re messier. They require talking to your sales team and to actual customers instead of pulling a report. But they’re the only honest measure of whether your content is working.
So what does actually work in 2026?
To be clear: I’m not saying “stop making content.” Content is still one of the highest-leverage things a B2B company can do. I’m saying stop making content the way everyone was doing it five years ago.
Here’s the honest version of what works right now:
Short, specific, ungated. A 600-word article that completely answers one question beats a 30-page guide that partially answers twenty. Give it away for free. The trust you build is worth more than the email addresses you’d collect.
Personal and experience-based. Write or record from your own perspective. Your specific experience is the one thing AI can’t replicate and competitors can’t copy. Opinions are okay. Failure stories are great. “Here’s what I tried and why it didn’t work” is more compelling than any best-practice listicle.
Consistent over perfect. One solid piece per month, published consistently for two years, will outperform a burst of six pieces followed by silence. Buyers take time to make decisions. You need to still be visible when they’re ready.
Distributed deliberately. Every piece of content deserves a deliberate distribution moment — not just a scheduled social post, but an intentional effort to get it in front of specific humans who need it.
Built for trust, not for lead capture. The companies winning at content in 2026 are not the ones with the best gating strategy. They’re the ones whose content makes someone think “these people actually know what they’re talking about.” That thought is the one that converts.ond to traditional sales tactics and more likely to be influenced by companies that provide real value and demonstrate expertise in their field.
The thing about eBooks specifically
I want to end where I started — with the eBook — because I don’t think you should necessarily stop making them. I think you should stop making them badly.
If you’re going to create a long-form content asset, here’s the question to ask before you start: would someone find this genuinely useful if they never had to give us their email address?
If the answer is yes — make it. Gate it if you want, or don’t. The quality will show either way.
If the answer is “probably not, but it’ll fill our lead gen quota this quarter” — don’t make it. Make something smaller and more useful instead. Your audience’s time is the only resource they can’t recover.
And that, honestly, is the whole content strategy.
I write about B2B growth, content, and what actually moves the needle — every two weeks at sebastien.no. No fluff. No gated PDFs (obviously).
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