During our keynote session at the B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) Conference earlier this year, we asked attendees about their greatest B2B content marketing concerns and areas for improvement. What they told us may surprise you…
Content may be king, but it still bows to process
When our chief creative officer Michael Ruby spoke about creating value for businesses and customers at B2BMX, we also wanted to hear from participants about some of their experiences. So we asked, “What is one of the scariest/worst content initiatives you’ve ever created? What would you do differently?”
One might think that we’d be hearing stories about a lack of audience engagement, low conversions or negative ROIs. Incredibly, the responses revealed two far more fundamental metrics for success and failure.
No matter how great your content is, much of its success comes down to your content development and quality assurance processes. Putting a strong process in place, making sure all the players know their parts, and remembering to proofread (then proofread again) are critical takeaways that B2B content marketers tell us can’t be taken for granted. Consider these poll answers (just a few of many like these):
- “We launched a new proprietary tool that wasn’t even built yet. Three different times.”
- “We sent out a ‘congrats you earned a trip’ email to everyone… including the people that didn’t earn the trip.”
- “What would I do differently? PROOFREAD.”
- “There’s a piece of content that has been on our website for about five years, and it was published with Lorem Ipsum text and blank areas that said ‘insert quote here.’”
What these responses show is that content marketers must work closely with their teams – from proofreading to quality control/testing to making sure the team is on the same page. And did we mention proofreading? This kind of prep and process helps ensure the content takes center stage – in a good way. Even tiny errors and lapses in judgment can negatively impact your brand in a big way.
No more “random acts of content”
B2BMX attendees also shared a glaring problem with getting strategic alignment to power their content marketing efforts. To be effective, B2B content must be understood in context – how it supports the overall strategy, the voice it should carry, and key messages that must be communicated. What it shouldn’t be is haphazard or done without alignment to brand, business, and marketing objectives – nor without putting the customer/audience first. These poll responses demonstrate what can happen when you take your eyes off the content ball:
- “Not having a content strategy that’s realistic and actionable enough to produce the results we want.”
- “Demo-based webinars. Sales insisted, but as we suspected, the audience was not interested. The content needs to be value-based.”
- “Generic ad content without proper positioning.”
- “Launched a contest campaign where a skill-testing question was required to win the grand prize. The question we published was not solvable.”
- “Spent a bunch of time and money creating an interactive content piece with a 3rd party, only to find out later it was on a topic our customers weren’t interested in. $20k wasted on a topic that wasn’t that important.”
The learning here is around not just creating great content, but also understanding the spectrum of what happens with that content and making sure those complex elements are built into the foundation of why and how you develop content. Worse than making these types of mistakes is making them again and again because you haven’t internalized the lessons.
The core of content creation
As you can see from the results of our poll, mistakes happen to the very best of us – and one small mistake has the power to take an otherwise incredible content idea down when it occurs. The important thing is that we learn from these mishaps and then put the right processes in place to avoid them the next time around. To create amazing content, it’s important to establish a seamless process from concept to completion, with the right knowledge, experience and strong collaboration every step of the way.
At Park & Battery, these qualities define our approach to content creation. We’ve seen and heard it all – and then some – and have every fail-safe in place to ensure our clients’ content shines. With the right processes and expertise well-established, we can be sure your content delivers the value it was created to deliver, both for your business and your customers.
