Stop Snipping Strands: Why Cutting Your Content Budget Is Killing Your Industrial Marketing

“Let’s cut the blog. It’s not generating leads.”

“These LinkedIn posts aren’t converting to sales. Let’s stop posting cold turkey.”

Sound familiar?

If you’ve worked in industrial marketing for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard some version of this from leadership when budgets get tight. And honestly, I get where they’re coming from.

When you’re staring down a spreadsheet, and someone’s asking you to justify every line item, content marketing can feel like an easy target. It’s hard to measure. It’s time-consuming. And unlike a trade show booth or a paid ad campaign, you can’t draw a neat little line from “blog post published” to “purchase order signed.”

But, cutting your content because you can’t trace a straight line to revenue is like ripping the foundation out of your house because you can’t see it from the street.

Let me explain.

You’re Not Selling Leggings

Stop treating high-ticket industrial products like they’re $30 athleisure leggings someone impulse buys from an Instagram ad.

I see this all the time. Companies apply B2C marketing logic to B2B industrial sales and then wonder why they’re not seeing the same immediate results.

Nobody is impulse-buying a quarter-million-dollar industrial compressor package.

Your buyers aren’t scrolling through LinkedIn, stumbling across a single case study, and thinking, “You know what? I’ve been meaning to replace our entire fluid handling system. Let me just add this to my cart real quick.”

That’s not how industrial purchasing works.

Industrial sales cycles are long. Like, really long. We’re talking 6, 12, sometimes 18+ months from initial awareness to signed contract.

During that time, your prospects are:

Researching solutions to problems they might not even fully understand yet

Comparing vendors (including your competitors)

Building internal consensus among engineers, plant managers, procurement teams, and executives

Justifying costs to leadership who want to know exactly why this purchase is necessary

Dealing with their own internal fires, deadlines, and competing priorities

And throughout all of that? They’re consuming content.

Your content.

Or your competitor’s content, if you’ve decided to stop producing yours.

Think Like a Spider

Industrial marketers need to think like spiders.

Spiders don’t build webs with one or two threads and hope some poor fly stumbles into them. They build intricate webs with dozens of interconnected strands, each one serving a purpose, each one increasing the odds that something valuable lands in their trap.

Your marketing strategy needs to work the same way.

Every blog post is a strand. Every LinkedIn update is a strand. Every case study, technical guide, product comparison sheet, and email newsletter are all strands.

It’s not about any single strand catching the fly.

It’s about the web.

The entire system working together.

The Attribution Trap

When a prospect finally converts, everyone wants to know which strand caught them.

“Was it the trade show?”

“Was it the email campaign?”

“Was it that blog post we published six months ago?”

Wrong question.

The answer is almost never a single touchpoint. It’s the accumulation of every touchpoint they encountered over months (or years) of their buying journey.

Maybe they first found you through organic search when they were Googling a technical problem. That blog post didn’t convert them; it just planted a seed.

Then maybe they saw your company pop up on LinkedIn a few times. Still didn’t convert. But now they recognized your name.

Then they downloaded a technical guide from your website. Still didn’t reach out. But now they trusted your expertise a little more.

Then they talked to a colleague at an industry event who mentioned they’d worked with you. Now they’re seriously considering you.

Then they finally filled out a contact form, talked to sales, and eventually signed.

Which touchpoint converted them?

All of them. None of them. The web.

But because that final form fill is the only thing that shows up in your CRM, that’s what gets the credit. And all those strands that made the web strong enough to catch them get dismissed as “not converting.”

What Happens When You Start Snipping

So, budgets get tight. Leadership wants to see ROI. And because content is hard to attribute, it ends up on the chopping block.

“Let’s pause the blog.”

“Let’s cut back to one LinkedIn post a week.”

“Let’s stop producing case studies until we can prove they’re working.”

Every time you do this, you’re putting holes in your web.

And prospects fly right through those holes, straight to your competitors.

The competitors who understand the long game. The ones who kept publishing while you went quiet. The ones whose names keep showing up in search results while yours disappeared. The ones who are building trust and credibility while you’re trying to figure out why your pipeline dried up.

Spiders with weak webs don’t eat.

And in industrial marketing, the companies with the strongest content webs are the ones feasting on all the flies.

What to Do Instead of Cutting Content

Look, I’m not naive. I understand that budgets are real, resources are finite, and you can’t just tell your CFO to “trust the process” when they’re asking for numbers.

But instead of cutting content entirely, here’s what I’d recommend:

Get Smarter About What You’re Producing

Not all content is created equal. If you’re producing generic, surface-level fluff that doesn’t actually resonate with your technical buyers, then yeah, that’s not going to perform.

Focus on specificity. Write content that demonstrates genuine expertise and speaks directly to the problems your ideal customers are actually dealing with. 

Track Leading Indicators, Not Just Conversions

Form fills and purchase orders are lagging indicators. By the time someone converts, they’ve already been influenced by your content dozens of times.

Instead, track things like:

• Organic search traffic growth
• Time on page for key resources
• Content engagement from target accounts
• How many touchpoints converted leads had before becoming customers

These won’t satisfy the “draw a straight line to revenue” crowd, but they’ll give you a much better picture of whether your content is actually working.

Think in Terms of Systems, Not Campaigns

Stop thinking about content as a series of one-off campaigns and start thinking about it as a system you’re building over time.

Each piece of content should serve a purpose in the larger ecosystem. Some pieces attract new visitors. Some pieces nurture existing leads. Some pieces help close deals. Some pieces support customer retention.

When you think systematically, you stop asking, “Did this single blog post generate leads?” and start asking, “Is my content system supporting the buyer journey?”

The Bottom Line

When someone suggests cutting your content because they can’t draw a straight line to revenue, remind them:

Industrial buying decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re made after months of research, comparison, and consensus-building. And content is what guides prospects through every stage of that journey while building trust in your expertise.

Cut your content, and you’re not saving money.

You’re handing market share to your competitors.

Spiders with weak webs don’t eat.

Build a stronger web.Want my team of industrial content specialists to help you build a web that actually catches flies? Request a proposal today.