b2b marketing mistakes
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4 Worst Mistakes Can Disrupt and Derail Your B2B Marketing from Success

Today, creating an effective marketing strategy may seem overwhelming with plenty of marketing system platforms, various marketing channels, and a wide range of audience segments to target with diverse messages and offers to consider. In addition to the challenges of making the right choice in this extensive range of options, many companies make it even harder to achieve their marketing goals by repeating the same mistakes over and over again. 

Marketers either deploy all of their resources into their wrongly planned approaches and efforts, or they spend even more time and resources in rectifying their methods, or they may even do both. All of these methods and approaches result in deterring and delaying their campaign performance, and that’s when they assume their digital marketing tactics are not working.

However, when implementing the right B2B marketing strategy and guarding those severe mistakes, they can start seeing their methods and efforts yield positive results. These are the four worst and most common things to prioritize in your attempts to avoid marketing mistakes.

Assuming Guest Posting Is Not About Quality, But Quantity

Guest posting is growing to be a popular marketing medium, but also, getting more and more complicated day by day. While earlier, it was a medium where you can produce a plethora of guest blog posts containing copious links to redirect readers to content hub sites wherein they can find thousands of similar posts. But as search engine algorithms are evolving, gone are those days when the quantity of content had the edge over a lesser quantity of articles. 

Marketers should remember that producing and posting as much as 7 to 10 articles a week will not be effective unless those articles are of good quality. Poor quality content does not get accepted by the highest traffic and renowned sites. Then the chances of improving your reader base will be almost nothing or nothing at all.

What to Do Instead:

Instead of focusing too much on the number of articles for guest posts as part of your B2B marketing strategy, marketers need to pay attention to the quality of articles. The better quality and original content you create, the more high-traffic and reputed websites will accept your posts, and the audience will take interest and start reading your articles. Later, you can highlight those posts from the portfolio section of your website.

Forgetting Social Media Channels  

B2B marketers often overlook the opportunities attainable on social media channels and do not want to promote their brands like B2C marketers. However, social media channels present adequate opportunities for both B2B and B2C companies to promote their business, target their audience, promote events and special announcements and other gains, when used strategically, and targeting the right time and frequency.

Though email marketing has been proven to be more effective in demand generation and customer interaction than social media, there are several channels that are usually ignored for B2B marketing, such as LinkedIn which is even more heavily relied upon than Facebook.

What To Do instead:

Many B2B marketers reported that they hardly notice any immediate impact on Facebook over Twitter or LinkedIn. But implemented effectively and consistently, Facebook can produce impacts even though it may take a few weeks or even months. Instead of spending too much time optimizing posts for Facebook, you can replicate the same post with the link and a few relevant tags. 

Later, you will see noticeable growth in traffic coming from this social media channel. Also, people will start sharing Facebook posts more frequently that they find relevant and useful. Remember that completely omitting this channel will be a missed opportunity from one of the biggest social media platforms and cause you to miss out on the vast mass of audiences and customers on Facebook.

Do Not Mirror What Your Competitors Do

Many marketers start mirroring other businesses and especially competitors, to use the same channel and tactics just before they do. Replicate the same techniques, pattern, and tone of the message, or even adopt the same marketing channels without considering or even analyzing whether it will impact your marketing goals and your customer base. 

This is even more prevalent in the selection of social media channels. Most companies set up accounts on major platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram without considering which specific platforms are the best and how their audience is engaging on social channels.

What To Do Instead:

Instead, conduct a thorough social media listening and collect customer insights to analyze where your targeted audiences are more frequent, discussing similar products, services, brands, and the day of the week and the time of the day they engage the most. A platform that is heavily used in one country or region will not have the same size of audience in another country. 

Hence, the idea is to prevent spending your resources and time on channels and strategies which have not given any significant results in your segment and in your previous campaigns. Instead, focus on those social media channels based on in-depth analysis of customer insights and performance of previous marketing approaches to ensure which tactics will contribute to your revenue growth.

Not Practicing Personalization

Kurt Vonnegut, the Famous author, has stated that a major marketing copywriting mistake is to write generic messages for a vast base of the audience instead of writing personalized messages for individual contacts. Companies and marketers involved in B2B marketing should not target a broad range of customers or the entire database at one go – the more generic your content and message appears, the less engaging they become. 

Targeting a broad category of people with just one campaign means you are including both people who are genuinely interested, might be or not interested at all. Composing one message or resource for all these people will make your message sound less useful or engaging toward people who have already interacted with your brand and are looking for more specific information. Therefore, you will start losing out on those audiences and negatively impacting your campaign results.

What To Do Instead:

Segment your customers based on their level of interactions with your brand to divide them into multiple groups based on their behavioral data. Then, optimize your marketing approaches specific to each segment with lesser people with specific information and type of content they need to move to sales reps. 

Businesses with multiple markets to target and reach can develop such personalized and better-targeted campaigns by using the product and service-related keywords and industry keywords to enhance your reach. Personalization also helps marketers to connect with their prospects and customers on a deeper level by addressing their specific challenges and solutions to resolve those pain points.

Conclusion

Similar to these common and alarming B2B marketing missteps, another severe mistake is what they should guard against, which is minimum or no practice of conducting quality tests before launch. B2B marketers need to make sure that they follow a rigorous A/B testing practice to test everything before and even after the launch. A/B tests will not only improve your targeting efforts but also impact significantly in heightening customer engagement and an increase in revenue generation. 

In case you need an expert helping hand to make sure your marketing operation is immune to these notorious B2B marketing mistakes, you can always talk to us and get help – all you need is to drop a message in the chat box (at the right below), email at experts@marrinadecisions.com or simply DM us over Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – anywhere you want! Our seasoned marketing consultants will help you thoroughly with campaign straggles, execution to ongoing campaign management while guarding your process against all probable marketing gaffes!