Content has become the foundation for so many of your most critical marketing tasks. If it’s not effective enough, things like demand generation, mid-funnel engagement, account-based marketing, and top-of-funnel lead generation will suffer.
But consistently creating quality content for every stage of the buyer’s journey is easier said than done—and there’s new research that shows just how difficult it can be.
Despite the importance of content for B2B marketing, many teams aren’t succeeding. Something has to change if you want to drive the results your company needs.
B2B Marketers Increasingly Frustrated with Content
In a new report, Uberflip and Heinz Marketing get to the crux of content’s importance in B2B marketing. The authors say that “If you think of your demand generation program as an engine, then your content could be thought of as the gas. [It’s] essential to move your initiatives forward.”
And for 82% of respondents, content is seen as very important to marketing success with 79% using it far beyond demand gen. And yet, 48% of B2B marketers say that their content is either “somewhat effective” or generally “ineffective.
That’s a real problem when business results hinge on effective content that stands out from the noise of your competitors. What’s worse is that this isn’t simply a problem of investment. Throwing money at content ineffectiveness won’t suddenly right the ship.
According to the study, teams spending as little as 25% of their budgets on content are capable of achieving strong results while 1 in 5 respondents have ineffective content despite spending 75% of their demand gen budgets on it.
Diagnosing the real roots of your content problems will have widespread benefits across your entire organization.
3 Ways Content Fails (and How to Fix Them)
All too often, content ineffectiveness is blamed on noise. There’s so much being published in your industry that cutting through feels nearly impossible. Don’t get caught up in this line of thinking.
While content shock is a real challenge, it’s not the main factor contributing to ineffectiveness. As you evaluate your existing content creation processes, consider how these problems make your pieces fall short of desired results:
- Playing a Content Guessing Game: Marketers often view content as an art rather than a science. And while there’s certainly an art to content creation, leaving out the quantitative side will leave you playing a guessing game. You end up creating content because you believe it’s what your customers want/need. When you aren’t able to identify specific in-market target accounts, you risk publishing just to send it out into the void and fall flat.
- Stopping at Basic Personalization: Personalization has become the holy grail of marketing. But for a long time, all that meant was adding {FIRST NAME} to an email greeting. If you aren’t building personalization into actual pieces of content, customers won’t engage as much with your marketing activities. This means creating specific pieces for specific target accounts and addressing the unique needs of individual contacts.
- Delivering at the Wrong Times: It’s possible that you’ve created high-quality content that is perfectly suited for your target accounts. It might even be personalized beyond what your competitors are doing. And yet, it still falls short of expectations. In many cases, this is a matter of timing. When you aren’t able to deliver content in the right moments, your messaging won’t feel relevant enough to the audience.
The good news is that each of these issues can be addressed with the right data. Investing in third-party intent data can give you the insights necessary to identify the right people, create the right content for them, and deliver it at the right times.
But again, this isn’t a problem you can just sink money into and expect to see results. You have to be prepared to unlock the true value of intent data. And that starts with knowing the ins and outs of this kind of third-party data.
Source: https://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/why-your-content-isnt-driving-the-results-you-want-02251609
