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As a B2B marketer, you probably know how incredibly powerful content marketing is in terms of persuading your prospects to consider your product or services.
Studies show that 51% of B2B consumers rely on content before making a buying decision. Also, 47% read about 3 to 5 content pieces before interacting with a sales representative. These figures indicate a massive opportunity for B2B technology organizations and companies.
However, with B2B technology marketing, there are certain common mistakes you might want to avoid if you wish to achieve your marketing goals. In this blog, we will be covering five major B2B tech marketing blunders and ways to avoid them.
1. Starting Without a Strategy
In the B2B marketing landscape, you are not going to gain much from your campaigns without a strategy.
Content marketing is not easy, it takes effort, and with B2B’s longer sales cycle, it is going to take some time before you see results. Despite the fact that 89 percent of B2B sales reps use content marketing to appeal to their target prospects, only 41 percent claim to have yield success from their content marketing initiatives.
Source: Content Marketers
What you need is precise and clear targets and a strategy to achieve them. Start with your objective in mind (for instance, attract more prospects), and work backward.
A B2B company whose content marketing isn’t sophisticated or mature, and therefore, less successful is a company without a well-documented strategy.
Do you know your audience and their needs? What type of content they prefer, and when to send them? But most importantly, how are you going to measure success? When planning your content marketing initiatives, these are some important questions you need to answer first.
Anything else is an attempt that has a very little chance of success, and it generally shows in the end result. Hence, start by making a strategy based on your company goals, and ensure that it’s solid before writing a single word.
2. Fails To Make It Customer-Centric
Of all the marketing blunders you can make, this is the biggest one.
Most B2B organizations make the mistake of focusing too much on pitching how great their products or services are. While it may seem like a fantastic marketing approach, it isn’t something your audience would be interested in.
The one thing that prospects care about when they visit your website is this – How can you be of help to them? All they want to know is how your services or products can fix their issue.
So, if you use phrases such as “Our app is the best in the market and far better than other brands,” rather than “our app helps you in managing schedules, payrolls, and sending paychecks with ease,” you’re doing it all wrong.
To avoid this B2B technology marketing blunder, you need to revise your website content and inspect it from your audience’s perspective. Are you targeting and addressing your prospect’s pain points? If not, make sure you revise the content to show how your company can help your audience.
3. Doesn’t Align With The Buyers Journey
In a recent report by CMI, approximately 50% of respondents, regardless of their organization’s size, said they make content for the beginning stage of the sales funnel, with 22% claiming to make it for mid-funnel.
The survey also suggests that only 14 percent of businesses created final-stage content meant to facilitate an actual purchase. As you can see, this is a missed opportunity. If your B2B prospects can’t find the insights they require to support a big purchase, they will go to a different vendor.
So, to avoid making this marketing mistake, plan your content to aid each stage of the buyer’s journey. Remember that not all types will work for every buying funnel stage. For instance, in-person events, social posts, and blog articles work best for branding. Likewise, webinars, virtual events, and case studies are great for converting leads into sales.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
The outcome for each content type will vary from one company to another; therefore it’s important to determine the type that’s worked best for you previously and also the type of content that performs well for other B2B sales reps.
4. Not Publishing Frequently
This one’s a bit tricky. How much content should you be creating? How much will be too much?
While quality over quantity does matter in B2B marketing, it is also important for you to build some sort of brand awareness. This will help you establish trust with your target audience.
So, how do you do that? The best way to do this is by consistently publishing content that offers value to your readers without always trying to sell.
Remember that great content helps in establishing strong relationships with your prospects and existing buyers as well. Hence, you shouldn’t always be focusing on selling when you create your content.
However, if it makes sense or fits naturally within the value content you’re offering, you should certainly mention your products. When you offer a consistent stream of content that’s truly helpful to your audience, it doesn’t seem self-serving or feels forceful to ask for the sale.
5. Failing to Create Evergreen Content
This is another common B2B technology marketing blunder and an unfortunate outcome of producing content without a proper plan.
In hopes of ranking at the top of the SEO results, too many B2B marketers make the mistake of publishing multiple new posts after another. Content created only for SEO will quickly end up becoming irrelevant if it’s not detailed or helpful. Consequently, all the efforts in creating it will go to waste.
However, you can avoid making such a marketing mistake by creating evergreen content – one that won’t become outdated. It’s the type of content that will remain as relevant as the day it was first published. Evergreen content is one that addresses a common issue of your prospects and offers actionable insights to solve it.
There you have it – the five major B2B technology marketing blunders that you need to be avoiding right now in order to yield high returns on your marketing efforts.
