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As a B2B marketing team, there are a few common mistakes that should be avoided. Not focusing on branding enough, or ignoring the potential solid audience research holds for your brand can all negatively affect your brand's growth in the long run. 

The growth of online marketing strategies, various tools, and software, and even a shift in audience preferences have all led to a change in B2B business's marketing journeys. However, there are timeless mistakes that every B2B marketer should know about while crafting a marketing strategy. 

In this blog, we'll cover the top 6 mistakes that a majority of B2B marketers make - mistakes you should try not to make throughout your marketing journey. 

#1 A Lack of Focus on Branding

You may think, "What's branding got anything to do with B2B? Isn't branding only needed when interacting with a non-business audience like B2C brands?" This notion could not have been farther from the truth. Most B2B brands do not focus on branding as much as they should, since they do not see the contribution it provides to your brand and your customers in the long run. Put simply - branding is important. Creating a strong connection with your present and potential customers with a solid brand identity, voice, and emotion-centric branding efforts is the best way you as marketing can avoid making this first mistake. Tips: 

• Creating a brand from scratch takes the same (if not more) amount of effort as creating a company. 
• Emotion is key. The more you relate to your customers' feelings, emotions, and needs, the more customer-centric your brand will be able to be. 
• Consistency is key. Creating a brand is not an overnight process, so putting in effort regularly is the best thing you can do for your B2B brand. 

#2 Being unaware of your true target audience

Be it a business or an individual on social media, knowing what your target audience is essential for B2B success. B2B brands often miss out on defining their target audience early on in their marketing efforts, simply because it does not seem important at that stage. However, businesses too, comprise your target audience and need personalized, impactful marketing efforts that might motivate them to opt for your brand's products/services. Understanding your target audience is highly useful for your marketing, advertising, sales, product development, and even service departments, as the better you know who and what your audience comprises, the better you will be able to cater to their needs. 

Tip: Buyer personas are a must. Take some time out to divide your customers into personas that you can use to create better targeted and more efficient marketing campaigns. After all, better B2B marketing efforts potentially lead to better brand and revenue growth! 

#3 Using unnecessary jargon 

Often, B2B brands (and marketers) use unnecessary jargon to sound more "authoritative and professional" in front of their target audience. However, this is the biggest mistake you could make as a B2B marketer. Content marketing efforts such as a company blog, weekly newsletters, free industry resources, and whitepapers are a goldmine for B2B brands. No matter how useful and valuable the content inside each of these may be, using jargon and complicated terms to interact with your audience will be nothing but negative for your brand growth. 

Keeping it simple, not bland, is a mantra every B2B marketer should know. 

Here are a couple of ways to stop making this mistake.  

• Write like your audience. Conduct thorough research on the types of content your audience prefers, and create content accordingly. It always helps to keep in mind their preferred level of technicality, subject understanding, and voice in mind!
• Ensure you ask for lots of feedback from your audience after they view/interact with the content you've put out. Asking for feedback before publishing the content is a great way to ensure you don't publish content that is not audience-friendly in the long run. 

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#4 Analytics, analytics, analytics
(or a lack thereof) 

As any B2B marketing will tell you, analytics tools are THE way to track and measure brand performance over time. Be it website conversions, newsletter sign-ups, or even the number of visitors that signed up for a demo call, analytics are essential for a rocking marketing strategy. B2B brands often ignore this aspect of marketing, which is perhaps the most important one - tracking results. Understanding which channels are bringing in better, more promising leads, and which channels need optimizing are useful insights to have while allocating budgets and brainstorming strategies for each of these channels.

Opting for the right analytics software based on your brand needs is equally important, and the only way you can do this is by conducting lots of research on the various options available. Social media platforms too, provide separate analytics dashboards for business accounts, and these are a great place to understand audience behavior. 

#5 A Poor Definition of your Brand’s USP  

Your brand's USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, is what sets it apart from your competitors. Not understanding your USP leads to poor use of marketing potential, and a potential dip in the amount of traffic your sales funnel sees. What's more, marketing your USP well creates a lasting impression on your audience, which is nothing but beneficial for your B2B brand. Understand your audience's needs, tie them in with your USP, and market it in a way that makes it about what your brand can do for them. 

#6 Ignoring UI and Design

Here's a TL;DR - If your User Interface sucks, you're not doing it right. Apart from your service or product, your overall user experience is what helps clinch the deal. Be it a mobile application or your website, focusing on a smooth, user-friendly, and responsive design is key for a glowing UX. 

Ensure you test out all of your website pages, applications, and landing pages on multiple devices and network speeds. Optimize your images and videos so that they load quickly on slower networks, and ensure that your website is accessible (and readable) on both desktop and mobile devices.

