Piercing the content conundrum in B2B marketing
Keeping the B2B marketing content faucet running isn’t easy, is it? The constant pressure to differentiate your brand through the noise with the most effective channels only seems to grow more difficult.?
You thought you had a good content strategy, but you’ve been banging your head against a brick wall hearing crickets after setting up a new channel you think will be a better fit for your audience. You add, say, a fancy newsletter, and the trending topics and passion are flying out of your fingertips! The subscribers are flowing, engagement is high, click-throughs offer hope, and the metrics are looking good!?
Until they aren’t.?
All of a sudden, CLUNK, the brain train jumped the tracks somehow and the inspiration, then motivation, slowly fades, as do subscribers. You’re reaching for fresh ideas like it’s water in the desert.
Insane perspective for B2B marketing managers
Content marketing offers your expertise, products, or services through various channels like video, social media, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, even live audio events. These outlets can bring so many creative formats of your content to target businesses. In the day-to-day, year-to-year of running your content marketing strategy, however, we can get stuck in the uncertainty of what those businesses want to see or hear from you, and what channels they want to get it from.
Forbes’ Jack Borie provided quite the accurate parallel from his Hair-ness Albert Einstein when the celebrated physicist famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. This “Insanity Principle”, as Forbes called it, inhibits many companies from moving on to better strategic opportunities.
There are untold numbers of businesses who – despite constantly evolving marketing tools and outreach channels – seem to insist on the traditional content strategies they’re comfortable with or got them to where they are. They lean on existing methods, volume of content, or some misguided sense of “tried-and-true” tactics that will bring momentum back around, yet too often never does. They’re stuck in the past, and their analytics reflect it.?
B2B marketing is a tough nut to crack, there’s no way around it. According to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Prof’s joint B2B Marketing Benchmarks, Budgeting, and Trends: Outlook for 2024 report, 57 percent of B2B marketers struggle to gain their targets’ attention. There will be ever-evolving market expectations to adjust to, but also the overwhelming content saturation you must overcome in order to stand out, regardless of the marketing channel. Even today’s most dominant marketing tools have become desensitized to most audiences. I mean, who DOESN’T have a podcast these days?!
Perseverance in today’s B2B marketing ecosystem
The field is getting pretty busy to say the least when you explore this new B2B marketing universe. Social media, email marketing newsletters, case studies/white papers, even webinars; content saturation in the digital space has become a mountain of a challenge.
Despite a crowded if supportive industry field, a former B2B client and myself decided to invest time writing and designing a case study. It actually turned out to be pretty great (their judgment, not mine!), and we were excited. My content dazzled, spoke to a powerful trending issue, told some hard-hitting and emotional stories, and weaved the product solution into the subject.?
The case study promptly landed on deaf ears. We distributed it through all our digital marketing channels and it hit pavement with a resounding thud. Now, I’d never say case studies or white papers aren’t valid tools for B2B outreach. That would be silly. I’m just saying make sure you know if the juice is worth the squeeze for the audience you’re attempting to reach.
All that said, any of these tools still can work. Of course they can, it’s no secret. In fact, according to the Motley Fool this last May, email marketing still offers the highest return on investment (ROI). It also sports the highest conversion rate, 66 percent, for purchases made in response to promotional messages.
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Re-examine your B2B marketing strategy
I hope it’s at least comforting to know that you’re not alone. This Insanity Principle is more than common: Do the same thing you’ve always done and hope something sticks. Many executives don’t want to take action because adjusting strategy takes a leap of faith, effort, and a new frame of mind. There is relaxation in the “easy,” in the "we've always done it this way." But breaking those chains of habit is the only way to find continuing success.?
To overcome these growing pains, executives have to learn to challenge themselves, to consciously expect change and innovation in order to make progress for their company in a crowded and competitive industry. Here are some action steps to energize your B2B content marketing strategy:?
While fixed or “static” content will always have its place, it’s losing out to the kinds of interactive content that keeps users consistently engaged. Polls, user-centric quizzes, live-streaming, gamification tools, and video: Video is dynamic, engaging, and still drives powerful results: according to Sprout Social, 87 percent of marketers reported a direct influence in sales through video.
The basics never go out of style. Building and fostering a community around a brand helps establish a sense of trust, loyalty, connection, and advocacy. Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn remain powerful outlets for your brand to cultivate discussion, familiarity, feedback, and shared experiences if you can address it and use it consistently. Granted, spam is notoriously challenging in social media groups, not to mention less heralded assets like your blog's comments section. But you never know the goodwill you can generate on those platforms until you legitimately try.?
A nimble mindset allows for experimenting with new ideas when adjusting one’s B2B marketing strategy. A consistent awareness of the possibility of a strategy change can be a valuable tool when you recognize even moderate attitude shifts in the market. Such alterations will benefit multiple areas including product strategy, customer experience, conversion rates, lower risk of ineffective initiatives, and increased ROI.
It’s such an overused term these days, but the alternative is true death in any kind of marketing. The power of authenticity catches a brand audience and holds an audience. Strategies like user-generated content and influencer partnerships and stories employed by brands like 127-year-old, Seattle-born outdoor brand Filson infuse credibility, rustic relatability, and a sense of real-world adventure into their marketing efforts and initiatives. By using authentic content and stories on contemporary digital platforms like TikTok, instagram, and Snapchat, for example, confirm the brand message is being communicated in a humanizing context that is natural, real, and engaging.?
Data analytics needs to be a consistently-used feature in evaluating and understanding how your customers view and engage with your brand. Analytics offers a clearer understanding of your customers’ behavior, helping you adjust your B2B marketing strategy or maintain your existing direction. While I myself continue to adjust to employing artificial intelligence in my work, there is no doubt AI can provide constructive intuition while performing traditionally monotonous tasks and constructing personalized interactions. What has your experience been so far with AI writing programs like ChatGPT?
The importance of advancing past the comfort zone of what you have always done, i.e. the Insanity Principle, is vitally important in allowing yourself to separate yourself from your competitors while finding newer, more productive paths in your B2B content marketing journey. Doing so will position you to achieve better long-term success in a crowded, fast-evolving market environment.