5 B2B Digital Marketing Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making

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Some mistakes are really easy to spot. As soon as you press send to the wrong email address or hand over the wrong report, your heart sinks and the mistake opera singer from Scrubs is warming up. But not every mistake is so visceral.

Others creep up on you, and pounce when you least expect it. For days, weeks, even years after you made the mistake it still sits there unnoticed. Only to explode at the worst possible moment.

And then sometimes, you never realize that you were doing something wrong. You just go on about your life, assuming everything’s fine. Never fully understanding just how wrong you’re getting things. Like a haircut that never really suited you, or a financial investment that never realized its full potential. Despite their silent nature, these are often the most dangerous of mistakes.

While it’s possible to make every kind of mistake in B2B digital marketing, the silent mistakes are by far the most common. Mainly because a lot of the worst digital marketing mistakes are the ones that seem like exactly the right thing to do.

Creating Pages And Content That ‘Look Good’

The last line of defense for the quality of any B2B marketing content is your eye. You, ultimately, will judge if something is good enough to promote your brand. The problem is, you may not always be right. And the success of any piece of content isn’t down to your opinion. It’s up to your clients. Get second, third and fourth opinions on everything and base your choices on previous successes wherever you can.

Posting Regularly On Social Media

This may not be an earth shattering statement, but it’s missed by business after business and B2Bs in particular. You don’t need to be on every social network, in fact it’s best that you aren’t. B2B social media only works where

Your ideal clients discuss your industry. Your social media activity should stick to those channels. In other words, as a B2B you are wasting your time on Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

Getting Things ‘Done’

Every job needs to be completed and you should never accept substandard content. However, it is important to understand that online locations grow organically. You may have an ideal image in your head of exactly what you want your website to look like. Or an exact list of the content you want to have available from your online resource. That doesn’t mean you should wait for all of it to be completed to start using some of it. It’s easy to add more content or tweak an image to a live online presence. It’s impossible to market when all your great ideas are ‘almost done’.

Talking About Your Products

The most obvious mistake on this list is B2Bs who only create content about their own products. Of course, you need to inform your clients and prospects about your products and discuss new developments but your content needs to do more than that. Content marketing works for B2Bs when you provide valuable, relevant information that meets the needs of your market. That doesn’t mean finding 10 ways to list the benefits of your product for a variety of situations.

Following The Advice Of Others

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know I’ve used this point before; but it’s worth restating. Despite the irony of advising someone not to take advice; never fall into the trap of blindly following the so-called experts. The great thing about digital marketing is that not everything works for everyone in exactly the same way. Test everything, over and over, keep what works and dump the rest; that’s my advice, feel free to ignore it.

On a final note, some of the best marketers out there make the mistakes above. And some of the worst make these mistakes but get away with it. The important thing is to think about every facet of your digital marketing strategy; weigh up why you make the choices you do and always keep an eye out for the guy with a goatie beard in a tux.

Avoiding mistakes is just one of the vital steps in building your perfect marketing strategy. Download our whitepaper and see how you can transform your marketing.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Eoin Keenan
Media and Content Manager at Silicon Cloud. We help businesses to drive leads and build customer relationships through online marketing and social media. I blog mainly about social media & marketing, with some tech thrown in for good measure. All thoughts come filtered through other lives in finance, ecommerce, customer service and journalism.

1 COMMENT

  1. Thanks for the post, Eoin. I disagree somewhat with this statement, though: “In other words, as a B2B you are wasting your time on Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.”

    In the end, even B2B businesses do business with people. Where do people spend their time? Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, etc. By not having a presence on these networks, you are often missing an opportunity to drive traffic and better engage both prospects and customers.

    Of course I’m not suggesting businesses should spread themselves too thinly if they don’t have the resources, but I know of many a case where B2B companies have driven significant well-converting traffic via Pinterest, for example. Your pins and boards can rank well for search phrases in Google, driving not insignificant traffic. There’s a good post here: http://www.socialmarketingforum.net/2012/08/facebook-for-b2b-marketing/ discussing facebook for B2B marketing, too.

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