Top B2B Content Marketing Challenges 2025 + Solutions for Sales Alignment

Hire an SDR

Major Takeaways: Content Marketing Challenges

Why is content alignment with sales critical in 2025?

B2B buyers consume 5–8 pieces of content before engaging sales, making content the front line of influence. Misaligned content leads to wasted effort and inconsistent messaging.

What’s the real cost of unused content?

65% of marketing content is never used by sales, wasting resources and undermining trust between teams. Alignment reduces friction and improves asset adoption.

How can you measure the ROI of content?

47% of marketers still struggle to measure content ROI. Tying content KPIs directly to sales metrics like SQLs or influenced revenue bridges this gap.

Why does content quality matter more than ever?

With AI-generated content flooding the market, 54% of marketers find it hard to differentiate. High-quality, relevant content is now essential to engage B2B buyers.

What role does the buyer’s journey play in content success?

48% of marketers struggle to map content to complex buyer journeys. Strategic content mapping ensures every stage and stakeholder is supported with the right assets.

How can technology strengthen content’s impact on sales?

Leveraging CRM-integrated tools, content tracking, and omnichannel distribution enables sales to deploy the right content at the right moment with measurable results.

What’s the value of content collaboration between teams?

Marketing and sales collaboration improves content usability. Involving sales in planning boosts adoption and ensures real buyer questions are addressed.

How can you do more with limited content resources?

58% of marketers cite lack of time or staff as a challenge. Repurposing and refreshing high-performing content increases ROI without requiring more output.

Introduction

A staggering 65% of marketing content is never used by salespeople (1). This disconnect between marketing and sales in B2B organizations highlights a core issue: content marketing efforts often operate in a silo, missing the mark when it comes to driving actual sales results.

In 2025’s hyper-competitive B2B landscape, bridging the gap between content strategy and sales goals isn’t just nice-to-have – it’s a necessity. Buyers are more empowered and 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience (self-serving information without talking to sales) (3).

That means our marketing content frequently serves as the de facto sales rep in early stages of the buyer’s journey. If that content doesn’t align with what sales needs to close deals, we end up with missed opportunities and wasted resources.

In this insight-driven guide, we’ll examine the key B2B content marketing challenges that prevent marketing content from delivering sales impact.

More importantly, we’ll share how we can solve these content marketing challenges by aligning content strategy with sales enablement and performance goals.

Every section includes real data points, actionable takeaways, and expert perspectives tailored for CMOs, CROs, and marketing leaders intent on turning content into a revenue engine.

Let’s dive into the challenges and solutions of uniting marketing content with sales success in 2025.

Why Aligning Content Strategy With Sales Goals Is Crucial in 2025

65% of marketing content is never used by sales teams due to misalignment.
Reference Source: RWS

Marketing content and sales goals have traditionally been managed by separate teams with distinct metrics: marketing focuses on traffic, leads, and engagement, while sales focuses on opportunities, pipeline, and revenue.

When these teams operate in isolation, a lot can go wrong. Content marketing problems like inconsistent messaging, unused content, and unclear ROI often stem from poor alignment. Consider that nearly 45% of B2B marketers cite aligning content across sales and marketing as a top challenge (2). Misalignment isn’t just an internal issue – it impacts the buyer’s experience and the bottom line.

Why does alignment matter so much more today? For one, B2B buyers are doing extensive research independently. They consume multiple pieces of content before ever speaking to a salesperson.

In fact, B2B buyers consume an average of 5-8 pieces of content (blogs, whitepapers, webinars, etc.) before making a purchase decision (5). If those pieces of content don’t strategically guide the buyer toward a solution (and your solution in particular), you risk losing the lead long before a sales development representative can intervene.

Moreover, content marketing now plays a direct role in revenue generation. According to recent research, 58% of B2B marketers say content marketing helped generate sales/revenue in the past year – up from just 42% the previous year (2).

This jump shows that when done right, content marketing can directly influence deals and dollars. But it also underscores that many organizations weren’t seeing sales impact from content before – likely due to misalignment or suboptimal strategy.

Our takeaway: Aligning content with sales isn’t only about avoiding negatives (like wasted content); it’s about capturing positives – more leads, faster deal cycles, and increased revenue.

Finally, aligning with sales goals keeps content marketing accountable. In 2025, with economic pressures and tighter budgets, CMOs and CROs are scrutinizing ROI on every spend.

Content is no exception. By tying content efforts to sales KPIs (like SQLs, pipeline generation, and win rates), marketing teams earn greater credibility. 62% of top-performing B2B content marketers create content that aligns with their organization’s key business objectives (6) – a practice strongly correlated with success.

We’ve found that when we align our content strategy with sales targets, it fosters a shared sense of purpose across teams: we’re all driving revenue, just through different roles. This shared mission is a cornerstone of “smarketing” (sales-marketing alignment) and a prerequisite for modern B2B growth.

Key B2B Content Marketing Challenges (and Why They Hurt Sales)

Even with the best intentions, marketing leaders face several content challenges that can undermine sales results.

Let’s explore the most common B2B content marketing challenges in 2025, backed by data, and why each is problematic for sales outcomes. By understanding these pain points, we can better address them with targeted solutions.

