Common B2B Marketing Strategy Errors: Advanced B2B

Struggling to perfect your business-to-business marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place! JSL Marketing & Web Design has been helping organizations market to other organizations for years! We’ve learned a lot about B2B marketing in the process and compiled this list of common mistakes to help you in your marketing! The tips and tricks laid out below are not magic; they won’t immediately take a business-to-business marketing plan from zero to hero overnight.

However, these common mistakes are a good place to check for foundational errors. If B2B marketing is like building a house, these tips and tricks won’t perfect the living room color scheme or give you a perfect lawn. But they will prevent your basement from flooding and give you a good starting point to work off.

B2B Marketing Industry At A Glance

But first, a look at some B2B marketing stats at a glance.

• Businesses that use content marketing see a 6X higher return on average than those that don’t.
• 89% of marketers use some sort of blog.
• 47% of organizations have seen performance increase after moving budget from physical to digital marketing efforts
• About 2/3rds of marketers consider email their top revenue-generating tactic.

The market is projected to grow in future years, but that strength does bring challenges. Many marketers find themselves with a plethora of options for B2B marketing, which often just complicates their strategy.

Don’t get lost in the shuffle… learn from these common B2B marketing mistakes!

Common B2B Mistakes

B2B Mistake 1: Neglecting Research

Business-to-business marketing takes time. (Read our first blog in this series to see how that impacts your overall strategy.) Any successful business-to-business marketing strategy will begin with an idea of the target persona for your brand.

For instance, if you’re a legal software provider, you might decide that your B2B marketing should focus on law firms with over 100 employees. You decide this approach is the right one and center your new marketing strategy around these customers. All the content you create, the ads you design, and the videos you record are addressed to law firms with over 100 employees. However, after a few months, you have a startling observation.

Most of your business isn’t coming from law firms with 100 employees. It’s coming from in-house legal teams who don’t bill on hours and are more interested in productivity than manual work. This is a game-changing insight and it’s one that completely destroys your prior marketing strategy.

How could you have prevented this? The answer is pretty simple: research. Many B2B marketers research their customers better than B2C marketers, but it is still an easy part of the process to whiff. The more time you spend researching, the better.

B2B Mistake 2: Foregoing Testing

Let’s stay on this law firm example. Maybe you decided that while you felt law firms were your target organization, you wanted to run a 60-day pilot marketing campaign to see where you could improve. After the 60 days, you return and realize that while you’re beginning to make inroads with law firms, they are not the core of your business. Conversations with sales and customer success reveal that most new clients in those 60 days were actually in-house legal teams.

Never think of marketing as a cut-and-dry endeavor. It’s a constant process of researching, evaluating, and adjusting as needed. Always test approaches when implementing a new B2B marketing strategy. While not comprehensive, consider running any of the following.

• A/B/C Testing: In this approach, you compare two similar units and determine which performs better. This could be different email subject lines, different geos for two exactly similar Google campaigns, or two different blogs on the same topic. For best results, we’d recommend including 3 or more to truly see which unit is the best performing.
• Channel Testing: It’s ok to not have it all figured out. It’s perfectly natural to compare two different media channels and decide which channel is the most impactful for your brand’s needs. We’d recommend always ensuring that you have a full-funnel media mix at all times, but there’s nothing wrong with deciding that LinkedIn is a better use of your ad budget than Facebook.
• Load Speed Testing: This is one you should always check in any web design project, but it’s still a good practice for B2B. Always keep tabs on your website’s load speed to ensure that your potential customers are able to load your website quickly and accurately. Most users will leave a site if it doesn’t load in 3 or four seconds, so constantly auditing web design metrics can save a B2B organization money in the long run.

B2B Mistake 3: Thinking of Channels Instead Of One Overarching Strategy

Do you know how we talked about testing channels earlier?

That’s a great approach and one we recommend, but some B2B marketers can swing too much in the opposite direction. The paradigm of testing different channels is totally fine, but be sure that you’re creating a full funnel. You should always be trying to take users from awareness to consideration and then purchase and if you want to audit to determine if LinkedIn or Facebook is better for your brand, go ahead!

However, compartmentalizing your marketing into social, email, web design, and written content without a comprehensive strategy or clear messaging is not a good approach.  You should have one overarching strategy that uses different channels (email, social, etc) at different stages to drive the best results.

Not Setting Up A Clear Definition Of Success

A lot of B2B organizations think their definition of success is clear-cut. After all, it’s won deals, right? However, different B2B organizations might have different definitions of what a successful campaign looks like, but forget to clarify this upfront.

Maybe you’re new in your industry and need to measure brand recall to see how you’re being remembered by your potential clients. Maybe you need niche targeting to reach the right people, as yours is a very specific product or service. Maybe you’re focused on upselling existing accounts and need to market to your current customers. Regardless of your goals, it’s important to define them and communicate them clearly to your digital marketing partners.

Dominate B2B Marketing With JSL Marketing & Web Design

Are you having problems with any of these business-to-business problems? Solve them with the experts at JSL Marketing & Web Design! We’ve been helping organizations reach their target businesses for years and have the credentials to prove it!

We are…

• A Proud Forbes Agency Council Member
• 5-Star Reviewed On Google
• A Zapier Certified Expert
• Expertise Best Content Marketers In Dallas 2020
• & More!

As a full-service business-to-business marketing agency, we offer a wide array of services to help you reach your desired audience. We could suggest any of the following, depending on your unique needs, strategy, and desires.

• Web Design & Development
• Brand Development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Marketing & Production
• Photography & Video Production
• Social Media Marketing & Management

Our portfolio of work doesn’t just look great. It performs great as well! We think our clients are cool, and they do as well!

“High touch, very personal, knowledgeable team.”- Kim L, Dallas, TX.

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