Top 10 Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing to Cure in 2022
The B2B landscape is rising very quickly in competition. As a B2B business owner, there lies a very small margin for mistakes in your marketing activities. Here’s a valuable insight on the top 10 infectious diseases of B2B Marketing you would like to avoid to keep growing your brand.
Adding up to the seriousness of the situation – nearly a third of B2B companies allocate just 5% of their organization’s total budget towards marketing.
The last thing you want is to catch the “infectious diseases” of B2B marketing.
Top 10 Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing to Cure in 2022
In this post, we’ll list the top 10 infectious diseases of B2B marketing, that are costing numerous companies some serious money — and how to cure them.
#1 Jargonisis
In the world of B2B marketing, people often think using jargon indefinitely in their digital marketing plan – for example: blog posts, funnel copies(e-books, white papers, etc.), landing pages, newsletter emails, etc. is justified.
No doubt it’s important to convey the technical explanation, jargon then is reasonable and necessary. It presents the knowledge that your company possesses in its niche. Often it is seen that using vague and general wording may present your organization as inexperienced. Hence, leveraging specialized language portrays brand authority and will definitely enhance your rank for specific keywords.
However, using too much jargon with your readers is popularizing one of the infectious diseases of B2B Marketing. Your audience will find it difficult in understanding your message and information. Additionally, your content can even frustrate them.
The Cure
Spend a good amount of time to understand your target audience and curate your content or copy relevantly. Now when you analyze your buyer persona optimally, your content will resonate with them. Moreover, create content that they want to create.
#2 Deisgnitus
It’s not a fact hard to accept – Mobile devices account for more than 50% of web traffic globally. During the first quarter of 2021, smartphones (excluding tablets) registered a staggering 54.8% of worldwide website traffic as it continues to move above the 50% mark since the initial months of 2017.
Interestingly, Google has mobile-first indexing. That basically suggests – your website’s mobile (surprisingly not the desktop) version is the deciding factor for how Google indexes your website and how you rank. More importantly, 79% of people prefer revisting the mobile version of a website if it is easy to use.
All of these statistics suggest that not implementing a responsive mobile-first design (which essentially allows us to deliver the same content that adjusts to the user’s device size and shape ) is one of the terrible diseases of B2B Marketing that’ll deeply hurt your site’s user experience and rankings.
The Cure
Simple cure – prioritize the mobile experience. How? By using a responsive design. Let’s go through a few best practices to promise a mobile-friendly experience:
- Ask less number of inputs by merging multiple form fields into a single field, allowing autofill wherever possible, and the option to connect existing accounts (like Facebook, Google, or Twitter) as opposed to signing up from scratch.
- Make sure your website’s speed is optimized by compressing images, minifying the code, avoiding unnecessary redirects, and enabling browser caching and compression.
- Ditch the navbar and opt for a hamburger menu, which turns your space-hungry navbar into an expandable menu.
- Optimize your content layout for the “thumb zone,” which is the easy-to-reach area of the screen using the thumb while holding the device with one hand
#3 Selfishectomy
This is one of the huge copywriting-related infectious diseases of B2B Marketing that’s fairly rampant in the B2B space.
Many B2B marketers focus heavily on boasting about how great their product or service is. While it’s obviously a big boon to have a superior product or service…
Your prospects don’t want to hear about your greatness. They want to know what’s in it for them.
How does your offering provide value, solve their problem or make their company more money? Do you offer a free, feature-rich trial? These are the questions they care about when they visit your business website.
So if your marketing copy is full of phrases like “our service is the best in the industry and better than everyone else” rather than “our tools help you streamline internal workflows, send invoices with ease, and improve your teams’ productivity,” you’re suffering a huge B2B marketing disease.
The Cure
Again, it’s all about audience research and shifting your focus. Look at your website and its copy from the audience’s perspective. Pretend you know nothing about your product as you read the site descriptions. Are you addressing the user’s pain points? If not, revise your text to prove to your visitors how your business benefits them.
#4 Testphobia
How do you improve something? By testing it and analyzing the results. The same applies to B2B marketing.
For instance, the first draft of your landing page copy is usually never the best-performing one. If you test a few versions of the copy over a couple of weeks, you’ll likely reach a variation that converts much higher than the original.
Split testing isn’t just useful for landing pages. It’s essential for driving better results in various aspects of all your marketing campaigns, including but not limited to:
- SEO elements like title tags and meta descriptions
- Social media captions and formats
- Email subject lines, copy, and visuals
- Ad copy and visuals
- CTA buttons
The Cure
Keep split testing the critical areas of your campaigns. Evaluate whether the new version converts better (and why). It’s the only way you can turn so-so results into incredible results.
If you’re wondering, “where do I even begin?” here’s the PIE framework to prioritize which pages to test and in which order:
- Potential: What’s the potential for a conversion rate bump on the page? Consider prioritizing your worst performers.
- Importance: How valuable is the traffic to this page? Consider pages with the most volume and the costliest traffic.
- Ease: How difficult will it be to implement a test on this page or template? The lesser time and effort you need to invest for equivalent returns, the better.
#5 CTA Syndrome
If you haven’t placed calls to action buttons on your site or landing pages, it’s kind of like going on a date with someone and then at the end just sort of quietly walking away instead of clearly asking them for a second date. If you don’t ask, they may just shrug their shoulders and walk away, too.
