Have you ever wondered why your B2B content marketing efforts fail to resonate with your audience?
Could it be that a few common content marketing mistakes are to blame?
In an era saturated with marketing content, recognizing and avoiding these blunders isn't just wise—it's imperative. This article unveils the critical B2B content marketing mistakes to avoid, providing you with a smarter, more effective path forward. Because, let's be honest, success in today's digital landscape is no accident—it's the result of a systematic strategy to attract, engage, and convert buyers. Read on to discover the missteps that could be costing you not just leads but valuable time and resources.
B2B content marketing is an omnichannel approach to building brand awareness and trust through the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content, ultimately driving action. Unlike B2C marketing, which emphasizes emotional buying triggers, the best B2B content marketing focuses on meeting the buyer where they are in the journey, educating them, addressing their problems and objections, and helping them confidently strive toward their desired business outcomes.
The biggest mistake we see B2B brands make with their content marketing is the lack of a unified message with a clear and consistent value proposition. Frequently this is due to the content itself being created in silos, with one team handling social media while another is sending email newsletters and with blogs and website content often outsourced to third-party vendors or freelancers.
Sure, it’s understandable for bootstrapped B2Bs to be a little scrappy, but failure to deliver a cohesive message across the multi-channel, multi-touch (and often multiple stakeholder) B2B buyer journey will only lead to confusion, disinterest, and waste of valuable resources. Solidifying your messaging is the first and most crucial step in developing a successful B2B content marketing strategy, one that will also inform how your sales team talks about your product, and how your CEO fields press inquiries and other PR opportunities.
There are few better ways to spend a lot of money and generate very little ROI than trying to create every blog, webinar, podcast, social media post, or email nurture from scratch. For B2B content creation, repurposing is essential. For every long-form piece of content your team creates, an exponential number of short-form pieces of content can be created from it.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it’s a waste of time and effort to do so. Extract quotes, bullet points, and highlights and use them for social posts. Summarize the content and make it the topic of your next email newsletter. Take that podcast and transcribe it into a blog post. You get the picture. The goal is to maximize the breadth of each piece of original content and squeeze it for all it’s worth. A content distribution strategy can help you maximize your content creation efforts and get the most out of your marketing budget.
While repurposing content is key to efficiency (and not burning out your marketing team), it’s still vital that content be tailored to the platform or channel it is slated for. Keeping ideal character counts, image ratios, and video length in mind will help your content perform better on each platform and appear ‘native’ to users, providing a more engaging experience. Additionally, content should be tweaked to address the subtle differences in audiences across platforms. What is trending on TikTok, for example, might not be appropriate for your LinkedIn audience. The better you know your ideal customers, the easier it will be to adjust content for both the channel and the audience it attracts.
Another common mistake? Focusing only on the sales pitch in your messaging. By weaving in an awareness of the B2B customer journey, brands can speak to customers at every stage of the buying process, from the time they become aware of a problem 'til the moment they decide on a solution. By putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can anticipate their questions, sympathize with their challenges, and help address their objections, keeping them moving along the path to purchase, all through strategic content marketing.
So, you’ve launched a B2B video marketing campaign, started repurposing content, and are weaving in your knowledge of the customer journey, well done. But how are your CTAs? Are you telling people what to do at the end of each video? Are you prompting them to book a call or download a resource in your blog posts? Are you encouraging likes and shares on your social posts? Producing great content on the right channels with the right message will get you in front of the right audience, but then what?
If you don’t tell them what to do, or encourage them to stay engaged, they may just wander off. Once you’ve captured their attention, whether it's for 10 seconds or 10 minutes, don’t skip the chance to keep them engaged. Leverage CTAs to encourage them to take the next logical step, whether it's reading a related article or signing up for an email newsletter.
It pains me to think that some brands are still just throwing up content without considering SEO, but lo and behold, it still happens. If you are creating long-form content without a proper SEO strategy including keyword research as well as on-and off-page best practices, you are shooting your content in the metaphorical foot. SEO is how the search engines determine who you are and what you’re about. It also helps them understand how much authority you have on a given topic which directly impacts where your content and website show up in search results. Skipping SEO on blogs, videos, and your website design and copy broadly stunts your ability to grow because it keeps you from being found by prospective customers. Who can afford that?
So, are you merely participating in the game of content marketing, or are you strategically engaging to win?
Remember, without a unified message, mindfulness of the customer's journey, and a convergent strategy you're wasting valuable time and resources on marketing that not only will not convert, it may cost you your market position. Your content is the voice of your brand ethos and the bridge to your customer's loyalty—it’s foolish not to maximize its potential and tailor it to your ideal audience. By avoiding these content marketing mistakes and adopting a refined approach that understands the criticality of every piece of content, you can ensure that your B2B content marketing doesn't just meet the mark—it sets it.
If managing a comprehensive content marketing strategy seems too big to tackle on your own, we’re here to help. At Brand Theory, content strategy is one of the key components of our growth marketing framework. We help brands leverage high-impact content across channels by diving deep into what makes their solution, and their audiences unique. Our proven system uses content to drive traffic, increase leads, and boost conversions, helping brands grow profitably and predictably over time. Find out more by booking a no-obligation introduction to Brand Theory today.