Common Content Marketing Mistakes B2B Marketers Should Avoid
Are you sticking to a content strategy impactful enough to engage the audiences and help you accomplish your marketing & sales goals? With the right content strategy, your business can harvest the maximum returns. However, the B2B marketers often fall prey to certain common content marketing mistakes, reducing the vigor of their content strategy & dwindling the returns harvested from the investment made in executing a multi-channel content strategy.
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According to Jeff Bullas, CEO of Jeffbullas.com Pty Ltd, “If you love what you’re doing… that will make it so much easier to actually sit down & create content, inspire, entertain & educate. That’s what’s really important.”
A strategic content strategy executed right, fetches numerous benefits for a brand in terms of boosting the branding endeavors & sales revenue. The problem starts when the common content marketing mistakes loop in. These mistakes can appear in front of your business in diverse permutations & combinations including having no clear plan to execute content strategy, not having enough knowledge of your niche & customers & not doing your research right while crafting the pieces of content.
We have summed down the common content marketing mistakes B2B marketers should avoid boosting their content marketing endeavors & aid to business bottom lines:
1. Not Employing Data-Driven Research:
The modern age content marketing needs to be data-driven. Not assimilating data-backed insights in your content strategy is amongst the common content marketing mistakes. Your customers are everywhere on the digitized platform & across the web. The data being generated by them from the Internet of Things (IoT) put together is humongous.
A well-articulated content strategy needs to be directed towards the insights fetched from data. Know who your customers are. Plan your targeting campaigns to carter to the specific needs of the customers. The intent data of the prospects coupled with their browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behavior and other insights such as demographic & firmographic details help marketers in the precise targeting of the personas.
The clustering of the prospects into several segments & sub-segments & executing a content strategy to suit the stages of the customers in their buying cycles is possible only if you create, tailor, review & execute a hyper-tailored content strategy that is both data-driven & agile.
Read more on 13 Ways Agile Content Marketing Benefits B2B Enterprises
2. A Content Strategy Devoid of KPIs:
One of the biggest content marketing mistakes that B2B marketers should avoid is to execute a content strategy bereft of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Your KPIs are your way to analyze, measure & evaluate if at all your content strategy is in the alignment of your marketing & organizational goals & what roads you can take to further improve on your content strategy.
For example, for the brands who wish to boost their branding through content strategy, the content KPIs may include the ones such as organic visits, impressions, average time on page, shares, etc. On the flip side if the main goal of your content strategy is lead generation, then your content KPIs can include metrics such as downloads, form submission, phone calls & similar other metrics. Not defining the content KPIs is definitely bad content marketing & a content marketing mistake that the marketers should avoid.
The following quote by author Karl Pearson reveals that quantification is critical to the success of your business, “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured & reported back the rate of improvement accelerates.”
Defining, monitoring & optimization of the top of funnel KPIs, middle funnel KPIs and bottom-funnel KPIs can help in strengthening the sales pipeline & boosting the revenue generated.
3. Producing Poor Quality Content:
This is probably the gravest content marketing mistake that marketers can make. The landscape of content marketing is far too competitive to spare content strategy mistakes. The poor quality means writing pieces of content just for the heck of it & not focusing so much on how relevant it is for the prospective customers.
Also, a content strategy devoid of data-driven insights is pretty mundane & boring. Concentrate on creating the pieces of content that are in alignment with the areas of interest of the prospects.
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Often writing sales content and being too promotional too soon backfires. Amongst common content marketing mistakes is creating a piece of content that isn’t in synchronization with your brand messaging. Such content comes across as abrasive and pushy & is a big turn-off for the buyers.
When creating the pieces of content, marketers should display a high level of expertise, authority & trustworthiness through their content. This process is often recognized by the acronym E-A-T (Expert, Authority & Trustworthiness). Google ranks the pieces of content in order of relevance to the online users based on the philosophy of E-A-T. Violation of the E-A-T strategy is not only detrimental to the interest of the searchers but also to the businesses and is amongst the deadliest content marketing mistakes.
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4. Forgetting to Add CTAs (Call-to-Action):
A content strategy that doesn’t serve a purpose is not going to establish a connection with potential customers. The entire point of content marketing is to build a relationship with potential customers to generate leads.
Not adding CTAs to your content strategy is definitely one of the gravest content marketing mistakes as CTAs provide a logical next step for potential leads to follow.
Letting the customers know what path you want them to follow next, doesn’t guarantee that they will follow it; nonetheless, it certainly makes it easy for people who like to follow the next steps towards the purchase to follow a defined path.
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5. Ignoring SEO:
You may have written the best piece of content to reflect your subject-matter-expertise; nonetheless, all the practices are futile unless your content isn’t discovered by the search engine & doesn’t gain the requisite reach amongst the potential customers.
So, the marketers need to adhere to the best SEO practices so that they can serve the pieces of content tailored to the specific buying cycles of the prospects across multiple channels.