📊 B2B content teams face numerous challenges: notably:

58% struggle with limited resources,
48% find it difficult to align content with the buyer’s journey,
45% struggle to align content across sales and marketing teams (2).

These hurdles directly impact content’s effectiveness in driving sales.

1. Misalignment Between Marketing and Sales Teams

45% of B2B marketers struggle to align content efforts across sales and marketing.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

The Challenge: Marketing produces content that sales doesn’t use or find relevant. Sales complains that marketing content is too high-level or impractical, while marketing complains that sales isn’t leveraging the materials they create. This classic silo issue is backed by hard evidence:

📊 A study found that 65% of content created by marketing is never used by sales (1).

That is an enormous waste of effort and budget, and it points to a disconnect in priorities. Sales might be under pressure to hit quota this quarter, while marketing is crafting thought leadership for long-term brand building.

Without alignment, content can miss the immediate needs of the sales team (e.g. a case study to handle a common objection) and thus gets ignored.

Why It Hurts Sales: Misalignment leads to inconsistency in messaging and lost deals. Imagine a prospect reads your blog and whitepaper (from marketing) and is excited, but when they talk to sales, the conversation and follow-up materials don’t resonate with what they learned earlier. That inconsistency erodes trust.

Or consider a salesperson trying to engage a prospect but lacking relevant content (like a technical one-pager or ROI calculator) to send them – they might either rush to create something themselves (inefficient and off-brand) or worse, go without any content, reducing their effectiveness.

Over time, this gap shows up in longer sales cycles and lower close rates. In fact, companies with strong sales-marketing alignment achieve 38% higher sales win rates (7). The bottom line is that if our content isn’t helping sales sell, it’s hindering our growth.

📊 Aside from the 65% unused content stat above, consider that 45% of B2B marketers say aligning content efforts across sales and marketing is a significant challenge (2).

It’s not just your company – nearly half of marketing teams struggle here. This widespread challenge underscores why leadership (CMOs, CROs, and even CEOs) are prioritizing alignment initiatives.

We certainly prioritize it at Martal: we know that when our outbound sales teams and our marketing content are in sync, the results are exponentially better.

2. Inability to Prove Content Marketing ROI

47% of marketers admit they don’t measure ROI on their content efforts.
Reference Source: Sproutworth

The Challenge: “What did our last whitepaper actually do for sales?” If this question makes your team uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Measuring the return on investment of content is notoriously difficult.

📊 Almost half of B2B marketers (47%) admit they don’t measure ROI on their content marketing efforts at all (4).

Even among those who do track metrics, connecting content to revenue is complex. Multiple touches influence a buyer, sales cycles are long, and it’s hard to attribute a closed deal to one blog or webinar. Additionally, data often lives in silos (website analytics, marketing automation, CRM) that don’t talk to each other.

📊 In fact, a whopping 84% of B2B marketers struggle with integrating or correlating data across multiple platforms to measure content performance (4). That means even if you want to tie content to sales, the technical challenge is real.

Why It Hurts Sales: When we can’t quantify content’s impact on pipeline or revenue, two problems occur.

First, marketing struggles to optimize or justify content initiatives – if you don’t know what’s driving sales leads or deals, you might keep investing in the wrong content.

Second, sales tends to lose trust in marketing’s contributions. We’ve heard it before: “Leads from that ebook are junk” or “Our blog doesn’t bring us customers.” This skepticism can lead sales to go off-script, create their own materials, or underutilize content – a self-fulfilling prophecy that further reduces content ROI.

Not measuring ROI also makes it hard to secure budget for content projects that would help sales (e.g. a series of case studies or a new interactive tool) because you can’t prove the value.

In 2025’s climate, where every expenditure needs justification, failing to attribute revenue to content is a major roadblock. On the flip side, organizations that do crack the ROI code see clear benefits: 61% of high-performing B2B content marketers can effectively measure and demonstrate content’s performance (2), which means they can double-down on what works and cut what doesn’t – ultimately driving more sales.

📊 According to the Content Marketing Institute, the top two challenges in measuring content performance are attributing ROI and tracking the customer journey (6).

Over 56% of marketers cite attributing ROI to content as a primary measurement challenge.

If you feel that way too, it’s a sign that better analytics and alignment with sales data (CRM, revenue numbers) are needed. We address this by ensuring our content strategy starts with clear lead generation KPIs that map to sales outcomes (more on solutions later).

Remember, what gets measured gets improved – and content is no exception.

3. Limited Resources and Bandwidth

58% of B2B marketers cite lack of resources (staff, time, or budget) as their biggest non-creative challenge.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

The Challenge: Content marketing is resource-intensive. Quality content requires time, skilled people, and often budget for design, distribution, and promotion.

But many B2B teams are constrained by small teams or limited funding. It’s telling that 58% of B2B content marketers say lack of resources (staff, time, or budget) is their biggest non-creative challenge (2).

Creating enough content consistently is hard when you’re short on hands or dollars – and that challenge hasn’t gone away even as content marketing matures.

In addition, specialized content (like in-depth research reports, videos, or interactive tools) may require expertise that the in-house team doesn’t have. The result is often an overstretched team struggling to keep up with content demands from all sides (blog, social, sales collateral, lead generation campaigns, etc.).

