To capitalize on content trends, marketers should create content that’s both engaging and informative. Customers should never feel like you’re blatantly hawking your product, service, or platform—instead, content should help them make smarter decisions and move forward in their buyer journey.
It is crucial to always prioritize buyers' informational needs in your content, but you should also be careful of the potential problems listed below that could ruin both your content and its revenue.
5 B2B Content Marketing Mistakes
1. Over-Optimization
Content should be optimized for the needs of your customers, not for search engines. If the content is overly keyword-stuffed or does not appeal to buyers' informational needs, it will fail to get traction and hinder audience engagement. A great way to ensure you’re not over-optimizing your content is to read it out loud (or listen to it, if it’s a video or webinar). If the language and sentence structure flow naturally, you’re all set! If your content sounds like it was written with AI, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
2. A “Salesy” Presentation
Customers don't want content that's only promotional — they want content that educates them and helps them make an informed decision. High-quality content focuses on being helpful, not just pushing products or services. Your content should not focus on pushing a sales message, as overly promotional content can turn off buyers quickly. Instead, focus on helping buyers make smarter decisions while staying true to the brand’s purpose and values. This helps build trust and sets up long-term relationships.
3. Not Leveraging Multimedia Assets
Content isn't just about text anymore. Videos, infographics, podcasts, and webinars are essential content pieces in any successful B2B content strategy for 2023. It's important to consider what content mediums your audience likes best and create content around these preferences. This can help you build a diverse content portfolio. Potential leads may appreciate your brand, but be more partial to a specific genre of content. Creating a variety of content ensures all your bases are covered.
One easy strategy to appeal to multiple audiences without duplicating efforts is to create a single-topic blog/webinar pairing. Create a long-form webinar for a more technical audience, or an audience that simply prefers video as a medium. Then, create a blog that essentially summarizes the biggest takeaways from your webinar. Now you’ve created two pieces of content with different appeals and applications without using two different ideas and SEO research.
4. Content for Content’s Sake
Content should not be rushed out in an effort to keep up with trends; creating quality content takes time and patience. Every piece of content your brand releases is an opportunity to be perceived as you would like to be perceived, so make sure your content is thoughtful, useful and most of all accurate. This can be done by ensuring each piece of content is rich in information, often in the form of statistics or quotes. Content should be informed by data, such as search engine optimization (SEO) or analytics, to make sure content reaches its target audience and meets business goals.
5. Outdated Content
While focusing on upcoming strategy is essential, marketers shouldn't forget to update their existing content too! Not only will you be able to integrate the latest and greatest insight, statistics, and more, but you can ensure that your content adheres to the latest search engine policies and guidelines, increasing the visibility of all your content.
Gut-Check Questions on Content Strategy
There are plenty of reasons content can be created — a client request, a stale website, or antsy creative teams. Before bowing to any of these factors and putting more content into the world, there are 3 important questions you need to ask yourself.
- Who will find this useful?
- Is this content well-informed?
- What is the end goal of this content?
If you can answer all three of these questions with satisfactory answers, you should be all set to go ahead and produce your blog, webinar, or infographic (while avoiding all the mistakes we outlined above, of course). Happy creating!
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