Why “So What?” Is One of the Most Important Questions
in B2B Marketing

Early in my marketing career, I wrote some copy I was quite pleased with. I was still a junior, so I was keen to prove myself.

The CEO red-penned it. Next to a whole load of my carefully crafted copy, he wrote two words: “So what?”

At the time, it stung a bit. Looking back, it’s probably one of the best pieces of marketing advice I’ve ever been given, because I’d made a mistake that’s still incredibly common in B2B marketing. I’d explained the product. I hadn’t explained why the customer should care.

The problem with “good” B2B marketing

B2B companies have a lot to say. New products, new features, new technology, new capabilities. Years of experience, industry expertise, awards and accreditations. All of these things can be important to the business.

But there’s a difference between something being important to the business and being important to the customer. That’s where the “so what?” test comes in.

Take a product launch video. It might tell you the new product is 40% faster, more powerful, more efficient, easier to use, built on the latest technology. It all sounds impressive. Then ask: so what? Faster than what? More efficient for whom? What actually changes for the customer? That’s where messaging starts to become useful.

Features aren’t automatically benefits

Imagine a company says: “Our platform processes results 40% faster.” That’s a feature claim. It might be technically impressive, but it doesn’t tell the customer what they gain from it.

Now change the message: “Get the results you need in 30 minutes instead of an hour.” That’s easier to understand. But we can go one step further. What does getting those results faster actually enable? Maybe a lab team can make decisions sooner. Maybe a consultant can get information to a client the same day. Maybe a sales team can respond to an opportunity before a competitor does.

The important part is what being faster makes possible, not that the product is faster.

The “so what?” test works beyond product launches

This is a useful test for almost anything you put in front of a potential customer, not just product videos.

Your website. “We have over 25 years of industry experience.” So what? Does that mean you’ve seen the problem before? That you can reduce implementation risk? That you understand the regulatory environment and avoid mistakes a less experienced provider might make? The experience itself isn’t the message. The value created by that experience is.

Your content. “Download our latest report on industry trends.” So what? Why should someone spend 20 minutes reading it? Will it help them make a decision, avoid a risk, or make a stronger business case internally? If the answer isn’t obvious, the title probably isn’t doing enough work.

Your campaign. “Our new solution helps businesses improve efficiency.” So what? Does that mean less time on manual work, lower costs, fewer errors, faster turnaround? The more specific the outcome, the easier it is for the customer to see the relevance, rather than reading it as disconnected activity with no clear payoff.

The further you get from the customer, the easier it is to lose the point

This gets harder in complex B2B businesses. The people writing the marketing usually know the product extremely well. They’ve sat through the demos, read the documentation, heard the internal conversations. They know the terminology. The customer doesn’t have any of that context.

So the marketing starts to reflect what the business knows rather than what the customer needs to know, and you end up with websites and campaigns full of what we do, how we do it, what our technology can do, how long we’ve been doing it. Somewhere further down the page, the customer is still wondering: yes, but why does this matter to me?

Try asking “so what?” five times

One simple way to pressure-test your messaging is to keep asking the question.

“Our software automates reporting.” So what? It saves your team time. So what? They spend less time compiling reports manually. So what? They can spend more time analysing the information. So what? They can identify issues and opportunities sooner. So what? Your business can make decisions faster.

Now you’re getting close to something the customer actually cares about. The final answer won’t always be five steps away, sometimes the first “so what?” gets you there, sometimes you need to keep digging. The point is to keep moving away from what the product does and towards why the customer should care, not to mechanically ask the question five times.

“So what?” doesn’t mean removing the detail

There’s an important distinction here. Good B2B marketing shouldn’t dumb complicated products down. If you’re marketing scientific equipment, financial services, technology or professional services, the detail can matter. The problem is when the detail becomes the message.

Technical information should help the customer understand the value. It shouldn’t make the customer work to find it. You can still talk about specifications, capabilities, processes and technology, just make sure there’s a clear connection between those things and the problem they’re helping the customer solve.

A simple test for your next campaign

Before signing off your next product launch video, website headline, landing page, sales presentation, email campaign, case study, LinkedIn post or brochure, read it as if you were the customer. Then ask: “so what?”

If the answer is immediately obvious, you’re probably on the right track. If you need three paragraphs to answer it, the message probably needs more work. And if your internal team responds with “well, obviously the customer needs to know that”, that’s a good sign to ask the question again, because what’s obvious to the business isn’t always obvious to the buyer.

I didn’t fix it after one red pen mark

I’d love to say that one red pen mark cured me for good. It didn’t.

The mistake kept turning up in email campaigns, especially for complex products. It’s an easy trap with that kind of copy specifically. You’re describing something genuinely sophisticated, so it feels like the sophistication itself is the message. Line after line explaining what the product does and how it does it, with the actual reason someone should open the email buried somewhere near the bottom, if it’s there at all.

It took a few more rounds of writing those campaigns, watching the open rates and the silence that followed, before “so what?” properly stuck as a habit rather than a memory of being told off.

A lesson I still use

That CEO’s red pen taught me something as a junior marketer that I still use more than a decade later. Marketing doesn’t get better just because you add more information. Sometimes the opposite is true. The job is to work out what matters, make the value clear, and give the customer a reason to care.

So before you ask whether your next piece of marketing looks good, sounds clever or explains the product properly, ask the question that’s stayed with me since those early days: so what?

If you can’t answer it clearly, your customer probably can’t either.

Want to check your own copy against it right now? The “So What?” Scorer flags every unanswered claim in whatever you paste in and rewrites it for you, free to try, no login.

If getting this discipline into your marketing consistently is the actual problem, that's usually a sign the business needs fractional marketing leadership, not another round of copy edits.

Common questions

What is the “so what?” test in marketing?

The “so what?” test is a simple way to pressure-test any piece of marketing by repeatedly asking what a feature, claim or credential actually means for the customer. Instead of stopping at a stated fact, faster, more experienced, more efficient, you keep asking “so what?” until you reach an outcome the customer would recognise as genuinely valuable to them.

What’s the difference between a feature and a benefit in B2B marketing?

A feature is a fact about the product or business, a percentage improvement, a number of years of experience, a piece of technology. A benefit is what that fact makes possible for the customer: faster decisions, lower risk, less manual work. The “so what?” test is one way to move from stating features to explaining the benefit they create.