Why It Hurts Sales: When resources are tight, marketing may default to easier-to-produce content or stick to one or two formats – which can leave gaps in the buyer journey unaddressed.

For example, maybe your team pumps out short blog posts but doesn’t have time to create that technical case study or product comparison guide that late-stage prospects (and your sales reps) really need to push deals over the line.

Or you produce content inconsistently, resulting in fewer sales ready leads over time. 28% of B2B marketers cite limited team bandwidth as a significant challenge impacting their content marketing (4).

That means important projects get delayed or dropped. From the sales perspective, this can manifest as not having the right content at the right time to engage a prospect.

A salesperson might think, “If only we had an ROI calculator or an industry-specific whitepaper, I could convince this lead,” but those assets aren’t available due to resource constraints.

Additionally, lack of resources can impact quality – rushed or mediocre content won’t impress savvy B2B buyers (who expect high-value insights). If our content isn’t excellent, it won’t generate the trust or interest that fuels the sales pipeline.

📊 Content quantity itself is a challenge for some teams: while only 30% of marketers now say “creating enough content” is a top challenge (a number that has decreased over recent years) (2) (2), the focus has shifted to creating content consistently and of high quality.

Over half (54%) of marketers struggle with creating content consistently (2).

Consistency often suffers when resources are thin – you end up with sporadic content bursts followed by dry spells. This inconsistency makes it harder for sales to rely on a steady stream of marketing-generated leads or new sales enablement pieces.

Our experience is that a well-resourced content operation (which can include leveraging external partners or fractional team members) pays dividends in feeding the sales engine continuously.

4. Content Quality and Differentiation in a Saturated Market

54% of marketers say it’s difficult to differentiate their content from competitors’.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

The Challenge: B2B buyers are swimming in content. By 2025, virtually every B2B company has a blog, a webinar series, an e-book or two, and a LinkedIn presence sharing content. The result is content saturation – making it extremely challenging to stand out.

📊 In fact, 57% of B2B marketers say that creating content that truly engages or is “the right content for the right audience” is a top challenge (2), now surpassing the old challenge of simply producing enough content. Additionally, 54% struggle with differentiating their content from competitors’ (2).

The rise of generative AI tools has ironically made this harder: AI can crank out passable blogs and listicles at scale, flooding the internet with lookalike content.

One industry expert noted that as AI makes content creation easier, “there will be a need for companies to stand out… we’re not only competing with other B2B content; we’re competing for attention” (2).

This means originality, thought leadership, and genuine insight are more important than ever – but also harder to achieve.

Why It Hurts Sales: If your content is just echoing what everyone else says, it won’t build the credibility needed to influence buyers (or convince them to choose you over alternatives).

Sales teams rely on marketing to provide compelling, insightful content that can open doors and overcome objections. When content quality is low or undifferentiated, prospects may tune it out.

Even worse, poor content can reflect badly on the brand, making a salesperson’s job tougher in establishing trust. Consider a scenario: a prospect downloads your whitepaper but finds it superficial and not insightful – they may question your expertise and by extension, the value of your solution. Sales then has to work uphill to rebuild that credibility.

📊 In contrast, 79% of top-performing content marketers attribute their success to knowing their audience and delivering what that audience cares about (4).

High-quality, targeted content warms up prospects, making them more receptive when sales reaches out. Without it, sales often faces colder leads. We also see this challenge in evolving buyer demographics – as millennials and Gen Z take on more decision-making roles, they expect engaging, even entertaining, B2B content (the dry corporate brochure no longer cuts it) (2).

Content must be both informative and engaging to differentiate. That’s a high bar, and hitting it consistently is difficult without the right strategy and talent.

Supporting Stat: Buyers reward quality and relevance: 78% of B2B buyers say that personalized, relevant content significantly impacted their purchasing decision (3).

If marketing content isn’t tailored and high-value, those buyers might never make it to a sales conversation. And if they do talk to sales, they’ll be less informed (meaning sales has to do more education from scratch).

This is why improving content quality and relevance is not just a marketing concern, but a sales enablement priority. It’s also why in our approach, we focus on thought leadership and truly helpful content – not just pumping out blog posts for SEO. Quality leads to trust, and trust leads to sales.

5. Buyer Journey Complexity and Evolving Behaviors

48% of B2B marketers find it challenging to align content with the buyer’s journey.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

The Challenge: The traditional linear funnel has given way to a more complex buyer journey with multiple touchpoints and stakeholders. B2B purchase decisions in enterprise scenarios now involve an average of 11 to 20 people influencing the decision (3).

These stakeholders each seek content that speaks to their specific concerns – from technical specs for IT, ROI figures for finance, to use cases for end users. Additionally, as noted earlier, many buyers prefer to self-educate.

They might bounce between reading a blog, watching a product video, comparing reviews, and only later contact sales (if ever). This non-linear path makes it challenging to have the right content at the right time for every prospect. 48% of B2B marketers say aligning content with the buyer’s journey is a significant challenge (2), reflecting how hard it is to map content to every stage and persona. If certain stages or personas are overlooked in your content strategy, those gaps can cause prospects to drop off.

