6 mistakes that drain your marketing budget
Jason Myers
Helping SaaS firms ensure that their marketing leads to sales success | Messaging for the Challenger Sale | Content Strategy | SalesEnablement | Advertising
It’s maddening, isn’t it??
Marketing is talking about all the great things they accomplished last month.
Social media audiences are increasing.
Email open rates are high.
Leads and demo requests are coming in, but....
…they all suck.?
None of them are qualified, and worse, they’re taking a lot of time for business development reps (BDRs) to chase down.
So, you throw your hands up in the air and go back to what you’ve always done — focus reps on more cold outbound—make more calls and send out emails and see what conferences you should be attending.
If you’re thinking “there’s got to be a better way,” there is.?
But it’s going to require more collaboration between sales and marketing.
Start by identifying and correcting these common mistakes:
Mistake #1: Brand awareness as the goal.
Marketing practices over the last 50 years have taught us that people do business with brands. The Nike Swoosh. The apple with a bite out of it. The Amazon arrow.
However for B2B companies, your brand is the culmination of content that educates and provides perspectives on solving typical business problems in new and innovative ways.
Buyers today are fragmented and they’re skeptical of vendor information.?
They probe their peers first, ask questions in online communities (that didn’t exist five years ago) and check out review sites like G2 and Trustradius–all before reaching out to a vendor.?
They want to do as much research on their own before talking to a salesperson or taking a demo.?
In short,? generating name recognition in front of more people won’t result in more qualified leads.?
For content to create customers over the long term, it has to help the buyer understand whether or not it will apply to their own use case.
We highly recommend that B2B marketers read The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon as it has a very detailed methodology for creating content that not only educates buyers, but gives them compelling reasons to move off their status quo.?
Mistake #2. Content for content’s sake.
Marketing’s first impulse is to generate content. But we waste time and energy on content that is too tangential (interesting to your audience, but doesn’t motivate off of status quo).?
Ultimately, to make sales, content needs to inspire the right people to take some sort of action–like agreeing with a problem statement and investigating your new perspective on solving it.?
If it’s a problem you need to solve, you’ll start researching further. And if you’re the vendor that’s illuminated the new perspective, they’ll start with you.?
Then when they come to your website, you want to make sure you’re not making mistake number 1.?
In other words, provide the content they want and make sure they can find it easily:
But don’t take my word for it…
Check out TrustRadius’ recent report about the buyer/seller disconnect for what buyers expect from your content today.
Also, it’s likely that you have plenty of content that can be repurposed, rewritten and re-distributed. Most content that we review as an agency is poorly written in that the lead is buried in the third paragraph, the headline isn’t compelling in the first place, or it doesn’t take a position and follow a narrative that commands action.??
Mistake #3. You don’t give them a reason to care.
Don’t take it personally, but people don’t care about what you do.
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Sorry.
They care about their own problems that they must solve.
If they believe it’s your product, they’ll be anxious to get a demo.
Top of funnel content should always focus on a typical business problem and poke holes in the traditional ways of solving it.
That way, when buyers agree with a problem as you’ve articulated it, they become curious about your perspective and want to know more about how you’re solving it.?
Mistake #4. You’re a keyword worrywort.
The early days of blogging were like magic! Maximizing intent keywords and creating content was all it took for people to find you.
Now, there’s so much content out there, getting your blog to rank on the first page of Google is nearly impossible.
And with ChatGPT and other AI platforms, the mediocre content ocean is about to get worse.?
At this point, I question whether or not searches start at Google anymore.?
Sure, some do, but what they’re searching for is changing and the questions they’re typing in are different. It’s more about searching for use cases and reviews that recommend vendors to look at versus the starting point for searches than it used to be.?
The reason for that is both mediocre content from companies that are better at manipulating organic search than you, and (back to mistake 2) buyers trust their peers way more than vendors.?
Instead of writing content to maximize keywords, you should instead seek to take a position, provide a new perspective, and then see where maximizing intent keywords makes sense.?
Engaged audiences buy stuff, and your superfans will help you develop more.
If you’re speaking directly to the customer’s problem with engaging posts, it will attract the right prospects.
Mistake #5. The cart before the horse.
Many marketers do this backward — they start with projects and campaigns without determining the overall narrative that’s going to drive sales engagement.
But the sales team needs leads, so they write blogs, place ads, and produce videos.?
The results are mediocre because they don’t understand how content becomes a sales conversation in the first place. (See Mistake #2)
Start by answering these questions about why you’re developing content in the first place:
Mistake #6. Measuring the wrong things.
Web traffic, social media likes, Linkedin connections, rising search rankings, and even marketing qualified leads— marketers love to track these measurements and boast about their increases.
But the only measurement that truly matters is revenue–did it lead to a qualified sales conversation? (Whether or not you closed the deal is a different issue)
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t build targeted audiences with thought leadership content–but ultimately, we want the qualified buyers coming to you to find out more.?
Ultimately though, sales needs to go up. Afterall, that’s the purpose of marketing, right?
Marketing Must Generate Demand
Tracking leads and engagement can be useful for testing messages, but ultimately revenue needs to go up.?
That only happens when the entire organization is aligned to the same goal.
Start by taking a position, educating buyers on your new perspective, and create curiosity to find out more about your product.
Over time, more relevant traffic will take the actions you desire, and when they do, they’ll be more educated, ask salient questions, and close faster.
CEO at Digital Di Consultants | Bringing MarTech and B2B Database Management Together
1 年A well-written article, Jason Myers