It hits you in the stomach first. Before your brain has time to kick in, before your mouth even reaches its first expletive, you feel sick to your stomach. That twisting feeling is just the early warning sign that it’s not going to be a good day. Especially when the mistake was your fault.
Mistakes are strange. Everybody makes them, every single one of us has gotten something wrong at some point. But when they do happen it feels pretty disastrous. No matter how minor the transgression, the frustration and desire to fix can be overwhelming. Especially in fields like B2B digital marketing, where so much can rest on really minor details.
The Do-Over Crutch
Digital technology, for the most part, has been really kind to the accident prone among us. Printing content on paper or committing images to film are one shot tasks, but in the digital world mistakes are easily erased. An endless line of do-overs is just a ‘CTRL+Z’ away. Unless you’re online.
Digital technology has become a double-edged sword. The ability to save, undo and redo have become ingrained in those of us who sit in front of a screen all day. We’re used to having a quick fix, but those fixes aren’t always forthcoming online. No matter how quickly you delete a tweet or recall an email, someone may have seen it. And that can be all it takes.
B2B Digital Marketing
B2B digital marketing involves a very targeted system. It’s about creating content that your target market want and putting it in front the people you most want to talk to. In an ideal world that interaction happens immediately. If your message gets from your keyboard to their mind in milliseconds, you’re doing a great job.
That instantaneous goal doesn’t leave much margin for error. One of the first rules of B2B digital marketing is that everything has to be right. And everything has to be checked and double-checked. But mistakes do happen.
The hope is that the mistakes that do happen are as minor as possible. That the cracks are so tiny that you need a fine-toothed comb to find them. The thing is, in B2B digital marketing, even the tiniest cracks can have big consequences.
Really minor errors can have a huge effect on your sales and marketing targets and, by extension, your business.
Brand Awareness
At the most basic level, your digital marketing is designed to raise brand awareness. You create blogs, tweet, email and advertise to get your business’ name in front of businesses in your target market. All it takes to ruin that drive for brand awareness is a misspelled email address, an omitted link or a miskeyed posting time. Emails in the wrong place, content that goes nowhere and blogs that post in the middle of the night won’t get you noticed.
Search Results Appearance
SEO is hugely important for B2Bs. Without the ability to broadcast to a wide audience, B2Bs need to focus on getting their website to the top of the right results page. Of course it’s impossible to get found for “data backup services” if your Metadata is targeted at “date backup services.” In that example you might get traffic, but probably not the kind you’re looking for.
Credibility
The most glaring mistakes can have a huge effect on credibility. Digital marketing is supposed to build B2B credibility. Your blogs, emails and whitepapers are designed to identify your website as an expert resource. That image is hard to portray if links don’t work or pages are out of date.
Conversion
The most important factor in B2B digital marketing is conversion. All of your efforts rely on your landing pages and downloadable content turning traffic into leads. Minor errors can derail conversion completely. All it takes is a broken link or an incorrect email for gathering leads, and all your efforts will be for nothing.
Mistakes do happen. And that feeling in your stomach acts as a constant reminder. The key is to make sure that the only mistakes that happen are the ones that require just a few key presses and a do-over.
Minor mistakes can really derail your marketing efforts, but an out of date strategy is a major mistake. Download our whitepaper to find out how to transform your strategy today.
I totally agree with you Eoin. A simple mistake can go viral considering the technology that we have right now.