Furthermore, buyers’ expectations have risen – they want personalized, on-demand content. Think about how Netflix or Spotify personalizes consumer experiences; B2B buyers carry similar expectations for relevancy. Yet many organizations struggle to deliver personalized content at scale. The complexity of tracking buyer intent and tailoring content accordingly is daunting without advanced tools or close sales-marketing coordination.

Why It Hurts Sales: If marketing isn’t providing content for each stage and stakeholder, sales teams often have to fill the void.

For instance, if there’s no late-funnel case study for the healthcare industry prospect, the salesperson might be stuck using a generic deck, which won’t resonate as well – possibly elongating the sales cycle or losing the deal.

Or if a key influencer (say, a CTO) doesn’t encounter content addressing their concerns (e.g., integration and security details), they might veto a solution before sales even gets a chance to speak with them. In short, content gaps or one-size-fits-all approaches lead to lost sales opportunities.

Another emerging behavior is that a large majority of B2B buyers (almost 80%) will favor brands that offer personalized content experiences (3).

So if your competitor is delivering tailored insights and you’re not, guess who has the edge with the buying committee? Sales conversations will go smoother when prospects have already consumed content that speaks to their needs and builds conviction. Without that groundwork, sales reps must handle all education and lead nurturing manually, which is inefficient and doesn’t scale well.

📊 Gartner research found “77% of B2B buyers state that their latest purchase was very complex or difficult”, due in part to the overload of information and options.

One reason is that buyers are gathering so much information independently – but not all of it is helpful. If our content isn’t guiding them, something (or someone) else will, perhaps in a direction unfriendly to us. It’s telling that 76% of B2B marketers who excel (top performers) make collaboration with other teams (like sales and customer success) a priority (2), ensuring the content covers the full journey.

This cross-functional insight is crucial to map out content that addresses each step of a complex buying process. At Martal, for example, we align closely with our sales team and even our clients’ sales teams to understand what questions prospects are asking at each stage, so we can create content that answers those questions proactively.

Solving Content Marketing Challenges: Strategies to Align Content with Sales

Having looked at the major content marketing challenges, the next step is crafting solutions that bridge the gap between marketing content and sales goals.

This is where we shift from identifying problems to solving content marketing challenges with actionable strategies. We’ll detail how our team (and by extension, your team) can align content strategy with sales enablement and performance objectives.

The following strategies address the challenges above and provide a roadmap to content that drives revenue.

Importantly, these tactics emphasize collaboration, process, and smarter resource use – not just “create more content.”

By implementing these, we and our clients have seen marketing content turn into a powerful sales ally rather than a disconnected function. Let’s break down the key techniques:

1. Establish Shared Goals and KPIs between Marketing and Sales

62% of successful B2B marketers align their content strategy directly with business objectives.
Reference Source: Content Marketing Institute

One of the foundational steps to align content with sales is to ensure both teams are working toward the same definitions of success. This means setting shared objectives (and metrics) for outbound campaigns and content.

For example, instead of a marketing goal like “increase blog traffic by 20%,” frame it in terms of sales impact: “increase the number of sales-qualified leads from content by 20%” or “influence $X pipeline per quarter via content.”

Sales and marketing leadership should co-create these KPIs so that content performance is measured by its contribution to the sales funnel (awareness and conversion).

A practical way to do this is through joint planning meetings each quarter: marketing presents upcoming content themes and assets, sales provides input on what they need and agrees on the targets those assets should hit (e.g., generate 50 demo requests or help shorten sales cycle by 10%).

By having clear, shared KPIs, both teams stay accountable. Marketing can no longer rest on vanity metrics, and sales becomes more invested in leveraging content because they had a hand in shaping its goals.

📊 According to research, 68% of successful B2B content marketers ensure their content strategy aligns directly with business objectives (2) – this alignment trickles down into setting the right KPIs. When we tie a content piece to a stage in the sales funnel (say, an eBook aimed to convert MQLs to SQLs), we define a metric (SQL conversion rate) and track it religiously. This keeps everyone honest about content effectiveness.

Actionable Insight: Create a simple marketing-sales scorecard that tracks content metrics alongside sales metrics.

For instance, include columns for content asset, number of leads generated, SQLs generated, opportunities influenced, and revenue influenced. Review this scorecard in your weekly or monthly sales-marketing sync meetings.

This transparent reporting fosters a team mindset: we win together or we adjust together. When sales sees that marketing is measuring a blog post’s success by how many opportunities it influenced (not just page views), they’ll recognize marketing is serious about revenue.

And when marketing sees sales using their content and providing feedback on it, they’ll get the data needed to refine future content. This cycle of feedback and shared metrics is core to our approach – it turns content marketing into a revenue-focused function.

2. Involve Sales in Content Planning and Creation

Organizations with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve 38% higher sales win rates.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

If you want sales to actually use and value marketing content, involve them in creating it. Your sales team sits on a goldmine of customer insights: the questions prospects ask, the objections raised, the features that excite them, and the deal-killers that scare them off.

Use that intelligence to drive your content calendar. For example, host a monthly roundtable with SDRs and account executives to ask:

What are the top 3 questions or pain points you’re hearing this month?

If the sales team is constantly hearing, say, “How do you compare to X competitor?” or “Is there ROI proof for your solution?”, that’s a prompt for content – perhaps a comparison guide or a case study.

By co-creating content ideas with sales, you ensure the content is immediately useful in real sales conversations. You can even have sales reps contribute to content.

