What NOT to do when getting started with content marketing for B2B lead generation

Everything’s been set up. You’ve got a great product and a market you know wants it. Now all you need to do is make contact and drum up interest. Easy right?

Not so much.

It takes quite a bit of convincing to generate a reliable B2B lead. The average prospect will conduct no less than 12 searches on Google before even engaging with a brand’s website.

In other words, before a potential client will show any meaningful interest in your offer, you’ll need to demonstrate the genuine value your organisation brings to the table. And you’ll need to do it more than once.

The best way to pull this off? Content marketing.

The power of content marketing

So how do you convince prospects to engage with your brand?

You produce content. Relevant, useful content that establishes your brand and builds trust with your target audiences.

Rather than immediately pitch your services or products, content marketing operates like an inbound magnet, pulling in prospective customers organically over time. If your branded content is particularly compelling or persuasive, your target audiences will continue coming back for more.

Nurture these relationships with a steady stream of content, and by the time a lead is ready to make a purchase, your brand will be fixed securely at the top of their mind.

It’s a marketing strategy perfectly suited to the cautious, slow-moving decision making processes typical of B2B buyers.

Of course, inbound marketing is no great trade secret. Content marketing now creates about three times the amount of leads as more traditional outbound marketing techniques.

So if content marketing is clearly the way to go, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Well, the truth is that inbound content marketing takes vision, budget and patience.

It’s easy to miss out on essential steps or fall for superficial vanity metrics. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for corporate marketing managers to invest months of time and effort in branded content, only to find they’ve failed to generate a single lead, let alone proven a financial return on their investment.

We’re here to walk you through some of the most common inbound content marketing mistakes. Whether it’s a short-sighted content strategy or under analysed results, the first step towards overcoming these common content marketing woes is to identify them ahead of time.

To pull off a lead generating inbound content marketing campaign for your B2B enterprise, here’s what not to do.

1. Don’t skip researching your audience

It’s tempting to jump straight into writing up blog posts or video scripts. You want to get things moving quickly and not spend forever thinking about what to do. But this is never the right move.

Without first learning everything you can about your ideal clients, you’ll end up producing content that targets no one while trying to speak to everyone. It’s a one-way ticket to low engagement, and a sure-fire way to lose out on valuable leads.

If you want to produce content that will really work for your business, you’ll need buyer personas. These are semi-fictional accounts of the people you want to attract as leads and ultimately convert into clients.

Building up a detailed picture of who these people are and what makes them tick will help you craft content that speaks directly to their needs. Four main things to focus on are:

• Demographics:
  This is the foundation of your buyer personas. Work out everything from their age and gender to their profession and family status.
• Obstacles:
  We’ve all got problems we want help with. Investigate what keeps your target market up at night. What are they desperate to make go away?
• Interests:
  Learn about what they want. What do they really desire? What have they’ve spent the last year saving up for?
• Behaviour Patterns:
  What do they do in their spare time? What are their consumer habits? Find out how they act and respond in different situations and contexts.
• Media Habits:
  What are they reading? Where do they get their news? Which community resources, professional forums, or social media channels do they turn to for advice and insights?

Once you create a set of buyer personas you can begin to narrow down their pain points. Address these pain points as directly as possible in your content and you’ll be well on your way to generating fresh leads.

Your buyer personas should also inform your tone and style guidelines, as well help you determine where to distribute your content once it’s been produced.

2. Don’t leave the buyer’s journey unmapped

Leads don’t appear in a vacuum. From someone completely unfamiliar with your brand to a qualified lead eager to close a deal, your prospective clients will always move through several stages as they interact with your content over time.

To really connect with your prospects, you’ll need to be able to identify their precise needs and hang-ups at each stage of their buyer’s journey.

Skip this part and you may end up delivering the right content to the right people, but at entirely the wrong time. After all, even a game-changing a-z guide on your products or services won’t connect with someone who hasn’t yet learned to trust your brand.