SEO is an ever-changing game & marketers need to make sure that they abide by the latest SEO practices to scale up their content strategy.
Read more on Google Algorithmic Update: SEO Best Practices for B2B Brands
6. Having no Plan to Magnify your Content Outreach:
You have created the right content strategy but if you fail to market it right, you fail at your objective of reaping the maximum out of your content marketing endeavors. Website owners should employ the cost per click (CPC) advertising and pay the publisher whenever an ad is clicked on.
Marketers need to keep abreast of the evolving PPC trends ranging from paid social to strategies for multichannel attribution.
It has been observed that employing the best SEO practices in conjunction with the best PPC campaigns helps marketers in gaining optimal high-quality traffic as well as in optimizing their marketing endeavors across omnichannel.
Not employing apt promotional campaigns to your marketing mix can disfigure your content marketing & it can prove to be amongst the gravest content marketing mistakes.
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7. Not Employing the Omnichannel Retargeting Framework:
If you give up on your customers, your customers will give up on you. Omnichannel retargeting is a cookie-based technique followed by the visitors across the web, once they have visited your website.
Smarter re-engagement across omnichannel engages the customers better & accelerates sales conversions.
On the other hand, a mono-channel targeting strategy might lose its essence once the customers migrate to another website from the parent website. It might also be the time where your potential customers are taken away by your competitors. Therefore, having an omnichannel retargeting framework is an absolute necessity for your company.
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Omnichannel remarketing is effective as customers are interested in engaging the brands through paid search.
8. Not Using Content Optimization & Performance Testing Techniques:
Your content strategy needs to be reshuffled time & again to keep abreast of the latest marketing & advertising trends. Performance testing is an art that puts multiple pieces of content against each other, in the same circumstances to test the effectiveness of the pieces of content.
A/B Testing or “split” testing is critical to digital marketers. It is a randomized experiment where the two alternative formats of the same piece of content are presented in equal scale to different viewers.
The process of content optimization starts with postulating the right problem statements & posing them in the form of a question. The right questions for content marketers can be based on a number of assumptions or trends witnessed through user-generated content or social listening. The question can be as simple as, “How to increase the total number of visitors on your website?”
Creating an appropriate hypothesis & prediction based on the content trends lies at the heart of your content marketing endeavors. The hypothesis is finally tested for its alternative forms, employing the A/B testing format and is either accepted or rejected. Following the hypothesis testing, marketers can analyze the data from content KPIs to make out whether they are sticking to the right content strategy or making some content marketing mistakes.
Jordan Johnson, Manager of Digital Optimization for Southwest Airlines says, “Testing and targeting needs a holistic approach…it is more than just understanding whether a red or blue button works better. It’s testing hypothesis to find theories about the effectiveness of your content.”
To avoid making any content marketing mistakes & to boost your content strategy the marketers need to employ advanced content management platforms like the Adobe Marketing Cloud & HubSpot, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce, all of which represent great resources to optimize B2B content strategies & reduce the content marketing mistakes.
9. Not Promoting Your Content Enough:
According to a study published by Stanford University, less than 1% of the total content published goes viral.
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Nevertheless, marketers need to focus on the omnichannel promotion of their pieces of content to the most relevant target groups. Not promoting your content enough is amongst the most recurrent content marketing mistakes that the B2B marketers should avoid.
10. Not Repurposing your Content:
A stagnant content strategy is amongst the most disastrous content marketing mistakes. While always, as a rule, you’ll create blog posts that will be evergreen; there will be a considerable number of the blogs published on your website that will be based on seasonal trend analysis.
Over a period of time, the blogs need to be repurposed, the statistics need to be updated & some vital conclusions need to be re-written.
Also, the blog posts may be repurposed in several alternative forms including slideshares, vlogs, video posts, infographics & vice-versa.
Marketers should ensure that they spend some time repurposing the already published content to avoid one of the most common content marketing mistakes & to keep their content in an animated state.
Read more on 5 Remarkable Ways to Repurpose Content in B2B Marketing
Wrapping Up
Content marketing has always been an impactful way of providing potential customers with valuable answers on the topic that they are researching. Customers come to the brands only when they’re ready to make a purchase. The entire phase of customer research is directed majorly by content marketing in ways more than one & avoiding the above-mentioned content marketing mistakes equips the marketers to get the maximum profitability of our marketing endeavors.
Content marketing is a dynamic & evolving field, where ideas keep on flowing. While some pay off, while the others flop sooner or later. Experimenting & establishing what works & what doesn’t will keep your content strategy viable for good; nonetheless, the abovementioned content marketing mistakes should be avoided at all costs as they immobilize your content marketing ROI.
Valasys Media is a well-renowned B2B company helping its clients with tailored B2B services such as Content Syndication, Lead Generation, Contact Discovery, Account-Based Marketing, Lead Nurturing & Appointment Setting to help them achieve their fundamental marketing goals.
Contact us to explore your content optimization & promotion options or for any other help to direct your marketing endeavors to maximized output.
