What’s Wrong with Your B2B Content Strategy? 7 Mistakes and How to Fix Them

You hear every day about how important content is for connecting with your audience and generating leads.

You publish relevant blogs, invest your time and money, and climb the SERPs.

You’re doing everything right, but your B2B content strategy isn’t generating the leads, sales, and ROI you were promised.

What’s wrong?

For starters, less than half of B2Bs said they have a documented content marketing strategy as of 2021. If you fall into the no-strategy camp, consider yourself lucky now.

You get to start fresh without making structural adjustments to your strategy.

The truth is most B2Bs approach content marketing the wrong way. They treat their B2B content writing more like a form of traditional marketing: overly promotional, assuming more is better, neglecting their audience, etc.

Content has serious potential as a marketing medium, but you have to give your B2B content writing the respect it deserves.

7 Mistakes with Your B2B Content Strategy and How to Fix Them

Instead of covering what you should do right, let’s start by highlighting some of the most common B2B content strategy mistakes. These are the problems that seriously hold back your content’s potential and keep you spinning your wheels.

1. Covering Too Many Topics in Your B2B Content Writing

You can’t be an expert in everything. When you try to cover every potential keyword slightly related to your brand, you end up pumping out endless generic content. It’s no surprise that over half of B2B buyers say most of the content they receive from brands is totally useless.

What can you do instead?

Pick one or two topic niches – definitely no more than three – and go all in with your B2B content ideas. Your content will be much more relevant to your target audience segments which will deliver better results.

Plus, Google will notice that you’re an expert in these specific areas (rather than just trying to win keywords), and your rankings will improve over time.

2. Not Researching Your Target Audience Enough

Plenty of B2Bs can’t niche out with their content marketing because they don’t even know what their target audience wants – or who their target audience really is.

It really becomes a vicious cycle because then you don’t know precisely which pain points to address, who’s reading your work, and what they want from you.

What can you do instead?

Figure out who your target audience is and follow them. For ABM, this might mean choosing accounts or firmographics.

Develop detailed buyer personas and stay tapped into their day-to-day so you always know what topics to cover and problems to address.

3. Overly Promotional B2B Content Writing

This is a tricky problem to address when you have shareholders to please that don’t understand how your B2B content strategy is supposed to work. However, it’s vital because promotional content just looks like an advertisement.

What can you do instead?

Every piece of content you publish should empower buyers in some way. If you can manage to make their job easier with content like product comparisons, case studies, and tutorials, you’ll be 3x more likely to close bigger deals with less regret from your buyers.

4. Publishing Frequent Low-Quality or Mediocre Content

It’s much more likely that you’re publishing too often than not enough. Lots of marketing teams tend to assume more is better, but it’s really quality that matters.

If you’re just publishing blogs hoping to rank for keywords, Google will notice. Without quality, there’s no reason for anyone to see your blog over another.

What can you do instead?

Stick with your niche topics, where your expertise can truly shine. Publish longer in-depth content around keywords in those niche topics. Always strive to outdo content pieces on the first page of search engine results for your target keyword. Just make sure you’re not contributing to the noise.

5. No Personalized Content Distribution

73% of B2B buyers say they have less time for researching than they’ve had in the past. They don’t have time to dig through your content catalog for case studies relevant to their company. They expect a personalized experience like they find everywhere else online.

What can you do instead?

Use AI-powered tools to hyper-personalize each visitor’s experience based on their behavior. Organize your content by pain point, issue, or vertical. Use interactive features to keep visitors engaged.

Once they start clicking, the AI will offer personalized recommendations.

6. Misdirected Keyword Research for Your B2B Content Strategy

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to rank for every semi-relevant keyword in sight.

Google has billions of choices to display when someone runs a search. The results are designed to only display the top experts in each topic. How can they tell your expertise if you’re publishing content in every arena?

What can you do instead?

Shoot for long-tail keywords, questions, and autocomplete keywords instead of broad primary keywords. Likewise, expand your B2B content strategy keyword research with semantic keywords via the Google search results. Like so:

Google

7. Gating Your B2B Content Writing Behind Lead Forms

Fully gated content hurts your B2B content strategy for many reasons. First, search engines are less likely to display your content in the top search results.

Second, and most importantly, gated content interrupts the website user experience. No one wants to provide personal information (or information about their company) to an organization they don’t know just to read content. They’ll just go somewhere else.

What can you do instead?

Give visitors a sample of a few hundred words so they can decide if it’s worth providing their details and email to get the full piece. Use micro smart forms that only ask for a business email and country instead of lengthy lead magnet forms.

Make Your B2B Content Strategy Work Harder

The right website experience can make every piece of content you publish work harder. Instead of giving visitors a generic blog interface and expecting them to find what they need, AI-powered tools create an interactive personalized experience.

Using behavioral data and intent data, each visitor sees the most relevant content available on your site instantly. Plus, the algorithms are designed to gently nurture leads and guide them down the funnel before they ever contact your sales team.

Learn how AI-powered personalization can help you leverage your B2B content strategy.

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