Perhaps a rockstar rep can co-author a blog post on a common industry challenge they’ve solved, or sales engineers can help write a technical explainer. Not only does this produce highly relevant content, it also creates buy-in. A salesperson who had a hand in an article is far more likely to share it with prospects.

From our experience, this collaboration also uncovers new content formats. Sales might say, “Our prospects really respond to short videos or one-page cheat sheets more than long PDFs.” Marketing can then pivot to produce more of what actually helps sales engage.

📊 In fact, top-performing organizations are 55% more likely to have effective communication and collaboration across teams (2).

It sounds obvious, but literally sitting down with sales to plan content is something many companies skip. We make it a point at Martal to treat our sales team as our #1 internal customer for content – if they say they need a certain asset to close deals, that request goes to the top of our content production queue.

Actionable Insight: Implement a “sales content council” – a small working group of marketers and sales reps that meets regularly to exchange ideas. You can rotate which reps participate to get fresh perspectives from the field.

Use these councils to sanity-check your content ideas: Will this whitepaper actually help you sell? What angle would make it more useful? Also, invite sales to early content drafts or brainstorming. Even a quick Slack channel for content feedback can bridge the gap. Over time, this tight collaboration will also train marketing to think more like sales (and vice versa). The ultimate result is content that feels like it was made by the sales team for the customer – a recipe for impact.

3. Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey (and Sales Funnel)

73% of B2B marketers say case studies are effective at moving prospects through the funnel.
Reference Source: Zoominfo

To address the buyer journey complexity, it’s crucial to perform a content mapping exercise. Essentially, audit your existing content and map each piece to the stage of the funnel and persona it serves.

Often, teams discover heavy concentration at top-of-funnel (awareness) and gaps near the bottom (consideration/decision). Aim for a balanced content portfolio:

Top-of-funnel content (educational blog posts, infographics, checklists) to attract and educate
Mid-funnel content (case studies, webinars, analyst reports) to nurture and validate
Bottom-of-funnel content (ROI calculators, product demos, comparison sheets, proposals) to facilitate decision and purchase.

Don’t forget post-sale content like onboarding guides or customer training materials – aligning with sales also means ensuring customer success (which in turn drives renewals and upsells, extending the sales relationship).

When mapping, identify content needed for each buyer persona involved in the decision. If you sell a technical product, you may need a CTO-focused whitepaper alongside a business-case deck for the CFO.

Each should hit on the specific questions that role cares about. This granular approach ensures no stakeholder is left uneducated by the time the sales rep is engaging them.

Remember, content mapping is not a one-and-done; buyer journeys evolve, so revisit this map quarterly or biannually, ideally with sales input (tie back to Strategy #2: involve sales in identifying new questions or objections arising).

To make this actionable, create a simple table or matrix: one axis is the buyer journey stage (awareness, consideration, decision), the other axis is persona or segment, and fill in existing content or content ideas for each cell. Immediately, you’ll see where you have “empty cells” – those become priority content to create.

When new content is proposed, see where it fits on the map; if it doesn’t address a gap or replace an outdated piece, question why you’re making it at all.

This ensures efficient use of resources and maximizes sales alignment. It also helps avoid the trap of creating content for content’s sake. Every asset should have a purpose in moving potential customers closer to purchase.

Actionable Insight: Align content mapping with your sales pipeline stages. For example, if your sales funnel goes from Lead -> MQL -> SQL -> Opportunity -> Customer, ensure you have at least one strong content asset that helps move the prospect at each transition.

Perhaps a thought leadership blog turns a lead into an MQL, a webinar attendance turns an MQL into an SQL, a case study turns an SQL into a sales Opportunity, and a tailored ROI document helps close the Opportunity into a Customer.

When designing sales sequences (cadences of emails/calls), plug these content pieces in. At Martal, our outbound prospecting sequences often incorporate marketing content – a relevant blog post in a cold email or a whitepaper in a LinkedIn message – to warm up prospects. By mapping and then operationalizing content into the sales process, we ensure content isn’t just published and forgotten, but actively used to nurture and close deals.

4. Create Sales Enablement Content and Tools

79% of B2B buyers say personalized content significantly influences their purchase decisions.
Reference Source: Sproutworth

One specific subset of content mapping is enablement – sales collaterals specifically designed for sales reps to use in their one-on-one interactions with prospects.

While marketing often focuses on one-to-many content (like public blog posts or ebooks), sales enablement content can be more tailored, such as: product brochures, competitor battlecards, pricing FAQs, proposal templates, case study decks, and sales email templates. In 2025, an emerging best practice is for marketing to function as a support arm for sales enablement. Some organizations even have dedicated content roles or teams for sales enablement (if you have the scale, this can be immensely valuable).

Look at what content or lead generation tools your salespeople currently use during the sales process – and where they improvise. If reps are constantly custom-making slides for pitches, perhaps marketing can create a master deck or a slide library.

If reps are writing lengthy answers to technical questions, perhaps an FAQ document or knowledge base article can save them time. Even things like a curated collection of third-party research or statistics (relevant to your industry) can empower sales to have better conversations. Essentially, marketing’s job expands from just attracting leads to arming the sales force with information.

