Common Mistakes B2B Companies Make with Their Content
Building a strong brand is critical to your success, but it’s not just about you. A good brand development strategy will take the consumer into consideration and focus efforts on reaching the right people. Unfortunately, B2B marketing mistakes are easy to make and even easier to overlook. When you’re putting together your B2B marketing plan, particularly in terms of content, it’s important to learn the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
What Is Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy relates to your methods of making your brand more recognizable to your visitors. You need to make sure consumers can easily identify you over your competitors. There are many elements to your branding strategy, including your content marketing, which is designed to set your business apart from others who offer similar products and services.
Too Much Self-Promotion
One of the biggest B2B marketing mistakes is exercising too much self-promotion. While it makes sense your brand development strategy promotes your company, you don’t want to be overly promotional. It all depends on the type of content you are creating. For instance, your webpages should be somewhat promotional in nature. However, your blog posts should focus on being more informational, giving your readers the answers to any questions they may have. Self-promotion in your blog and other similar content types can turn visitors away from your company instead of toward it.
Not Targeting the Right Audience
Some companies think they know who their target audience is and begin creating content based on this information. However, if they haven’t completed proper research, they could easily be targeting the wrong people or missing out on a significant portion of their target audience. Unfortunately, most businesses can’t effectively create content that meets the needs of all of their customers at once. Instead, you need to create branded content for each segment of your target audience to make sure you can effectively reach everyone.
Failure to Stick to a Schedule
B2B marketing strategies should address how often you create and post new content. There is often a delicate balance between too often and not often enough. With a little trial and error, you can determine the appropriate posting frequency, both for your blog and your social media sites. This will help you reach your target audience without allowing them to forget about you or making them feel like you are trying too hard.
Doing It Alone
When you create your B2B marketing plan, you may think it’s best to handle it all yourself. After all, you know your business better than anyone. Unfortunately, many business owners aren’t well versed in the best tactics for search engine optimization and content marketing. This can cause your content to perform in a way you didn’t expect. In most cases, it’s best to hire a content marketing team to help with your efforts.
Not Measuring the Results
Your brand development strategy isn’t likely to be perfect from the start. This is why it’s important to closely monitor performance and track the conversion results for all of your marketing efforts. If you don’t take the time to closely monitor and track your marketing tactics, any inefficiency that exists will continue to exist, costing you more business. However, if you can identify these problems in the early stages, you can make adjustments to your plan that will benefit your business.
Not Multi-Tasking
Creating content is a lot of work, but you can reduce the amount of money you spend on content creation by multi-tasking with that content. For instance, you can take a series of blog posts related to a specific topic and transform them into an eBook you can use as a lead generation tool. You can also repurpose some of your content into videos, and longer content can be trimmed down into smaller pieces. The options are limitless.
Making these and other B2B marketing mistakes can have a negative impact on the success of your business. Unfortunately, many B2B businesses forget about these elements when creating their brand development strategy. Taking another look at your B2B marketing plan will help you identify whether you are making these mistakes so you can correct them.
If you’re looking for a team to help with your brand development strategy, contact us. We can help you create the content you need to reach your audience and increase your sales.