So let’s take a look at what the stages of a typical buyer’s journey include:

1. Awareness:
   In this first stage, the lead has little to no knowledge of the type of product or service you’re offering. This is where straightforward, introductory articles that focus on why your product is needed and what problems it will solve should come in.
2. Consideration:
   Now that they’ve got a basic understanding of your product or services, you need to show your prospect that you’re an expert who can be trusted. Long-form guides, e-books, and video series will prove that you’re an authority in your field.
3. Decision:
   At this point, the prospect has been persuaded that they need what you’re offering, and are probably considering contacting you or signing up to your email list. They may still have some concerns or feel similarly towards one of your competitors. Content that clearly explains why your products or services are superior to those of your competitors, as well as content that addresses any nuanced concerns your prospects may still have (think FAQ’s) will help move them towards a purchase.

Every industry will have its own, slightly different, buyer journeys. Some will have a longer consideration phase, while others will linger on the decision stage.

Take your time and work out how buyer journeys typically play out for your business. Follow up by producing content that will speak to your buyer persona’s needs at each stage of their buyer’s journey.

3. Don’t create mirage content

How many times have you clicked on a blog post only to find it filled with rambling filler instead of the valuable insights suggested by its title? In a world filled with lazy marketing and poorly executed SEO shortcuts, it happens all too often.

For your content to resonate with readers, it has to provide real value. Whether that means dishing out actionable advice and insights, or providing functional resources in the form of downloadable templates or product trials, your content should genuinely help your target audience(s). Anything else is just a smokescreen, a “mirage.”

Unfortunately, people often equate usefulness with article length. In reality, depth is almost always preferable to breadth when it comes to producing useful content.

For content marketers looking to do things right, that means doing your research. Look up what else has been written on your chosen subject. Find the stats. See what recent studies are out there.

Second, you need to mix up how you’re producing your content. Deep doesn’t necessarily mean a wall of text. Engaging visuals are essential for keeping your prospects engaged.

Take videos. Hubspot found that 54% of consumers want to see more videos from the brands they’re involved with. The result? 74% of B2B marketers use videos in their content marketing.

But again, don’t just add in stock photos for the sake of it. Your images, videos, and infographics should complement your content, not distract from it.

It’s all about beginning with what your target audience wants and shaping your content and messaging from there.

4. Don’t be impatient or inconsistent

Content marketing works. It builds relationships with audiences and helps convince them of your expertise. But this doesn’t happen overnight.

Just as you often see blogs producing content without much real value, there are also tons of content hubs that start off well only to go neglected after just a few months.

When investing in inbound marketing it’s normal to get frustrated when results don’t come overnight, but the worst thing you can do is give up entirely.

Consider SEO. Occasionally you’ll hit a home run and rank at the top of search for a specific query on Google straight away. But far more typically it will take anywhere from 4–6 months to get going. Muster up the patience to see things through and you’ll eventually find a steady stream of traffic arriving on your website. At that point, all you’ll need to do is keep the posts coming.

So why do so many companies fall behind with their content? One of the main reasons is that they only create as they go along. That means that whenever other business pressures come into play, content creation is the very first activity to get left behind.

You can overcome this common challenge by producing your posts or videos in batches and setting a distribution schedule for them in advance. That way, when the going gets tough, all you have to do is return to your content vault and hit “publish.”

5. Don’t spend time on the wrong channels

Distributing your content on the right channels is key to a successful content marketing strategy. Just because Instagram has a massive following, doesn’t mean it’s an ideal spot for promoting your B2B service offerings.

Let’s go through where most B2B companies should be focusing their time.

• LinkedIn:

When it comes to social media for B2B, LinkedIn is number one. Compared to the next best channels (Facebook and Twitter) it brings in over twice the number of leads. The reason? 4 out of 5 users are decision-makers at their companies. That means they have the power to instigate serious conversations and pull the trigger on major deals.

Of course, targeting your content towards senior-level decision-makers and executive staff will come with a hefty price tag. For many B2B enterprises, a trade-off between LinkedIn’s optimal user base and Facebook’s more affordable cost-per-lead may be worthwhile.

It’s also crucial to remember that your goal is to drive readers off of social media platforms and onto your own webpages. All the likes and shares in the world won’t guarantee actionable leads. For that, you’ll need newsletter sign-ups, conditional downloads, product trials, or some other means of garnering readers’ contact information.

