Guest Post: 5 Ruinous B2B Content Marketing Glitches to Avoid

Our guest post author shares insights into 5 lethal B2B content marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided with a little effort.

Did you know that around 64% of buyers conduct their research on vendor websites before contacting your sales rep? And at least 47% of them read/view three to five pieces of content before initiating any engagement. According to GetAccept’s UK B2B sales statistics, 59% of the B2B buyers even consult industry or peer reviews websites like G2 and Capterra.

From the above stats, we can conclude that content is quite important to move your B2B audience further in the funnel, right? But do we actually pay attention to this marketing strategy? Because 1/3rd of B2B buyers say that when they research, they can’t find the right information they need to make a decision - neither on vendor websites nor on the peer review websites.

The information they do find on your websites is either not applicable to their direct purchase (according to 37% of buyers) or it doesn’t prove ROI (according to 29% of buyers).

So maybe you are not creating the right content or are making some lethal content marketing mistakes that you need to stop right NOW!

In this article, we are going to focus on the mistakes part, to be specific, 5 lethal B2B content marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided with a little effort.

Let’s explore.

5 Ruinous B2B Content Marketing Glitches to Avoid If You Want Results

Before we start with the list, the content aspect of marketing is quite tricky and not an easy feat to undertake. So, don’t be too hard on yourself if things aren’t as rosy as you might want. It takes consistent efforts before you see any major results and it takes a lot of failed content ideas before you create a masterpiece that strikes the right chord with your audience.

So, let’s see which mistakes you might be making in your content and the easy ways to avoid them to elevate the quality of your content.

1. Sales-driven Content

One thing I personally hate is going on the blog section of a website and finding only sales-driven content. For example, ‘How Our Product is the Best in the Biz’, ‘We’ve Mastered the Art of Creating XYZ Products’, and the likes.

Every type of content has its place in the funnel. Don’t be sales-y all the time - it can cost you a potential customer as well. Craft content for every stage of the funnel that’ll not only nurture your customers but would also establish trust among them, hence building a solid foundation for long-term relationships.

Sales-driven content like datasheets, case studies, whitepapers, product-specific articles, etc. can be of great use at the consideration or the decision stage of the inbound funnel.

How to Avoid this Mistake:

• • Go back to the whiteboard and create a detailed persona of your buyers/readers.
  • Analyze the stages of the funnel where content can help your customers.
  • Have a habit of mentioning the stage of the funnel for every piece of content being created. If you want to get more creative, you can colour-code your calendar against the funnel stages like Red for Awareness, Orange for Consideration, and Green for Decision.
    
    

2. Only Words Make Jack a Dull Boy

Since you’ll be creating content that aims at educating your audience, then writing long-form content without using other formats and visuals would defeat its purpose. No matter how conversational the tone of your article is your audience would need visual elements like:

• • Bullet points
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • Embedded videos or clips
  • Quotes
  • Embedded tweets
  • Slides/PPT
    
    

Such elements make your content interactive and the bite-sized content in quotes, tweets, and bullet points make your content skimmable as well in case the reader is looking for a specific piece of information.

Since you are writing for a B2B audience, it’s inevitable that your content would be long-form, full of facts, and informative. So, you will need to make extra efforts to make your content engaging while showcasing your expertise.

How to Avoid this Mistake: Have a proper approval/editing process and give guidelines/checklists to your editor that needs to be followed before approving any piece of content.

3. Forgetting Your Content Once Published

This mistake can cost you the most - from time, and resources, to team morale. Creating content isn’t easy. It takes a lot of research, time, and resources, and most importantly, you’ll find writers get attached to their creations.

So, when a piece of content doesn’t work well among the audience, for a marketer, it’s just a data point to consider while creating the next piece of content. But for a writer, it might feel like a personal failure.

How to Avoid this Mistake: After you are done creating and publishing content, you will need to pay attention to the following things:

• SEO: This needs to be done before as well as after the content is published. You need to spend time in keyword research, keyword analysis, content analysis, etc. before writing any piece of content. Once the content is created and published, keep monitoring its ranking on search engines. Optimize it further for LSI keywords and based on the feedback from heatmaps. And don’t forget to add CTAs and interlink to important pieces of content to keep your audience longer on your website.
  
  

• • Promotion: Creating and publishing content is just the first step. You need to have a process in place for promoting your content. Use social media platforms, online communities, DMs, emails, and more to share your content with the target audience.
    
    

• Link Building: According to a study done by UXAX where they analyzed 11.8 million Google search results, it was found that links from external websites are directly correlated with ranking at the top on Google. The number one result has 3.8x links compared to other positions. This can be done by creating value-adding content and frequently writing guest posts on relevant websites.
  
  

• • Paid Ads: As a B2B organization, you have a better chance of converting a customer from a long-tail keyword. Since no one is advertising long-tail keywords, you can simply create an educational piece of content that showcases your expertise and run a paid ad for it. It won’t cost you much and would give you access to buyers who are either in consideration or at the decision stage.

4. Relying Only on Original Content

This might come as a surprise but let’s be honest. Creating an original piece of content with a brand-new idea is HARD. You can’t expect your writers to create fresh pieces of original content every day. The more time they have, the better the outcome will be.

While your army of writers and creators create original content, you can always invite experts in your industries or famous writers in your niche to guest post on your blog. Just make sure the content they write for your blog resonates with your audience and adds value to their time.

You can also repurpose old content and turn them into slides, a Twitter thread, Infographic, a podcast and a LinkedIn post. This would give an evergreen piece of content a new twist as well as a new way for you to share your old content.

Content marketers love this one: update your content. Breathe in life in your old content by adding new pieces of information or links or personal anecdotes. 

How to Avoid this Mistake: Set a rule: if it’s taking 10-15 days to create a new piece of content in-house, you publish at least one Guest blog or update/repurpose old content. Add these activities to your calendar itself. You would also want to have a guest blogging process in place with proper guidelines for writers to follow.

5. Not Reviewing Performance of Your Content

Analytics. Analytics. Analytics.

This is what I have written on my whiteboard for at least 15 days out of a month because measuring the performance of your content is THE most important part of content marketing.

Go to Webmaster, Google Analytics, SEMRush, and other analytics tools that you might use and gauge the performance of your content. Make sure to take the following metrics into account:

• • Traffic
  • Impressions & CTR
  • User behaviour - use heat map tools for a better understanding of customer behaviour
  • Content shares & backlinks
  • Lead generation
    
    

Also, make sure to pay attention to the bounce rate to understand the effectiveness of your title as well as the introduction. If your introduction doesn’t have the right hook, then you will see a higher bounce rate.

How to Avoid this Mistake: Hire Content Marketing Executives and add this as their KRA - measuring performance, gathering new ideas, competitor analysis, keyword analysis and research. Then measuring performance would become an integral part of your content marketing process.

To Sum Up

Content Marketing is all about trial and error. What worked for us, might not work for you. The key to successfully create relatable, engaging, and informative content that resonates with your audience is to know them. Try to inculcate a curious mindset in your content marketing team, encourage them to ask questions, and empower them with the right tools to find answers.

And most importantly, never get discouraged when a strategy doesn’t work out. Focus on the learnings and implement them in your new strategies. That’s how you will master the art of content marketing.

Author Bio

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.