On the other hand, maybe you are using calls to action everywhere — on your website, social media captions, landing pages, and so on. But are your CTAs doing the job?
Essentially, CTAs provide your audience with a clear direction to the next step once they’re done consuming your content. They lead your audience to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
Whether a visitor is browsing your website or looking at your social media ad, you want to leverage carefully crafted CTAs to guide them to take specific actions and eventually turn them into leads for your brand.
The Cure
Create calls to action that clearly guide your audience. Here are a few best practices to craft high-converting CTAs:
Ensure that the CTA button stands out from other elements and is instantly visible.
Have some negative space around the button so you don’t crowd it and confuse the site visitor.
Use a color that aligns with your branding and contrasts with the rest of the page.
Rather than vague CTA copy like “Click Here” or “Submit,” go for a descriptive, benefit-oriented copy with action verbs like “Get Your Free Guide” or “Start Your Free Trial.”
#6 SEO Cold
71% of B2B researchers begin their research with generic Google searches, and 61% of B2B decision-makers start the decision-making process with a web search.
All this is to say just how crucial it is for your B2B business website to rank on the first page of Google search. Ignoring SEO means a ton of lost traffic and leads. And besides more traffic and leads, the higher your website ranks on Google, the better your brand awareness and authority, plain and simple.
That’s because when someone finds your business organically (for relevant non-branded keywords), they’ll be able to appreciate the fact that your company is authoritative enough to be ranked so high. They’ll be more likely to enter your sales funnel because they know that if you’re ranking for relevant keywords in a competitive space, your offerings must be truly valuable.
The Cure
Begin with the basics. Tackle your website’s on-page SEO, which involves optimizing:
- Page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs for the right keywords.
- Images for file size (compression) and relevant, descriptive alt text.
- Page load speed, by reducing redirects, enabling caching, minifying the code, etc. Use PageSpeed Insights to get exact recommendations on how to improve your site speed.
- Content such as your blog posts for structure, comprehensiveness, keywords, and internal links.
Next, build a backlink strategy to generate backlinks from high-quality and authoritative websites via tactics like guest posting.
Quality backlinks play a huge role in achieving first-page rankings. But there’s a lot more to SEO, and it’s an ever-evolving field with Google refining its AI search algorithm each year.
#7 Metricstomy
Metrics help you get a clear understanding of how well your campaigns are performing, whether you’re hitting your desired goals, and if you need to change something to avoid wasting your limited marketing budget on campaigns that aren’t bringing in the right leads.
The Cure
Start tracking your metrics regularly. Define your KPIs for each marketing channel (search, social, paid, etc.) and use analytics tools to stay on top of your campaigns’ performance.
For example, you can use Google Analytics to track your website’s performance goals regarding the traffic it brings, the average conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.:
Likewise, use built-in analytics that major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide to track engagement metrics and optimize your campaigns.
#8 Techoplegia
You’re well aware that to thrive as a business today, you need to go all-in on digital. But with so many great tools and software available, digital can be chaotic.
So, you need a digital strategy — something structured (yet agile) that serves as a reliable roadmap to ensure that you’re investing in the right tools and processes that help keep your business on track for greater performance.
Furthermore, it’s one thing to invest in tools and tech, and entirely another to make sure that all your team members know how to use them to their fullest capabilities.
The Cure
Before jumping in and buying the latest technology, understand how your team will use the tool to its fullest (aka digital adoption), how it will fit into your current workflow and ecosystem, and how the tool will positively impact your marketing ROI. Otherwise, you risk wasting your budget or, worse, it may even mess up your existing marketing performance.
#9 Database Infection
As touched upon a couple of points back, you already have a lot of customer and competitor data, and if you wish for it to be truly useful, you have to clean it up regularly.
Understandably, taking the time to clean your database is like eating your veggies — you know it’s a good thing to do but don’t really want to do it.
Regardless, thanks to the pace of job-hopping these days, your B2B data has a half-life of about 18 months. And after two years, only 45% of your B2B database is still valid:
The Cure
Customer data from surveys, interviews, and research lies at the heart of all your marketing channels and campaigns. Using dirty data (that’s inaccurate, incomplete, or obsolete) will do your B2B marketing more harm than good. Be sure to clean up your database software and CRM every 6-12 months, so it reflects the latest data, thus making your marketing relevant and effective.
#10 Socialopenia
The importance of social media marketing, be it B2B or B2C, needs no introduction. Social media is one of the most effective channels to connect with your potential customers, nurture leads, build brand awareness and authority, and establish meaningful relationships with existing customers.
As a business, social media enables you to converse with your customers in a more “human” and direct way. But a common and potentially off-putting mistake many B2B marketers make is seeing social media as a channel to simply broadcast their promotional messages and nothing more.
The Cure
Drop the corporate jargon (see mistake #1 above!) and opt for an informal and genuine way of social engagement. Respond to comments and queries in a conversational way, using emojis to talk like an individual with a personality (aka your brand voice).
Post helpful content that benefits your followers. Ask them what they want from you, content- or product-wise. Don’t go on and on about your product’s bells and whistles. Instead, strive to spark two-way communication and make connections rather than merely pushing your products.