Why B2B Buyers Get Stuck Between Awareness Content and the Purchase Decision

Most B2B companies I talk to have plenty of content: blog posts, explainers, a webinar archive, a newsletter that goes out most months. What they’re missing is the stretch between “I understand this problem” and “I’m ready to sign with this supplier.” That’s where buyers get stuck, and where a lot of pipeline dies without anyone noticing. The good news is you can close most of that gap without writing another fifty blog posts.

How much of a typical B2B library is built for the decision?

Not much. My team audited close to 14,000 company websites across seven B2B industries in the first half of 2026, from manufacturing and construction to fintech, life sciences, and education. When we sorted the content of the companies that actually publish by buying stage, the shape was the same almost everywhere. Awareness content made up about 40% of the average library. Consideration content, the “how do I compare my options” material, was about a third. And the stuff that helps someone actually pick a supplier and justify it upstairs? About 17%. Post-purchase content barely registered at around 3%.

The full breakdown is in our State of B2B Content Marketing 2026 report if you want the detail. My read on why it happens is pretty unglamorous. Top-of-funnel posts are easy to make and easy to count, so that’s what gets made, the traffic chart climbs, everyone’s happy for a while. The people who were nearly ready to buy, though, show up and find almost nothing.

In some sectors it’s starker. Among asset managers that produce content at all, 62.3% had no decision-stage material whatsoever, so a buyer who wanted to compare them had nothing to go on.

What actually happens to the buyer in the middle?

Picture a head of operations at a mid-sized manufacturer. She’s read three of your articles about reducing downtime. She agrees with them. She even forwarded one to her finance director. Now she needs to answer a different set of questions. How do you compare to the two other suppliers on her list? What does it cost, roughly? Who else like her company has done this, and what happened? What does implementation look like in month one?

If your site only answers the first question (why this problem matters), she’s on her own for the rest. And she won’t phone you to ask, at least not yet. She’ll go looking elsewhere, and whoever answers those questions first tends to get the call.

I’m not making that up, by the way. 6sense surveyed more than 4,000 buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Report, and 94% of buying groups had already ranked their favourite vendors before they spoke to anyone. The favourite going in won roughly 80% of the time. Which means your sales team mostly hears about a deal after it’s been half decided, by whoever’s content was there when the buyer went looking.

Why do so many purchases stall?

Partly because there are so many people in the room. Forrester put the average at 13 people per purchase in its State of Business Buying 2024 research, with 89% of purchases crossing two or more departments. Same study: 86% of B2B purchases stall somewhere along the way, and 81% of buyers end up unhappy with the provider they picked. (The summary’s on Forrester’s site if you want to check.) Those are grim numbers.

Now think about your champion, the one person who’s read your stuff, trying to sell you to twelve colleagues who haven’t. Finance asks about money. IT asks how it connects to what they’ve got. Procurement wants to talk terms. Your awareness articles help with maybe one of those conversations. So she ends up pitching you from memory, in a meeting you’ll never see.

And when it stalls, nobody logs it as “lost because we had no comparison page.” It just goes nowhere, which is exactly why so few teams notice.

Is it the content, or the wiring around it?

Both, I’d say, and the wiring gets forgotten. In our audit, almost every site had some kind of call to action on its content, usually a contact or demo button. What’s missing is a path that changes with what the reader is ready for. In manufacturing, only about 5% of content-active companies used calls to action that differed by funnel stage. Across verticals, somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 5 pages simply dead-ended, with no next step at all.

So you get this odd situation. Someone reads an early-stage article, and the only option offered is to book a sales call. They’re nowhere near ready for that, so they leave. Someone else lands on a product page ready to evaluate, and there’s no pricing guidance, no comparison, no proof, just the same demo button. They leave too.

The pages usually load fine and the forms work. What’s missing is a reason to take the next step and a clear route to it. An inbound marketing strategy should connect those next steps to the reader’s stage in the buying process.

What belongs in the middle of the funnel?

This is where I’d spend next quarter’s content budget. I’ve listed these roughly in the order buyers reach for them.

Comparison content that’s honest

Whoever’s buying is already doing this sum in their head. In house or outsourced? Software or people? Or park it till next year? So write the comparison for them, and play fair with the routes you don’t offer. I know that sounds backwards. In my experience the supplier who helped the buyer think straight is the one who gets trusted later.

Cost and value explainers

Nobody’s asking you to publish a rate card. Still, a page on what pushes the cost up or down, with rough ranges and a sense of how to make the case internally, does a lot of your champion’s homework for her. Remember the finance director? That’s the link she sends him.

Proof that matches the buyer

You probably have a few case studies already. I’d bet at least one is vague, hidden three clicks deep, or written to impress other marketers. The ones that work name the client, say what was going wrong, explain what changed in normal language, and give a number a CFO would care about. Put them next to the articles buyers actually read. A resources tab nobody opens doesn’t count.

Implementation and “what happens next” pages

Almost nobody writes this one. Yet the thing keeping your buyer up at night is usually month one. Whose team gets dragged in? How long will it take? What breaks? Lay it out plainly and the whole thing stops feeling like a leap. It becomes a project with a plan, which a nervous committee can actually approve.

The right ask on each page

Last piece. Every one of these pages should ask for something the reader is ready to give. Somebody early on might trade an email for a short guide. Somebody comparing suppliers would probably take a rough estimate. Somebody close to signing may want to talk to an existing customer first. A single “book a demo” button can’t cover all of that.

Does AI search make the gap worse?

Yes, and fast. People now type their shortlist questions into ChatGPT instead of Google. Who’s good at this? Roughly what does it cost? Which approach makes more sense for us? The assistants answer by pulling from pages that address those questions directly. Forrester’s research found almost 95% of buyers expected to use generative AI in their purchase process within a year.

If your content only covers broad awareness topics, there’s very little on your site for an AI answer to cite when the buyer asks the decision questions. In six of the seven industries we studied, company websites were largely absent from AI-generated answers on high-value category queries. The engines leaned on third-party reference, review, and community sites instead. Decision-stage content, published as plain readable pages rather than locked PDFs, gives those engines something of yours to work with.

Where should a team start?

Honestly, begin with the pages you’ve got. Grab the twenty that get the most visits. For each, ask yourself what a reader should do after reading it, then check whether the page makes that obvious. My guess is you’ll hit some dead ends, plus plenty of pages leaping straight to “book a demo”. Fixing those is cheap and often lifts conversion on traffic you’re already paying for.

Then audit the decision shelf. Could a serious buyer compare you, understand rough costs, see proof from a company like theirs, and picture the first month, all without talking to sales? If the answer is no, that’s your content plan for the next few months, and it’s a far better use of budget than another round of awareness posts. If you work with a B2B marketing agency in Barcelona, use this review to agree on content priorities.

Awareness content still does its job of creating interest. Too often it then hands that interest to nobody. The companies that win complex B2B deals tend to be the ones that build the rest of the path, from the first article a buyer reads to the page that helps their finance director say yes. Build the middle and the bottom as one connected route, and the content you’ve already paid for finally has somewhere to send people.