We take this approach at Martal: our marketing team provides our SDRs not just with leads, but with talking-point briefs, objection handling docs, and content they can send to prospects after calls. It’s a full-funnel mentality.

Another key piece of enablement is case studies and customer stories – arguably some of the most persuasive content for late-stage deals. They provide social proof and practical examples.

It’s worth the effort to create a library of case studies across various industries or use cases you serve. Sales can then pick the most relevant one to share with a hesitant prospect.

📊 based on data, case studies are considered effective by 73% of B2B marketers for moving prospects along (8). If you don’t have enough, that’s low-hanging fruit. Similarly, short video testimonials can be gold for sales to email to a prospect who is on the fence.

Don’t overlook interactive tools as well: calculators, assessment quizzes, or ROI tools that sales can use live with a prospect. These make abstract value concrete. If resource allows, marketing can develop such tools (or outsource sales and marketing) and train sales on using them.

For example, a SaaS company might have a subscription cost calculator or “savings estimator” that a rep can walk a prospect through – it’s content in a more dynamic form.

Actionable Insight: Build a “Sales Content Toolkit” repository – a centralized, easily searchable folder or platform (like a sales enablement software, or even a well-organized SharePoint/Google Drive) where all sales-facing content lives.

Categorize it by stage or use case (e.g., Discovery Call, Demo Follow-up, Proposal Stage, etc.). Then train the sales team on what’s available. Even the best content is useless if reps don’t know it exists or where to find it when needed.

Do a quick showcase in a sales meeting whenever new content is added: e.g., “Marketing just uploaded a new one-pager that compares us against Competitor X – here’s how to use it.” This proactive enablement ensures your content actually gets utilized in the field.

It also allows sales to give feedback: “This slide deck is great, but can we have a version with XYZ for our enterprise clients?” – which you can iterate on. By treating sales as the primary customer for these content pieces, you’ll create a virtuous cycle of improvement and trust. They’ll come to rely on marketing for ammunition, and marketing will gain deeper insight into sales interactions.

5. Align Content Topics with Pain Points and SEO (Demand Capture)

Only 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy.
Reference Source: Sproutworth

Often, content strategy can be split into two broad goals:

Demand creation (educating the market, thought leadership, creating awareness of problems they didn’t know they had)
Demand capture (meeting existing demand by being present when people search for solutions).

Aligning content with sales means covering both bases. Keyword research and SEO-focused content planning are still critical in 2025 – because buyers start their journey with online research.

However, the twist is to ensure those keywords tie to real customer pain points that your sales team addresses daily.

Work with sales to list the top problems prospects have that your product/service solves. For each, ensure you have content that addresses that problem in-depth.

Many of those topics will naturally align with SEO keywords that prospects search. For example, if a pain point is “manual data entry taking too much time”, and your solution automates that, you’d want content around “how to automate data entry” or “ways to reduce manual data tasks” – which doubles as educational content and SEO content.

By solving actual problems through content, you attract high-intent visitors (who are likely to become leads) and simultaneously equip sales with material they can share when a prospect voices that pain. It’s a win-win.

In 2025, search engines and buyers alike value authoritative, in-depth content. Google’s algorithm updates emphasize experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

So, invest in quality here: long-form guides, research-backed articles, and up-to-date insights. Sales can actually be a contributor of “experience” – include quotes or anecdotes from sales or customer success teams about how they solved X challenge for a client.

This not only enriches the content (making it more authentic and expert) but also subtly showcases your company’s real-world know-how (which prospects and Google both appreciate).

Also, consider intent data and content: if you have access to intent signal tools (or even Google Search Console data), see what topics or keywords are trending up.

Aligning content production to rising intent signals ensures you’re answering questions buyers are actively asking now – and being timely helps sales close deals faster.

For example, if intent data shows a spike in searches for “B2B content marketing AI tools” and you offer something in that space, producing a fresh blog or webinar on that and getting it out quickly can capture that interest and give sales a timely talking point.

Actionable Insight: Maintain a living content roadmap that ties each proposed content piece to a specific buyer question or keyword and a sales stage.

For each item, fill in: Pain point addressed, target keyword (if SEO-focused), target persona, funnel stage, desired CTA (what action we want the reader to take next).

This ensures every content item has a strategic purpose. Review this roadmap with both SEO/data in mind (are people searching for this?) and sales in mind (will this help convert prospects?). A balanced mix might be, for instance, one thought leadership piece per month (to shape demand) and two SEO-driven pieces (to capture demand), all crafted around real pain points our sales team wants to highlight.

This approach has helped us not only drive organic traffic but also attract highly relevant leads – because our content resonates with what our ideal customers are actually concerned about. When those leads come in, our sales team finds them well-informed and primed by the content they consumed, making the sales conversation more productive.

6. Leverage Technology for Content Distribution and Insight

84% of marketers struggle to integrate data across platforms to measure content performance.
Reference Source: Sproutworth

Technology can be a force-multiplier for aligning content with sales. Two areas in particular are content distribution and analytics/insights:

Omnichannel Content Distribution: Don’t rely on “publish and pray.” Actively distribute content through the channels where your prospects and sales interactions happen.

This includes email (newsletters, lead nurture – email drip campaigns), social media (especially LinkedIn for B2B), communities/forums, and syndication on industry sites. It also includes enabling sales to distribute content directly.

