Two Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Your company has invented a new-fangled product that’s supposed to be the best thing sliced bread and everyone at work is super excited about it. None of them can imagine why the whole B2B industry you serve shouldn’t pull out their wallets and order a truckload of the product. You’ve been asked to drive awareness and then build leads around a new product. “It shouldn’t be a problem, the product’s great! It’ll sell itself!” You smile gamely, and think ‘Let’s do some content marketing!

You read somewhere that 67 percent of B2B buyers rely more on content to make an investment decision than they did a year ago. You’ve been told it’s a proven way to get consumers to understand a product, build a need for it, and build leads. You begin to feel like you’ve made the first, right step, towards your goal of pushing your company’s new product.

You smarty.

67 percent of B2B buyers rely more on content to make an investment decision than they did a year ago.

Now all you have to do is build content that’s going to blow people’s minds. Suddenly, you aren’t as confident anymore. You know from past experience that this is a tough nut to crack. Surveys have shown that the most mentioned content marketing challenge is building, you got it, content.

If you are building content, there are a couple of things you need to ensure you don’t ignore.

Content Marketing Mistake 1: Badly Thought-through Segmentation

There are plenty of different opinions around how to segment audiences. But what everyone absolutely agrees on is the need to segment audiences. Without segmentation content producers don’t have a clear idea of who they are writing for, and will resort to creating content that’s generic.

There are a couple of ways to segment audiences. The most popular of these including divvying up audiences by buyer persona, or by company vertical, or by company size, or by the stage of a buyer’s purchase lifecycle, among others.

Without segmentation, content producers will work in the dark. And who wants that?

According to research from B2B Content Marketing Report, the most popular (53 percent) way to segment audiences–and therefore your content–is by product or service category. Close on its heels is segmentation by persona (40 percent). In third place is segmenting by vertical with 35 percent of B2B marketing professionals.

Having the right segmentation strategy can do wonders to your content marketing push. It can increase relevance and loyalty, and, more importantly, the number of leads you can generate.

Content Marketing Mistake 2: Ignoring Video

A large number of corporate marketing departments are overwhelmed by demands on their time. As a result many of them, when thinking about content for content marketing, will turn to articles and blogs; if for no other reason than the fact that they are comfortable with the format.

91 percent of businesses say they plan to increase or maintain their spending on video in 2016.

But that strategy is short-sighted and ignores the fact that more and more buyers want to understand products, especially those in the technology space, using video. According to the The State of Video Marketing 2016, a whopping 77 percent of consumers report that they were persuaded to purchase a product or a service after having watching a video. And another 91 percent of businesses say they plan to increase or maintain their spending on video in 2016.

In a world that’s facing an firehose of content, video helps your company stand out. The popularity of video is evident from its meteoric growth. Video will form 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, according to Cisco.

You’re thinking video is great, but we don’t have video capabilities in-house. Neither can we afford to outsource our video requirements.

76 percent of businesses who use video believe that it provides a good ROI.

The fact is creating video isn’t has hard as you think. Today there are easy-to-learn tools like Boomerang that takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality video. There are also easy-to-digest video learning sites like Vimeo’s video school where you can quickly get started.

And a little learning is worth the effort: 76 percent of businesses who use video believe that it provides a good ROI. Even better: 72 percent of businesses who use video believe that it has improved the conversion rate of their website.