The 5 Most Common Mistakes in B2B Content Marketing

With B2B content marketing, you want to convince your customers of your company through information and interesting content without annoying them with flat advertising. What sounds easy in theory, hapens enormously in practice. The most common mistake? Most B2B companies focus too much on their own product.

B2B Content Marketing and Its Goals

Classic advertising that focuses on the advantages of a product or service is not very effective in the B2B sector in most cases.

In the business relationship between companies, experts are in dialogue, and it is important to convince them of one's own offer with relevant, informative and helpful content.

Accordingly, B2B content marketing has the task of generating, nurturing and converting leads by means of relevant content.

Minimum Requirements for Your Content

In order for your B2B content marketing to be successful at all, you must answer the following question with a resounding yes.

1. Is your content tailored to your target group or your buyer persona?

2. Does your content answer the questions of your buyer persona?

3. Is your content relevant?

4. Does your content really add value?

5. Does it really?

The goal of successful content marketing should be to position yourself as an industry expert with your content, thus gaining the trust of your leads.

When Success Fails to Materialize ...

What do you do when you create exciting content - which is not even just about your product - and still no one is interested in it? Before you give up right away, one thing in advance: it's the same for most B2B companies. Not because they can't do it or because content marketing doesn't make sense in the B2B sector (on the contrary!), but because there is often a lack of basic content. This can be avoided.

We have compiled the following five most common mistakes that most B2B companies make in B2B marketing. And of course, we'll show you how you can do it better.

5 Reasons Why Your B2B Content Is not Successful

Before you get into topics like SEO, performance marketing, etc., you need to make sure you have the basics right.

Problem 1: You Don't Focus on the Customer

We mentioned it at the beginning and we list it again here. Right at the top. Because we see this mistake over and over again. B2B marketers love their product or service and can't talk about it enough. They know all the product details and of course they should all be listed, after all the customer needs to know what they are getting.

You are welcome to present all your features and benefits on your website - but it's enough if you do it on the product page. The reality is: very few people are interested in all the functionalities your product has to offer, but your customers want to know how your product can solve their problem.

Solution: Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer persona and think about the challenges they face and the topics that interest them. You offer a software for warehousing? Then make a topic in your blog about what makes good warehousing or what demands the market will place on warehousing in the future.

Your readers will notice that you really know your stuff in this area and don't just want to sell a product.

Problem 2: You have written past the Buyer Persona

You probably know that you should create buyer personas. We'll assume that you've already done this in detail and have a clear picture of your buyer persona. Accordingly, your content is perfectly aligned with it. Or is it?

If not, now is the time to do it. In this post, we'll explain how it works step by step: Create helpful B2B personas in 5 steps

Solution: ask yourself if the content is really relevant to your buyer persona. To pick up the example from above: You've defined the Chief Operation Officer (COO) as your Buyer Persona. Accordingly, your content should be about how efficient inventory management saves resources and achieves more output. Or what trends to expect in warehouse management. However, the COO will probably be less interested in how to implement a software step by step - he will most likely delegate this task to his team

Problem 3: You Don't Cover the Entire Customer Jjourney with Your Content

We know them, the "5 Reasons why you should" and "how to do" articles. There's nothing wrong with that at all, and we're not just saying that because we write those articles ourselves. After all, these two types are among the most common and popular blog articles. Why? They pique interest and drive traffic to your blog. They often deal with a topic rather superficially and the reader gets a first impression. Depending on their needs, they can then delve further in one direction or another. But that's exactly where the content is often missing.

Solution: Make sure you have something for every phase of your customer journey. While at the beginning it's more about getting the reader in the mood for the topic and giving them an overview, as the story progresses it's more about delving into individual aspects - like a book, so to speak. Important: Don't forget the Delight Phase.

Problem 4: The Missing Strategy

Without a strategy, nothing works in content marketing. You need to know what goal you are pursuing with your content - ideally, of course, in line with the overall company goals

Solution: Develop a strategy. It's that simple. It's no use just knowing you need a strategy, ultimately you have no choice but to do it too. If you don't know how to go about it, this article will definitely help.

Important: Stay flexible. According to a study by Statista and the Content Marketing Forum e.V. from 2020, 3/4 of all companies surveyed adjust their existing strategies annually - because the more up-to-date your strategy, the more relevant your content.

Problem 5: No numbers, no statement

Producing content is one thing, evaluating content performance is another. To know what your target group is interested in and where you need to improve, you need numbers

Solution: Invest time not only in high-quality content, but also in monitoring. To do this, it is first important to define which numbers you want to measure at all

In this article, we've listed the most important metrics for content performance: The most important B2B content marketing KPIs you need to track

It's enough if you focus on these

Conclusion: Create a Themed World

Content marketing in B2B business is a very powerful way to compete with other businesses. If you manage to build an online topic leadership, you will not only have a big advantage over your competitors, you will also gain the trust of your leads. And they prefer to buy from the provider they trust

To achieve this goal, you need to offer your leads relevant added value. You can do this by highlighting and thematizing your offer from different angles. Create a thematic world that readers will dive into, get informed and move along the customer journey towards conversion

Still think you can do that with "product bashing copy"? Probably not