65% of B2B content = wasted

Hey, Paige here!

Before we get into today’s best marketing research… 

In today’s release: 

• Why 65% of B2B content goes unused (and how to stop the waste)

• What top-performing content teams do differently hint: it’s not more production

• A simple, 5-step content audit framework you can run quarterly

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DEEP DIVE

Content waste is quietly wrecking your marketing efficiency.

If 65% of your content never gets used (by your audience or your sales team) that’s not just a visibility issue. That’s a budget problem.

Most B2B teams are stuck in production mode: publish more, push harder, hope something sticks. But, nearly two-thirds of B2B content goes completely unused. Not read. Not shared. Not sold with.

Even worse? Only one in four marketers audit their content at least once a year. That means the majority are publishing blindly—with no system to measure what’s working, or fix what’s failing.

The result: bloated libraries, missed revenue, and a lot of ghost content haunting your CMS.

But here’s the thing—this isn’t a content quantity problem. It’s a performance problem. And it’s fixable.

What the data says: 

Most teams think they’re doing enough to track content performance,  but they aren’t doing nearly enough to stop the bleeding.

According to recent research:

• 65% of B2B content goes unused. Often because it’s misaligned with what buyers or sales teams actually need.

• Only 66% of companies consistently track performance, and just 24% run audits at least once a year.

• Meanwhile, top-performing teams are far more aggressive: 65% of successful B2B content teams audit more than twice a year.

In other words: content waste isn’t a niche problem—it’s systemic.

Most of what we create is never seen. And because it’s not being measured, most marketers don’t realize how big the gap is between effort and impact.

And it is a gap. In the same report, companies that took time to update or repurpose underperforming content saw a 45% increase in engagement and a 43% boost in organic traffic. That’s not a small lift. That’s the difference between a content program that generates pipeline — and one that just burns hours.

So what’s driving the waste?

• Too much focus on production, not enough on maintenance

• No clear process to audit, prune, or refresh

• Little collaboration between content and sales

• Metrics tracked inconsistently (or not at all)

The result: stale content, missed opportunities, and no idea what to cut or double down on.

Brand wins in the wild

Teams that updated underperforming content saw:

• +45% increase in engagement

• +43% more organic traffic
  This was directly tied to refreshing outdated assets—not creating new ones.

Updating old blog posts with new info and SEO improvements led to significant increases in organic lead generation, turning stale assets into top performers.

Quarterly pruning and repurposing is an essential part of a high-performing content strategy… a practice linked to more efficient SEO outcomes and better user experience.

The Challenge: Audit and Optimize Your Bottom 30%

If 65% of your content goes unused, that’s your opportunity—not just your problem.

Here’s your fix: a lightweight, quarterly content audit that helps you see what’s working, what’s wasting space, and what’s worth saving. You don’t need to boil the ocean… just start with the bottom 30% of your content.

Use this 5-step framework (pulled straight from what high-performing teams are doing):

For my own system, I keep an ongoing list throughout each quarter. I’m a mean, lean marketing team, so bandwidth can be tight. I make it a goal to create 1 new piece of content every week and refresh 1 outdated one… and our rankings continue to climb. 

The takeaway: Most B2B teams have a content waste problem. If you're not auditing, you're not optimizing. And you're leaving traffic, engagement, and revenue on the table. Your best-performing asset next quarter might already exist. You just have to find it and fix it.