For example, equip your sales team with snippets or cold email sequences that include content. Many modern sales engagement platforms allow marketing to create email templates that reps can use – load those up with links to relevant content for different scenarios. Also, encourage reps to share marketing content on their personal LinkedIn profiles to amplify reach (a prospect is more likely to read an article recommended by a salesperson they trust).

Our omnichannel marketing philosophy blends content with outbound touches – a prospect might get a cold email referencing a useful article we wrote, then see a LinkedIn post from us covering similar tips, creating multiple touchpoints of value rather than a pure sales pitch. The result is often a warmer reception when we do direct outreach.

Analytics and Feedback Loops: Utilize analytics tools to track how prospects engage with content through the sales cycle. For instance, if you send a case study to a prospect, using document tracking software can tell a rep whether they opened it and which pages they spent time on.

This is valuable intel for the rep’s follow-up call (“I noticed you were interested in the ROI section – happy to walk you through those numbers in more detail”).

On a broader scale, integrate your CRM with content engagement data: see which content pieces tend to be associated with won deals. Do leads who attend webinars convert faster? Does that new whitepaper correlate with bigger deal sizes? These insights allow you to refine both content and sales focus.

If one type of content consistently aids conversion, make more of it (and have sales use it more). If something isn’t pulling weight, either improve it or retire it.

Marketing automation and AI can also help personalize content delivery. For example, using marketing automation, you can set triggers: if a lead visits the pricing page (a buying signal), automatically email them a relevant case study.

Or use AI to suggest content to sales: some advanced sales enablement and multichannel marketing platforms might recommend “Next Best Content” for a rep to send based on deal context. While not every team has these tools yet, the trend is heading there. Even without AI, a well-thought-out sequence (if prospect did X, send Y content) can approximate this logic.

Actionable Insight: Invest in a sales enablement platform or content management hub that both teams can access. This platform should host content, allow tagging by persona/stage, and ideally integrate with your email or CRM tools to track usage.

Many CRMs (like HubSpot or Salesforce with extensions) can serve this role too. The key is to make content distribution trackable. When we share a link, we use tracking parameters or a link shortener that logs engagement. Then we review those metrics.

One metric we find useful is content influence on pipeline: what percentage of closed deals in the last quarter engaged with at least one piece of marketing content?

Seeing this number rise is a sign of better alignment. If a particular blog was read by 30% of closed-won deals, you bet we’ll make sure every new prospect gets a chance to see it.

Tech tools make uncovering such patterns easier. Ultimately, leveraging technology in this way moves content marketing from a nebulous art to a data-informed science closely tied to sales performance.

7. Repurpose and Refresh High-Impact Content

48% of marketers say their team doesn’t repurpose content enough to scale production.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

With limited resources, it’s smart to squeeze more value out of content that works. Content repurposing means taking a successful piece and adapting it into other formats or for other channels.

For instance, a comprehensive whitepaper could be turned into a series of blog posts, an infographic, a webinar, and a few short videos – all of which link back to the original or to a CTA. This extends reach and caters to different audience preferences (some people prefer a 2-minute video over a 10-page report).

It also gives sales multiple ways to engage a prospect. Maybe a prospect ignored the whitepaper you sent, but a week later they see a cool infographic on LinkedIn (that was sourced from the whitepaper) and suddenly they’re interested. We’ve essentially given the content a second (or third) chance to catch their attention.

Another angle is refreshing content. B2B topics evolve, and an article from two years ago might need an update with 2025 data or trends. Instead of starting from scratch, update high-performing evergreen content with new insights and re-release it.

This keeps your content library fresh and authoritative. Importantly, sales will appreciate having up-to-date info to share (nobody wants to send a prospect last year’s stat that might be outdated). We make it a practice to periodically revisit our top 10 performing content pieces (by traffic or by lead generation) and see if any need a refresh.

Often just adding a new section or update can revive its performance – and we let the sales team know, “Hey, our 2023 Guide to B2B Prospecting is now updated for 2025 – here’s the new version to share!” This avoids the scenario of sales sharing stale PDFs or links.

Repurposing also ties into localization or segmentation. If you operate globally or in multiple industries, consider versions of content tailored to each context.

For example, a generic case study might be repurposed into a Financial Services Case Study by tweaking language and examples for that industry. This way, salespeople in different verticals have relevant content to use without marketing having to create entirely new assets from scratch.

Actionable Insight: When planning any “big content” (like an eBook, research report, or webinar), brainstorm a repurposing plan as part of the content brief. List out derivative assets you will create and how they’ll be used.

For instance: from one webinar, plan to produce a highlights blog post, 3 short video clips for social media, a few quote graphics, and perhaps a Q&A document if a lot of questions were answered.

Assign these to team members or schedule them so it actually happens. This not only multiplies the ROI of that content effort, but provides a steady stream of material for sales and marketing to share. It’s no wonder that 48% of marketers say “not enough content repurposing” is a challenge when scaling content production (2) – many simply move on to the next thing without fully exploiting existing assets. By making repurposing a habit, you alleviate resource strain (challenge #3) and keep sales equipped with a variety of touchpoints.

