Whether you’ve only just started your journey into B2B marketing, or have been in the business for decades, there’s always going to be something you don’t understand or aren’t doing correctly.
A big reason for this is because the market is constantly changing, with businesses expected to keep up to date with what consumers expect at record rates.
This can be extremely difficult, especially when you think you’re doing everything right and can’t seem to understand why your businesses marketing efforts are failing.
Though we cannot give you personalized advice on your own website, there are many common mistakes that every company makes at some point in their journey.
These mistakes aren’t just made by beginners, either, with a lot of experienced businessmen and women falling foul to some of these mistakes that could be having a catastrophic impact on their success.
As a digital marketing agency, we have discovered some common marketing mistakes that ever company makes, and we thought we’d share them with you today to help you make smarter decisions about your B2B marketing strategies going forwards.
Not Having A Content Marketing Strategy
One of the most important things in B2B marketing is having a content marketing strategy, but far too many companies aren’t giving them the attention they deserve.
According to Digital Authority, just 39% of companies have a content marketing strategy in place, even though nearly 70% of companies admit they’d like one.
This mistake costs businesses hundreds of thousands of pounds every year, as it severely limits their ability to understand their audience and provide them with what they are looking for.
If you aren’t putting out content that inspires your audience, they aren’t going to frequent your site more often, making it more difficult for you to understand the behaviour of your users and use this to create effective sales funnels.
Not only that, but without a content marketing strategy, you are going to find it difficult to provide consistent value to your customers, making it harder to retain current customers and viewers of your content marketing.
Lastly, content strategy is not only about content. It’s also about adopting a data-driven marketing approach. According to ComboApp, data driven marketing refers to:
“the methodology of extracting actionable insights tied to consumer behavior from large data sets in order to predict consumer behavior in relation to new products, marketing positioning and users’ likelihood of interacting with a brand.”
In content marketing, this is a key strategy to pay attention to every day. How are people interacting with your content? How much of your content are they reading? What do they do next?
Contrary to popular belief, content marketing is both a science and a creative approach. You need the creative writing to engage with users. But you need the data-driven marketing approach to make sure those customers actually interact with your brand.
Using Complex Jargon To Explain Your Products Or Services
One thing that many B2B companies forget when talking to their customers is that they won’t necessarily have the same expertise as industry experts when it comes to understanding the products or services you are offering.
For this reason, it’s important to provide them with information they understand by breaking down complex jargon into everyday language.
This is likely to increase your conversions as there’s more chances of people understanding how your products and services can help them.
Creating Non Mobile Responsive Websites
A decade ago, nobody was talking about making sure that websites were mobile responsive in the marketing world.
Due to an increase in popularity, however, having a mobile friendly website is an absolute essential in 2019.
HealthcareWeekly reports that 52.4% of all users from the web come from mobile platforms, meaning over half of your potential customer base may experience your website from their advertisement.
Even Google has noticed the importance of this, with it now prioritizing websites that have mobile responsive layouts and navigational tools.
Though this sounds like common sense, a lot of B2B marketers are still forgetting to check this during the process, leaving them with websites that are hardly functional and difficult to use on mobile devices, potentially losing customers and funnel leads.
Using One Person To Balance All The Marketing
To cut costs, many businesses rely on one marketing executive to carry out all of their marketing needs.
This can be detrimental, however, as modern B2B marketing strategies involve many techniques, tools and skills that require a number of people to be carried out successfully.
Even if you hire an expert in the field, it’s likely you will still need to invest in more than one to reap the true benefits of having a marketing team.
While the initial outlay may prove more expensive, you will see the benefits when your ROI increases, and you find yourself having to spend less for better results.
Not Utilizing Data Visualization Techniques
As someone working in marketing, it’s tempting to want to share your achievements through content or long paragraphs on social media.
There’s nothing wrong with shouting about the achievements of your company on social media—in fact, we recommend it—but doing it using long form content isn’t the right answer.
When it comes to the online world, people want to find information as quickly as possible, so trying to make them read through lots of information could be counterintuitive.
Instead, think about using data visualization techniques to display the most important information, making it accessible and easy to find.
Doing so will promote your site, increase engagement and even encourage a higher conversion rate because people are finding the information they need easily.
Leaving Broken Links On Your Site
Google hates broken links, so checking for them and removing them where necessary is essential.
Not only will this help your search engine optimization, but it will also increase your trust with customers, who know that your site is going to provide them with additional useful information.
If, instead, a customer clicks on a link that isn’t working, they may become frustrated and leave without converting because they are unable to find the information they need.
While this sounds like a complicated job to keep up with, using a broken link generator or manually checking your blog posts regularly can speed up the process.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of mistakes that B2B businesses commonly make during the marketing process.
It’s important to remember that marketing involves keeping a close eye on the way your site is run, as well as the efforts you are using to get your website in front of the eyes of those who need it.
This can all seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be something you handle on your own.
If you’re struggling to find the time to dedicate towards successful B2B marketing, why not check out this list of consulting firms that can help you out?
