Overall, it’s poor management that quietly strangles good B2B material. Here’s how to fix it.
Most marketing executives produce high-quality B2B content that contributes to direct and indirect revenue. 77% of marketers say effective B2B communications is a core element of business success. More than €4.73B is spent on content creation and distribution. That’s something to live for!
So what goes wrong? Here’s the killer… little emphasis is placed on how B2B content is used post-production. HQ leaders spend huge monies creating quality content while 90% of frontline sales reps don’t use it. Why?
Three ways good B2B content falls flat
After first-rate B2B content is ready, where does it wind up? In storage on an internal portal, server or cloud system hidden from view and mixed with thousands of mundane, unrelated documents.
Sales reps can spend hours each month in online nooks and crannies seeking good sales aids for customer presentation. If your top-notch B2B marketing content doesn’t show up fast, they give up. It’s projected that 70% of B2B marketing tools end up unused in corporate portals.
If that isn’t bad enough, most sales reps get little training on how to navigate folder-type structure or do helpful searches. Rogue reps finally cobble together their own content to avoid the frustration of searching big corporate storage bins.
60-70% of B2B content goes unused due to irrelevance. This is because minimal effort is spent providing easy channels to quality feedback through content analytics. There are technologies to measure single data points such as number of downloads, shares, views, etc. It’s not being done.
Also a factor is not understanding where a prospect is on the buyer journey, along with his or her buyer persona. B2B content misdirected at the third buyer journey stage when the prospect is in the first will be woefully off-target. A preceding blog in this month’s series and White Paper explains the three stages. It also provides detail of each element, and explains what types of content is most effective for each stage.
Many marketers still ‘produce and pray’ - create and deliver content and hope good things result. It’s not unlike traditional analog TV versus streaming web TV. Analog sends the same content to everyone on a pre-set schedule with the same advertising.
But web networks offer customized viewership on-demand with tailored ads and banners. This results from a feedback loop about content intake, advertisement engagement and other consumption-related behaviors.
Distributing good B2B content must exploit new digital tools such as silent activation platforms to track content delivery, to whom and when. Also, link your B2B messaging to your website or access by smartphone or CRM system. This should include the ability to quantify downloads, views, shares or remarks.
Finally, a content activation platform can quantify ROI of B2B content by:
A White Paper offers deeper insight into the three reasons B2B content fails as well as other factors limiting its potential.