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5 Mistakes Sure to Impact Your B2B Marketing Strategy

By Jenna Bruce on Tue, Apr 28, 2020 @ 10:47 AM |

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The current marketing landscape sees continuous media fragmentation and channel diversification. This makes it incredibly tough for marketers to recognize what’s working on any given day.

And while all marketers struggle from time-to-time with these challenges, B2B marketing comes with its own set of challenges. Many executives assume selling to businesses is the same as selling to consumers, so they employ B2C tactics that simply don’t work.

Not only is B2B marketing vastly different from B2C marketing, it also happens to be far more difficult. To start, the B2B buyer is more sophisticated and requires a bevy of information a B2C buyer doesn’t. These buyers are also getting paid to make the RIGHT buying decision, so messaging must be right, with every touch point calculated and leveraged. And keep in mind, these touch points are usually shared by dozens of decision makers including influencers, stakeholders and nay-sayers.

There’s also the 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report which stated that up to 70% of the B2B buyer’s journey is completed online, before they even reach out to your sales department. Other reports project that the real figure is closer to 85% of B2B buyers making decisions without any human interaction. This lack of personal contact has made many B2B marketers throw up their hands and decree that B2B marketing is dead!

That’s what was said about print marketing. And that was also a lie.

The truth is, marketing is always changing, therefore marketers must always pivot and adapt. If you’re not keeping up with the B2B marketing changes, you’re probably making one of the 5 following costly mistakes:

Mistake No. 1: No Congruency

Every ad should be created with the idea of generating a potential warm lead. To do this you will need to send traffic to a dedicated landing page where their contact information can be collected.

Be sure the landing page is congruent with the ad. For instance, offering a “free evaluation” should lead the viewer to a dedicated landing page calling out the offer. Sending traffic to your homepage or a non-specific landing page will confuse the audience and will bounce back the time spent on the page.

Mistake No. 2: Relying on Jargon

As I mentioned earlier, B2B buyers are sophisticated and require more robust information than a regular consumer. For this reason, it is common to have to use technical terms in your copy to precisely describe your product or service.

But understand that technical terms are NOT the same thing as jargon. Jargon is intentional complex language that does not serve to communicate clearly but rather serves to make the user look smart. This usually backfires though as confused prospects tend to look elsewhere for solutions.

Mistake No. 3: Not Knowing Your Audience

No matter what B2B sales tactics you employ, none of them will give you the ROI you hope for if you’ve built a campaign around hunches. Or worse, built it around how amazing your product is instead of how you can help your prospect.

Like most business owners, you have a lot of data at your disposal. Much of this data will tell you who your audience is and what their needs, demographics, and buying behaviors are. This information will help you develop messaging that is relevant, which will ultimately result in more leads reaching out to you. That is, only IF you analyze the data to retrieve actionable insights.

Mistake No. 4: Not Considering Lifetime Customer  When Creating a Marketing Budget

It’s important that you know exactly what you can afford to spend to acquire a new customer. Many marketers make the mistake of calculating maximum customer acquisition budget based on the price of their product or service. So, if the marketer’s product costs $100 and they want 100% profit, the maximum marketing spend they believe is $50.

But the budget can look very different when you take into consideration the average lifetime customer value (LTCV) of each prospect. So for instance, if the price is still $100 but customers typically order one unit each month and remain customers for five years, then the LTCV is $100/month x 12 months x five years or $6,000.

If you spend just 10% of the LTCV to acquire a new customer, then you are looking at being able to afford $600 instead of $50. This is a more realistic figure and one that can help you buy more ads, resulting in greater lead generation.

Mistake No. 5: Not Qualifying Leads

At the end of the day, you’re not looking to generate tons of leads, you’re looking to generate QUALITY leads. In order to do that and not waste time on tire kickers, you need to set up processes to qualify these leads. This should happen on your landing page where you can ask the lead to checkmark one of three boxes:

  • Request the (free) lead magnet (white paper etc.)
  • Request product information or receive a quote
  • Request an estimate or set up an appointment

Can you guess which boxes indicate more qualified leads?

The last two! Leads checking either of these last two boxes are far more qualified than ones just looking for a free lead magnet.

B2B advertising definitely poses challenges to marketers. The key is to stay on top of B2B marketing trends so you know when to pivot and adapt, and stay away from making any of these classic mistakes.

We know, that can feel like a tall order, so if you feel overwhelmed with your B2B marketing or aren’t getting the ROI you would like, get in touch with us. Mediaspace partners with clients to identify and target the decision-making business executives. We make planning and buying more difficult media, like B2B, easy.

ROI marketing strategies customer reach niche marketing b2b relationships

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