Aaron Agius is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning global marketing agency Louder.Online.
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According to research, B2B decision-makers read an average of 13 pieces of content before buying. Your content is what can make or break their decision to go forward with your firm. But let’s face it, a lot of B2B content out there is boring and doesn’t generate leads or sales.
Let’s say your blog follows a content schedule, you post consistently as you’ve been told to do, and you go after low competition keywords, but you still don’t see results.
For your marketing strategy to work, you need to understand how to generate more impact and high-value leads with your B2B content. Your content might be failing due to one or more of these common mistakes:
Selling to Businesses
When people think of a B2B strategy, their tone and messaging become overly professional. It’s easy to assume that business decisions are driven by logic, data and technical terms. Don’t get me wrong, those do need to be included in B2B content. But don’t make that an excuse to publish dry content.
You’re still selling to people. You’re selling to the newly promoted sales manager of a SaaS company or the director who can’t keep up with the latest trends in the industry.
Target your prospect’s specific pain point and reestablish your authority. Add in some humor, inject a relatable anecdote or share a success story.
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Most importantly, don’t hide behind your brand; humanize it. People love buying, but people don’t like being sold to. Let your content be the bridge to help people understand the “why” behind your business, not just the “what.”
Giving Away Too Little for Free
I understand the reluctance to share core business strategies and keep them as guarded secrets. But this mindset is costing you leads. B2B blogs with educational content receive 52% more traffic than ones that just have promotional content.
Influence is the key in today’s buyer journey. According to Forrester, 70%-90% of the B2B buyer journey is already over before a business even reaches out to you. People increasingly want to understand what you can do for them (and how), and your educational content is your chance to establish that authority.
Give prospects the strategies that others charge for. Share real-life case studies of the work you’ve done for other businesses and the step-by-step breakdown.
If you help a prospect generate some results with your free content, you’re probably the first person they’re going to think of when they hit a roadblock. Strategies need to be customized to specific situations to work at their full potential anyways, and you can take advantage of this.
Most B2B companies struggle with implementation, so identify topics that address a specific problem that your product solves. Let your content demonstrate your expertise and how you’ve solved that issue for other clients.
The more detailed you are, the better chance you have of generating results.
Restricting Your Free Content
Please don’t put your educational content behind an elaborate content wall where your prospects have to fill in 20 details to access it.
Consider this: How often have you entered your details to gain information if you don’t know the company? How often have you simply closed the website and returned to the search engine results to find something that answers your query quicker?
Restricting your content decreases not only your impact but also the shareability of that content. In the B2B industry, where there are so many stakeholders, you want your content to be as shareable as possible.
Give before you ask. Let your content educate. And then people will be more likely to respond to your calls to action.
Inadequate Partners
Forty-nine percent of B2B companies outsource their content creation and marketing tasks. But finding the right partners with considerable topic expertise, who understand your audience and who consistently deliver on time, can be a struggle.
Some companies settle for the cheapest content provider to save a few dollars. But this is one area where you can’t settle and still expect results. Good quality content can get your company the most bang for your buck. And when content is the piece that moves your business, can you afford to skimp?
Invest in good-quality partners. Invest in storytellers.
The best way to find ideal partners is to get referrals from other businesses and ask for examples of the content provider’s work in your industry.
Not Assessing the Quality of Your Content Periodically
Is the vendor you outsourced sections of your content to not delivering the same quality as before? Has your content strategy floundered during the actual execution stage?
This is perfectly normal. And it’s the reason why you need to reassess existing pieces of content regularly instead of solely focusing on pushing out new ones. Your content has to be authoritative, not merely fill up an editorial schedule.
If you’re worried about scale, you don’t need 10,000 visitors to make sales, especially in the B2B sector. Instead, you need a cohesive strategy that will funnel your visitors into prospects and, finally, into customers.
Take them on a journey with your written content. Include relevant and exciting visuals. Scrap pieces of content that don’t fulfill this end goal. Refresh old content if it has gone out of date.
Keeping pieces of content on your website that leave the reader confused is hurting you more than you think. Don’t give them a reason to go to your competitors for answers just because you left an outdated strategy from 2018 on there.
Your Focus Moving Forward
B2B content is inherently tricky because its primary goal is generating leads. It’s even more complicated because you’re dealing with a web of stakeholders, each with a different level of knowledge.
Your content strategy has to identify and engage the right people at the right part of their buying journey.
Avoid these common mistakes to prevent lackluster content, and get clear on who your buyer is and where their journey leads next.
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Author: Aaron Agius, Forbes Councils Member