One piece of advice: track which formats resonate most with your audience. If infographics consistently get engagement, repurpose into infographics more. If your audience prefers data-rich blogs, focus there. Let the response guide your efforts so you invest repurposing energy where it counts.

8. Foster a Culture of Continuous Feedback and Training

76% of top-performing content marketers prioritize cross-team collaboration.
Reference Source: MarketingProfs

Finally, alignment is not a one-time project – it’s an ongoing culture to cultivate. Encourage continuous feedback loops between sales and marketing regarding content.

After a piece is published and distributed, ask sales: Did prospects mention it? Was it useful in your conversations? Any suggestions or objections that came up related to it?

Perhaps you launched a new eBook and a salesperson reports, “Prospect X said they loved the report but wished it had a section on [topic].” That’s invaluable feedback – maybe an opportunity for a follow-up blog or at least something to note for next time.

Show the sales team that their input directly shapes content. This will motivate them to engage more with marketing and to actually leverage content (since they see it evolving to meet their needs).

On the training side, ensure that new hires in sales are onboarded not just on product and CRM, but also on marketing content. Give them a rundown of key content assets, when to use them, and what’s coming in the pipeline.

Conversely, train marketers (especially content creators) on the basics of the sales process. We’ve found that when a content writer actually sits in on a few sales calls or listens to recorded calls, their understanding of the customer’s language and needs skyrockets. They can then produce content that hits the mark more often.

Even something as simple as a quarterly meeting where sales presents “Win/Loss analysis” (why we won or lost some deals) can spark content ideas or highlight messaging gaps that content can help fill.

Moreover, consider joint KPIs or incentives to reinforce alignment behavior. For example, if sales has a quota for sourced pipeline, maybe marketing has a KPI for pipeline influenced by content.

Celebrate wins together: when a particularly big deal closes that marketing touched via content, recognize both the rep and the marketer or content piece that contributed.

At Martal, we share such stories in team meetings: e.g., “We just closed Client Y, and they mentioned our blog post on industry trends was a factor in choosing us.” It reinforces the value of content in the sales outcome to everyone.

Actionable Insight: Set up a bi-directional mentorship or shadowing program: marketers shadow sales calls periodically, and sales reps can sit in on content brainstorming or attend webinars as panelists.

This cross-pollination builds empathy on both sides. Sales learns the effort and strategy behind content, and marketing learns the realities of customer conversations. Over time, the line between the departments can blur into a unified revenue team.

A well-aligned team might even swap roles for a day – imagine a marketer trying to prospect or a salesperson writing a blog outline – the insights gained would be tremendous (and often humorous!). While that might be extreme, the point is to break down walls. In the end, we – marketing and sales together – succeed by winning customers.

Content is a means to that end, and these human processes ensure it remains tightly integrated with sales needs.

Conclusion: From Content to Customers – Bridging the Gap

The evolving B2B landscape of 2025 demands that marketing content do more than generate buzz – it must generate business. We’ve explored how aligning content strategy with sales goals tackles common B2B content marketing challenges head-on, turning problems into opportunities. By ensuring that our content is created with sales in mind and measured by its impact on revenue, we transform marketing from a cost center into a growth engine.

At Martal, we believe in an integrated approach: our outbound lead generation campaigns leverage insightful content to warm up cold outreach, our fractional sales teams use tailored content as conversation starters and deal closers, and our sales enablement training (through Martal Academy) coaches teams on using content effectively throughout the buyer’s journey.

In short, uniting marketing and sales efforts so they resonate in harmony rather than work at cross purposes. It’s no coincidence that organizations with tight sales-marketing alignment see higher win rates and better ROI on marketing spend (2).

If your company is struggling to turn content into tangible pipeline, or if your sales team is hungry for better enablement, let’s have a conversation. Martal specializes in not only filling funnels through outbound lead generation, cold email, calls, and LinkedIn outreach, but also in nurturing those leads to fruition with strong content and sales enablement.

Our appointment setting services ensure you get in front of the right decision-makers, while our fractional SDR teams act as an extension of your own – armed with the messaging and content that converts.

Through Martal Academy, we even train your reps with proven playbooks and content usage strategies as part of a holistic sales enablement program.

Ready to bridge the gap between your marketing content and sales results? We’re here to help.

Book a free consultation with our team to see how Martal’s omnichannel outreach, expert content strategy, and Sales-as-a-Service offerings can accelerate your growth.

In doing so, you’ll gain a sales partner dedicated to aligning every blog, email, and call to what ultimately matters – winning new customers and driving revenue. Let’s align your content with your sales goals, together, and watch the results speak for themselves.

References

FAQs: Content Marketing Challenges

What are the limitations of content marketing?

Content marketing takes time to show ROI, is difficult to attribute directly to revenue, and requires consistent resources to be effective. It also competes in a saturated landscape and works best when aligned with sales follow-up rather than in isolation.

What are the techniques to overcome content marketing challenges?

Align marketing and sales goals, document a clear content strategy, focus on high-quality and relevant content, repurpose existing assets, use data to iterate, and personalize content by segment and stage. Cross-functional collaboration and feedback loops are essential.

Which is the key to successful content marketing?

The key is delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. This requires deep audience understanding, alignment with sales and business goals, consistent execution, and data-driven optimization to ensure measurable impact.