• Email:

Not everyone on your email list will be a qualified lead. And even if they are, they’ll still require nurturing. It’s crucial that you warm up your existing email contacts with periodic updates and consistently useful content.

As almost everyone checks their business emails at least once a day, there are few better ways to ensure that your content is actually getting in front of the people you want to see it. That’s why even today, 87% of marketers say that email remains one of their top-performing distribution channels.

• Websites:

Publishing content on your own website is in many ways the perfect lead capture strategy, namely because it’s free. Web content has the additional benefit of being accessible to search engines. With a bit of SEO, a little bit of web content can go a very long way.

In 2021, search engines are no longer fooled by keyword cramming or other superficial marketing tricks. Instead, content that is trustworthy, popular and authoritative will perform well for SEO. Craft reliably insightful content, host it on your company webpages and let Google do its job.

Organic traffic may take time to really take off, but once it does you’ll have no shortage of fresh leads. Just make sure to include prominent calls to action on your landing pages. Whether that’s a contact form, a newsletter sign-up, or a conditional download — be sure to make the most of your organic web traffic by gathering as much contact information as possible.

Whilst these three channels should be a priority for most B2B companies, it’s important to take note of what’s going on in your industry. Platform trends tend to come and go, so it’s essential that you keep your finger on the pulse.

6. Don’t neglect your results

You can conduct hours and hours of research but you’ll never know for sure what kind of content will connect with your audience until it’s already “out there.” And if you don’t keep tabs on your content’s performance you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t.

So what should you look out for?

Each of your distribution channels has its own set of metrics that you’ll want to analyse.

• Social Media:

The first and most intuitive thing you’ll want to monitor is engagement. How many likes and comments are you getting on your posts? What kind of content is being shared? Every platform has its own analytics page for your content. Use it to see what kind of posts are engaging your audience the most.

Again, it’s crucial to remember that comments, likes and shares should only be viewed as performance indicators for your content, not end goals unto themselves. A troubling number of marketers mistake these kinds of vanity metrics for real results, losing sight of the ultimate business objectives underlying their marketing efforts.

Stay on track by tying your content’s performance on social media to things that really matter, i.e. the number of leads you’ve generated or the number of contacts you’ve successfully converted through to sales. For more advice on tying content marketing KPIs to your bottom line and proving ROI, check out our companion article here.

• Email:

The key metric for email are open rates and click-through rates. These will show you what subject lines and topics are persuading your mailing list to choose your content over others, as well as help you zero-in on the kinds of content that are successfully prompting contacts to take some kind of action. If you use an e-mail service provider like Mailchimp or Klaviyo you’ll be able to receive up to date, in time results.

• Websites:

There are three things to think about here. First, how well you’re performing in terms of search engine ranking. You can do this by looking up your Google Search Console and seeing what kinds of search queries you’re ranking for. Read more about keyword research and other SEO strategies here.

Second, you’ll want to constantly be gauging how well your web content is engaging your readers. If you jump on Google Analytics or any other analytics software you’ll be able to see how much time people are spending on each of your pages. You’ll also be able to track the average number of pages visited per session, which will give you some idea of how well you’re convincing readers to browse the rest of your site.

Lastly, and most importantly, you’ll need to analyse and continuously improve upon your CTAs (calls to action). Encouraging a visitor to linger on your website is great, but if they aren’t providing you with contact information, then they’re still not a lead. Fine tune your messaging and page layouts to improve your conversion rates (whether that means newsletter sign-ups, downloads, free trials, or anything else).

Regardless of the channel, take the time to analyse your results and improve upon your content.

Final Thoughts

In 2021 especially, there’s not a single B2B enterprise that isn’t interested in generating leads, and content marketing kickstarts and sustains this process like nothing else. But as you can see, it takes a huge amount of strategy and discipline to get inbound marketing right.

With most companies hustling to make the most of the new year’s steady economic recovery, it can be extremely difficult to find the time and resources required to maintain an effective inbound marketing campaign. And inevitably, when things are rushed, mistakes are made.

That’s where We Create Content can help.

We take the time to fully understand your business, your brand, your market, and your services, crafting bespoke content that will generate leads and prove ROI.

Originally published at https://wecreatecontent.asia on January 27, 2021.