It's one of the most common things I hear from ERP VARs and consultants who've been around long enough to be skeptical. "We tried content. Posted for a while. Nothing happened." And they're not wrong, exactly. What they tried didn't work. But what they tried wasn't really a content strategy. It was a random act of content dressed up as one.
There's a difference worth understanding, because the firms getting it right aren't doing more. They're doing something fundamentally different.
The Burst-and-Silence Pattern
One of my clients, a boutique consultancy run by a former controller, had the same story as most firms: A website that read like everyone else in her space. A dormant LinkedIn page. A mental list of content ideas that never made it out of her notebook. When she did post, it came in bursts after a conference, followed by three months of silence. Nothing was tied together. Nothing was specific enough for a CFO or ops lead to remember.
When we first spoke, she said, "I've tried content. It doesn't bring in sales."
What she actually meant was that she'd tried random acts of content. An occasional blog. A case study written to satisfy a vendor MDF requirement. A webinar that never got repurposed. None of it repeated a clear idea. None of it helped a specific buyer feel understood. It filled a calendar without creating demand.
This pattern is more common than most firms want to admit. A burst of activity after a conference, an industry event, or a slow quarter. A few posts, maybe a blog. Then silence. Then another burst. The audience never gets a chance to build a mental model of who you are or what you stand for, because you keep starting over.
Research on B2B content programs supports this. Around 81% of North American B2B content marketers say their most successful programs work because they build credibility and trust with their audience, not because they publish frequently. The same research ties consistent branding and messaging to a 23% lift in revenue. That's not a content volume finding. It's a consistency finding.
The Fix Is Boring on Purpose
The first thing we did together wasn't build a content calendar or brainstorm topics. It was to make one decision: who she was really for, and what problem she wanted to own publicly.
Not "ERP implementations for mid-market companies." That sentence belongs to everyone. Instead: "Helping multi-entity professional services firms get clean, consolidated numbers every month without living in spreadsheets." That sentence became the filter for everything that came next. If a content idea didn't connect back to that problem, it didn't ship.
From there, we built the smallest cadence she could sustain without burning out. One substantial LinkedIn post per week. One deeper piece, a short article or email, every two weeks. No elaborate production schedule. Just a repeatable rhythm with a clear filter.
Every piece had to do at least one of four things: pre-handle an objection she heard on sales calls, show how she thought about a messy finance problem, tell a specific client story, or politely repel a bad-fit lead. If it didn't do any of those, it stayed in drafts.
That filter is worth writing down. Most content fails not because the writing is bad but because nobody asked what job it was supposed to do before it went live.
The Part Where Most Firms Quit
The first six weeks were quiet. A few likes, the occasional comment from peers, no "we read your post and want to buy ERP" messages. This is the moment most firms declare content dead and go back to waiting for referrals.
She didn't quit. She kept talking about the same problems: messy consolidations, month-end chaos, audit surprises. Different angles, different examples, same underlying idea. Prospects started to see a pattern. So did her existing network.
This is the part that doesn't show up in any 30-day content report. Because roughly 61% of B2B buyers now prefer navigating a purchase without talking to a sales rep, your content has to do the relationship-building work that used to happen over lunch or at a trade show booth. That trust doesn't accumulate in a month. It accumulates over many months of a specific buyer seeing you say the same smart thing in different ways, until the day they have the problem you keep describing and your name is already in their head.
Around the three-month mark, something shifted. A former colleague messaged her: "I keep seeing your posts about multi-entity reporting. Can you talk to our CFO?" A few weeks later, a private equity controller she'd never met reached out: "We've got three portfolio companies struggling with exactly what you described in your post yesterday. Do you do project work?"
The conversations weren't "we saw your website and want an ERP demo." They were "we feel seen. Can you help us fix this?"
What a Year of Consistency Actually Produces
By the end of the first year, she could point to real outcomes. Two net-new ERP implementations from people who had been silent readers of her content for months. A steady stream of discovery calls booked directly from LinkedIn. And a change in how people introduced her: not "she does ERP," but "she's the one who helps multi-entity firms get out of spreadsheet jail."
That last one matters more than it sounds. When your network starts describing you in your own language, your positioning has survived the ultimate test. It travelled without you.
Her content didn't become a demand-generation machine overnight. It did something more durable: it made her the obvious, low-risk choice for a very specific kind of buyer. The ones who found her already trusted her before the first conversation. The sales cycle was shorter. The fit was better. The referrals that came from those clients were sharper because people finally knew exactly who to send her way.
The most important change wasn't volume. It was consistency around a clear idea, repeated long enough for her market to build a mental model of who she is and what she solves. That's when content stops being a marketing task and starts quietly building a pipeline in the background.
The Two Questions Worth Answering Before You Post Anything
If you're going to take one thing from this: content doesn't work on a campaign timeline. It works on a trust timeline. And trust compounds slowly, then fast.
Before your next piece goes live, answer two questions. First: what is the one problem I want to be known for solving, specifically enough that the right buyer recognizes themselves in it? If you can't answer that, no amount of posting frequency fixes it. Second: what job is this specific piece doing? If it isn't pre-handling an objection, signalling how you think, making the right buyer feel understood, or disqualifying someone who's wrong for you, it belongs in drafts, not on your feed.
Those two questions won't make content easy. But they'll make it useful, which is the only version that compounds.
If you've been in the burst-and-silence cycle and you're ready to build something that actually accumulates, that's the work I do with ERP VARs and consultants. Not content production. Positioning first, then a sustainable cadence that does real sales work. If you want to talk through what that could look like for your firm, send me a note. No frameworks, no pitch deck. Just a straight conversation about whether it makes sense.