5 Reasons Why Most B2B Marketing Strategies Suck!

B2B marketing, or business-to-business marketing, can be difficult. You are trying to grab the attention of other businesses and corporations to land deals and contracts that bring in thousands of dollars.

It’s likely that you’re trying to convince an entire team of decision-makers to purchase from you, rather than one single person. The process of selling to a decision-maker within a business (or a team of them) is a lot different from selling to a consumer. When it comes to B2B marketing, you can forget pretty much about emotional investment as a selling point. This puts B2B marketing trends in opposition with a lot of the trends that we are seeing today.

As businesses try to figure out how to sell in this environment, we’ve seen a lot of marketing campaigns majorly backfire or flop.

Marketing teams may struggle because they keep thinking like a B2C marketing team instead of a B2B. Or maybe they just keep falling behind on the trends so they get left in the dust of their competitors. Maybe they’ve made a serious miscalculation in discovering what their audience wants.

If your marketing department isn’t getting results, check out this list of five reasons why most B2B marketing strategies suck (and some major fails for your bitter enjoyment):

1. Newsjacking the Wrong Way

Newsjacking is the practice of incorporating viral and relevant news into your marketing content. This is most commonly done through social media campaigns. In your posts, you can include hashtags that are trending or mention popular events that are happening now.

The best way to use this strategy is to pick a positive or funny trend that relates to people or practices within your industry.

However, if you’re not careful with newsjacking, it can come across as incredibly insensitive and inappropriate. Probably the best example of bad newsjacking is the press release from Quantum Tech two days after the terrorist attack on September 11th.

In the press release from Quantum Tech, the company explained how we lost more than people on September 11th, we lost computers and data. It went on to say that we should be reminded through this event how important it is to back-up data remotely. They pointed out that Morgan Stanley, one of their customers, was able to run the day after the attack because of their data storage with Quantum Tech.

It didn’t take long for the backlash to start rolling in. The press release was retracted and the company issued a formal apology and fired the writer of the press release.

It’s not hard to see how this move was in poor taste. Many people were mourning the loss of loved ones or were deeply traumatized by the attack just two days prior. Using this trama and hurt to try and sell a product makes you look heartless. If you want to try newsjacking, for the love of God, don’t use a national tragedy of any kind.

Remember:

1. Choose positive or light-hearted events and trending hashtags
2. Keep it relevant to your industry
3. Keep it relevant to your audience

2. Focusing on the Wrong Metrics

There are a lot of metrics measured to determine the success or failure of a marketing campaign--clicks, sales, traffic, new visitors, returning visitors, demographics, on and on. When measuring the success of a campaign, it’s important to focus on the correct metrics so that you get an accurate reading on the situation.

Sometimes, you may choose to create a campaign to draw in new visitor traffic. While sales are important, looking at metrics like clicks, new visitors, or how many of the new visitors become returning visitors could be more useful in deciding whether the campaign served its purpose.

You may also decide to create content that addresses a single, uncommon issue that your audience may encounter. This content may get fewer clicks because fewer people encounter this issue. But, how many of those clicks then turned into a purchase from those few readers? Clicks may be low, but the conversion may be high. I would call that a successful campaign.

A great example of focusing on the wrong metric was the infamous “Oh My God, I’m Gonna Puke” commercial for Internet Explorer. In the commercial, a woman uses her husband’s laptop and sees something that she finds disgusting in his browser history. She vomits, her husband slips in it, then she vomits on him, then she does it again… it’s awful.

People hated the commercial, but tons of people have seen it! The video on Youtube has over 1.2 million views. But does that mean it was a success? Absolutely not. Adding shock value just to get clicks does not mean that you have a good campaign on your hands.

Not only were people appalled by the commercial, but the unprofessional nature of it probably hurt Internet Explorer’s relationships with other businesses as well. Who wants customers to think of vomit when they think of your product?

Make sure that you are using the right metrics to help you accomplish your goals. Clicks and views aren’t everything.

3. Not Understanding Your Audience

Trying to build a marketing campaign to reach an audience that you don’t understand is a majorly bad idea for marketing teams of any kind. You can see this all over the place. Companies sell products that no one asked for or market to audiences that don’t care about their product. They usually go belly-up within a year or two.

One example of this is the HP Touchpad that failed to compete with the iPad. HP Wasn’t able to meet the needs of its audience. The operating system was weak and couldn’t compete with the products that were already on the market.

The features that differentiated them from the competition were not enough to outweigh the poor operating system. At the end of the day, the thing that consumer cared the most about was the thing that HP couldn’t deliver on. The Touchpad was discontinued within a year despite the buzz that it received pre-release.

If you don’t know what your audience wants, or what they believe is most important, you won’t be able to draw in the kind of sales that you need to be successful.

Specifically for B2B marketing, companies need to be aware of the needs of the businesses that they’re trying to sell to. 94% of businesses say that this is the top reason that they’ll choose one vendor over another.

4. Making It Up as You Go

A good marketing strategy is documented and updated frequently. Keeping a good record of your marketing strategy will not only keep you focused and on track, but it will make it easier to communicate needs, deadlines, and goals with the rest of the marketing team or with other departments that you may be collaborating with. It will also give you a realistic idea of what your budget needs to be.

According to Digital Authority Partners, 60% of successful marketers document their content marketing strategy. Getting your goals on paper makes it easy to break down those goals into smaller steps. Creating a solid, step-by-step plan with small, achievable goals will make larger goals easier to reach.

Goals that are recorded are more likely to be achieved than those that are not. By committing to recording your marketing strategy, you commit to the execution of the strategy as well.

5. Using Influencers the Wrong Way

Influencers are the trendiest thing in marketing right now. B2C marketing teams use influencers to sell products to their followers and increase the audience reach of the business.

These influencers typically don’t have any experience or expertise in the industry of the product that they are selling, but they live a lifestyle that is appealing to their audience. These types of influencers often help businesses create an emotional connection with consumers.

This is not the angle that you want to take with influencers for B2B marketing.

Businesses and decision-makers within them aren’t looking for an emotional connection to a product. They are working with each other to find the best product, the best deal, and the most logical choice when they look for a vendor.

As an example of what not to do, we can look at the commercial that Wix put together for their slot during the 2018 Superbowl. In this commercial, Youtube comedians Rhett & Link showed how they would build a website on Wix for their business.

The commercial was a flop because no one knew who they were, it wasn’t very funny, and Rhett & Link’s claim to fame has nothing to do with promoting a small business. They weren’t relevant to the industry and they didn’t bring any kind of expertise to the table.

When you choose an influencer to represent your business to other businesses, it’s essential that they bring something of value to the table in a logical argument. If someone asks, “What kind of traffic can Wix handle, and at what price,” two comedians are not going to be the ones to answer that question.

Decision-makers are looking for facts, numbers, and expert reviews, not an emotional connection. A survey done in 2015 showed that 49% of decision-makers value their peers and colleagues as their top source for information and 33% said industry experts.

By presenting your audience with an influencer that is at their level or higher within an industry, you bring authority and credibility to the table in a way that can boost your ROI in a campaign. Make sure to choose someone whose opinion your audience will care about.

B2B marketing campaigns cannot be treated like any other marketing campaigns. They need to be carefully planned and executed. You need to have the right goals in mind, monitor the right metrics, and use the right industry voices to help raise awareness of your company. Alternatively, you can always work with the right agency who can help you out with your endeavors.

Start by recording your marketing strategy and keep these failed campaigns in mind as you craft it. With the right strategy, your business will stand out from the competition and you’ll start creating quality, lasting relationships with your clients.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.