‍Contemporary B2B marketing is closing the gap

In the marketing realm, it’s a common precedent to pit B2B and B2C marketing against each other. And rightly so, given their inherently dissimilar attributes with who they’re selling to, how long it takes to make a purchase, etc. With that said, research and technology have proven there are a lot alike between the two. They might be subtle but understanding those subtleties are impactful for the long haul.

Technology has shown us the prevalence of digital customers in B2B buyer personas is similar to that of B2C. With B2B marketing showing a progressive interest in becoming more brand-oriented, research has shown us the importance of emotional connection at higher levels of a B2B element value. Like in B2C, building a social media presence or making more personalized content to promote branding has shifted the agenda of B2B marketing. To emphasize further, here are 4 things B2B marketing could adopt from B2C marketing.

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4 things b2b could adopt from b2c marketing

1. Marketing to People:

This translates to the personalisation of your marketing strategy that will tend to customers’ emotional and logical needs. B2C marketing for the longest time has honed the art of delivering personalized messages to individual prospects. While historically B2B marketing has been informational/educational akin to the needs of the several decision-makers involved. B2B prospects are nurtured with their need to research.

You’ll be surprised to know that adding a personal element to your interaction in your marketing promotes perceived brand value. In fact, B2B customers are 50% more likely to convert when they see personal value, and are 8x likely to pay a premium for a comparable service. The use of dynamic content that corresponds with a user’s needs on a website, and B2B email marketing to establish a personal tone, are some examples of personalisation. This isn’t to diminish the informational/professional element of B2B marketing but to add a personal touch to the same.

2. Building a Community Around the Brand:

From a business relationship to fans of the brand. Presumably, this is much harder for a B2B organization to achieve, while it’s second nature for most B2C brands. OnePlus for example built a community forum that gives users access to news, discussion and social features. This not only promotes the brand and its products but also allows for more customer engagement.

There are different channels through which B2B companies can build their communities. This can include creating a subreddit and uploading infographics on YouTube. Using these mediums could prove to be more useful than building your own forum thanks to the already well established B2B marketing communities within them. If you are keen on building one with a more tight-knit approach, consider forming a public discord server or a public slack channel.

When it comes to building a social media presence in B2B, having a social media presence alone won’t cut the mustard. Instead, a continual effort to build through customer engagement is key. B2C brands often create community posts and polls on Twitter, create short quizzes, answer queries, etc. This dynamic however is hard to build over the professional overtone, but adopting its practice should facilitate some creative and original content. It is also important to utilize a wide array of social media platforms, and not ones that might generate the most prospects.

Influencer marketing is something B2C marketing is all too familiar with. And for good reasons, people are more likely to purchase something with more credibility. But before you do so, you would have to sell the product to your influencer first, which involves a great deal of good faith and trust. The influencer marketing space in B2C is cataclysmically large, to scale the same for B2B would be pretty impractical. Instead, an affiliate program that incentivises existing customers to recommend the product or service to others. Even leaving reviews on authentic platforms like G2 increases the credibility of your brand by having other brands and marketing leaders vouch for it.

3. Buyer Personas and B2B Mobile Traffic:

Building a strong buyer persona is something B2B marketing could use to improve its content strategy and create more engaging content that addresses its challenges. This means understanding your target audience. In B2B this represents all the decision-makers involved, their pain points, goals and most importantly intent data. Research shows that B2B companies that utilize buyer personas in their content strategy perform better.

Speaking of buyer personas, it’s not unusual to expect a large portion of B2C buyers to use their mobile devices for research and queries. But what if I told you the use of mobile phones is gradually becoming the source of a lot of B2B search queries, over 50% of it to be precise. More buyers are using their phones for B2B research during work and leading organizations are generating 40% of revenue through it. Considering that mobile-first B2B generates higher engagement, site traffic, search queries and leads. Maybe it’s worth adopting from our B2C cousins.

4. Privacy and Privacy first marketing:

Becoming a privacy-first business is a big deal in this current digital climate. Given that the customer pool for the average B2C marketer is larger and its not so admirable track record with data security and privacy. More B2C marketers are becoming more proactive with their data and how they interact with it. This concerns B2B marketers as well, from a business perspective, data security is paramount. Educating yourself in B2C data security practices can be useful as most of the regulations governing these practices and the use of cookies stems from B2C practices in the past. To learn more about becoming a privacy-first business refer to this blog.

It's not hard to believe that the line between B2B and B2C marketing is getting blurry. At the very least they share the same goals. To generate as many leads and convert them. While contemporary B2B marketing adopts features of B2C marketing, the same could be said the other way around. Their culmination of experience in lead generation and conversion brings a lot to the table for the future of marketing methodology.