B2B marketing is actually pretty simple, except when you make it complicated.

Hello, marketer.

A new year has begun. It’s time you sit down with your marketing team and brainstorm on your organization’s B2B marketing strategy. If you get the strategy right, you are one step away from building valuable leads, generating positive brand awareness and build a foundation of trust with your audience. On the flip side, if you get it wrong, let’s just say it’s goodbye to your precious time and marketing budget.

Want to get your B2B marketing strategy right? Read on to learn about the B2B marketing mistakes you most certainly need to avoid.

Mistake #1 – Plan?? Errr… What’s that?

Post a blog today. Let’s create an infographic for tomorrow. What about the day after?

Are you one of the marketers who goes into posting random pieces of information on your social media handles without really having a reason or necessity for it?

You may want to think again. Random pieces of content are not going to take your marketing efforts anywhere. Rather, it may just confuse your audience and tick them off.

Don’t just invest time in creating digital collaterals. Plan to have industry-specific events and collaterals related to the event. Design landing pages or micro-sites with valuable information. This will help you build your contacts database and generate leads.

B2B marketing strategy is just not about posting random bits of information on your org’s social media handles. It is extremely important to chart out your goal, vision and the purpose of any piece of digital content you put out for your audience to consume.

Where do you want to see your org’s brand in the next few months? How many visitors or leads do you wish to capture through your marketing efforts? How will your marketing contribute to that goal?

These are a few questions that you need to find answers to before charting out your B2B marketing plan.

You can get somewhere only if you know where you want to go, right?

 

Mistake #2 – UX is not important!

User experience?

That’s only for websites, correct?

No.

You couldn’t have been more mistaken if you think UX is reserved only for designing and developing websites.

Think about what you want to achieve through your B2B marketing strategy. You wish to win audiences trust and build relationships that will ultimately pull sales for your organisation. Audiences are not going to return to your brand unless you create lasting impressions that will make a positive difference. It is all about the experience you offer to your audience through the content you publish.

UX is as much a marketer’s responsibility, as it is of the development team. The digital content that you create throughout sales funnel is a means to communicate with your audience. Chart out customer personas and make the communication worthwhile by providing persona specific experiences.

Any layman should be able to understand what you intend to say. That is usability.

 

Mistake #3 – It’s all about me!

You think blowing your own trumpet on social media is going to win you followers and leads? Think again.

You are highly mistaken if you think that marketing is all about the brand. It is far from it.

It’s fine to talk about your brand and how it can help the audience in solving their problem. But make sure that’s not what you are focusing on always.

Content marketing, whether B2B or B2C, is all about the customer. It is about providing value to the people who are consuming your content. It is about resolving problems that customers may have.

Self-promotion is fine; but make sure you maintain a balance by providing the users with something of value and interest.

With all the automation that is happening to marketing efforts across organisations, content has become robotic. It has lost its human touch. Bring it upon yourself to make B2B marketing more human by engaging in meaningful conversations with your audience.

 

Mistake #4 – I don’t look at analytics

Here’s a situation. Imagine you are on a plane. You get to know that the pilot is blind. He cannot use his instruments, nor can he see where he is going. How would you feel flying on that plane?

Not having analytics set up or not measuring key-metrics is precisely the same thing as flying the plane without seeing where you’re going. It’s not going to end too well, now is it?

You have free tools at your disposal (Google Analytics, for example) which help you get a feel of which piece of content is working for you, and which one isn’t. These tools offer you a glimpse into what users are doing on your website, what they like and what they don’t. They help you measure your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

 

Mistake #5 – A/B testing… What’s A and B?

You’ve put up your website after a lot of research and effort. It’s now time to put your legs up and relax.

Knock knock.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you can’t rest, yet. What is a B2B marketing strategy that doesn’t involve testing? What works with your audience and what doesn’t? Though you’ve done research on what your audience wants, you can never be sure until you put your website to test.

Moving a CTA button just a few centimeters to the left or the right, or even changing the colour of the CTA button, can improve your conversions to a large extent.

There are many free tools like Google’s Optimize, Convert.com or Optimizely to test your websites for conversions.

A few small changes here and there can make a huge difference to your marketing efforts.

Mistake #6 – Quantity is more important than quality

Alright. You’ve just brought out the big guns and shooting out content in all directions. You are bombarding audiences with content they aren’t ready for or have no time to see. After all the efforts you put in to create an original piece of content, you’d be heartbroken if it isn’t received well enough, isn’t it?

Well, I accept quantity is important. But certainly not over the quality of content.

Spamming users with content is not the way to start meaningful engagements. Take your time and invest in creating content that is high in quality. Your aim should be to create content that is valuable and useful to the user.

 

Mistake #7 – All I want is TEXT

The entire world is blogging away. And so you decide, blogging is THE way forward in your B2B marketing strategy. You put up blocks and blocks of content on your website and your social media handles and can’t wait for your users to get impressed and sign up.

WRONG!

Nobody in today’s world has the patience or the time to go through huge chunks of content that seem never-ending.

Research shows that people remember only 10% of any information they read three days later. However, if the same information is paired with a relevant image, people retained 65% of the information three days later. This shows that visuals hold a vital place in transmitting your messaging across to the user. Visuals make for better viewing and better relatability.

There are many free tools available for marketers today (Canva, for example) to make engaging and attractive visuals like images or infographics. Use these tools to make your content interesting.

 

Mistake #8 – I want to be perfect

It is good to aim for perfection, but a waste of time waiting for your B2B marketing strategy to get perfect. How do you know if your strategy is the pinnacle of perfection if you do not put it to test with your audience? How will you get feedback on what to change and what to keep?

It is important that you get your plan out to your audience, and get them to react to it. Only then will you know what’s working for you and what is not.

This gives you the opportunity to tweak the rest of the content you have planned for and give your audience what they really want.

Your B2B marketing strategy has the potential to make or break your business. Be careful to avoid these mistakes to get your strategy right this year!

Here’s to a rocking year ahead.

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References:

https://www.smartinsights.com/b2b-digital-marketing/b2b-strategy/top-10-mistakes-b2b-marketing/

https://b2bprblog.marxcommunications.com/b2bpr/5-common-mistakes-in-b2b-content-marketing

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy