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Earlier this week, we had an opportunity to chat with Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions, Inc., about all things B2B marketing. We took a dive into buyer personas, chatting about things marketers are doing wrong when developing their buyer personas– things like not understanding their buyers, not focusing on storytelling, and not understanding the questions their personas are asking.

This conversation inspired us to look at B2B marketing strategies as a whole, which led to some realizations about some of the worst B2B strategies. Here are some reasons your B2B marketing strategy might, in fact, suck, or worse, fail miserably.

1. You have no idea why you’re creating the content you’re creating. Instead, the team just *thinks* it should be written.
2. You create content with no real plan for distribution.
3. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Everyone must have an opinion and a say in approvals and processes, transforming straightforward projects into utter nightmares. (Sales, CEOs, product teams, etc.) These opinions are often contradictory and have you working to appease internal stakeholders instead of doing what’s best for the customer and company overall.
4. You have zero consideration for SEO and keyword research. While this isn’t the end-all, be-all, every content strategy needs to consider SEO at some point.
5. You write content assuming your reader understands exactly what your business is. There should be many facets to your content strategy, appealing to users in each stage of the buying process– from pure education to content that sets users up to find solutions and then ultimately, to find your solution.
6. To that point, one piece of content will not appeal to all users and potential buyers. You need to create various types of content, each moving the user to the next stage of their process.
7. You have no time or budget to execute correctly. That’s the case with many marketers, but as we learned from Michael Brenner a few weeks ago during our podcast, this simply requires a little creativity and imagination. It can happen, if it’s a priority.
8. You don’t write enough content or expect one piece of content to change “your life.”
9. You write about your “awesome” products or services. That is all. Nothing else. Just a bunch of awesomeness about your stuff and what you do and what these products can do and why you should buy them. That is not a content strategy.
10. You’re not creating content that’s industry-relevant but not directly focused on your company. You’re not going the extra mile to provide valuable, even shareable content that goes beyond and reaches into the interests and values of your target audience.
11. You don’t create content-rich e-mail newsletters to distribute to your audience, providing consistent value and sending them to your site often.
12. You’re skeptical about the value of content marketing and aren’t educating yourself or your team.

If you want your content marketing strategy to stop sucking, reach out to us today.

 

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