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💡According to our study on B2B marketing leadership investments, 80% of decision-makers plan to invest in marketing content in 2024, aiming to generate leads (68%) and enhance brand awareness (66%).
This near-unanimous agreement shows the importance of creating brand content for the company’s overall performance. However, on the ground, marketing departments struggle to produce this content. They are particularly hindered by:
- The lack of specialized resources internally;
- The challenge of offering original content to stand out;
- The absence of an editorial line in the distributed content;
- Unfamiliarity with effective strategies for distributing B2B content.
1. Lack of specialized in-house resources
By definition, B2B involves regular interactions between professionals, requiring a deep understanding of the subject matter.
To capture the interest of their targets, engage them, and convince them, companies cannot rely on approximate or generic content. To persuade a professional, the brand must reflect in its various contents:
- Its technical expertise;
- Its positioning and the uniqueness of its offer;
- Its values.
In B2B, raw material typically exists across various levels of the company. Technical expertise lies with engineers and technicians, on-the-ground data resides with sales teams, insights and strategic vision come from decision-makers, and so on.
One of the main obstacles to creating B2B content often stems from a lack of internal resources. Indeed, the challenge for a company typically lies in identifying the information that sets it apart from its competitors and translating this into useful, engaging content that achieves the intended goal (enhancing brand awareness or generating leads).
💡 The Key Statistic to Know
According to our study on B2B marketing leadership investments in 2024, decision-makers cite lack of resources (51%) and budget constraints (46%) as the primary barriers to successfully carrying out their actions.
How to address the lack of specialized in-house resources?
As with any issue related to resource constraints, the solution often lies in internal team reorganization to free up time, recruitment if the company is willing to invest in its long-term content strategy, or engaging external experts in B2B content creation. The chosen solution can certainly be a hybrid approach, combining internal efforts with external expertise as needed.
2. The difficulty of offering original content to stand out from the crowd
In the age of infobesity, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create relevant content to stand out on search engines, and thus reach a targeted audience. To achieve this, companies need to be able to create content that is both relevant and relevant to the needs of their audience.
How do you create differentiating B2B content?
According to HubSpot, there are over 600 million blogs on the web today. So how do you create original content when it feels like everything has already been said? Two solutions can be combined:
- Create firsthand data, for example conducting market research, surveys, or polls to inform and illustrate your content.
- Incorporate subjective formats: Add more subjective formats to your content mix, such as interviews and opinion pieces led by a company decision-maker. The goal is to provide a personal perspective and unique insights based on experience.
3. Lack of editorial line in broadcast content
Content is a key element in the marketing arsenal for achieving a company’s strategic objectives. In practice, this imperative is not always respected, which typically results in:
- Erratic communication, with periods of high activity followed by long silences;
- Disconnected content that does not fit into a lead generation sequence or a clear customer journey;
- Contradictory or repetitive messages cause confusion, irritate recipients (in the case of email marketing) and harm the company’s image.
This lack of coherence is often the result of a lack of content strategy. It can be exacerbated by misalignment between marketing and other departments that should be involved in content creation, such as sales and product development. Internal resource constraints can also be a contributing factor.
How to address inconsistency in B2B content?
To address the issue of sporadic and fragmented content, the company must first establish a clear editorial line that defines its expectations for content. This involves setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) accompanied by KPIs, and implementing the right tools to measure them.
Next, developing an editorial calendar is essential, detailing themes, formats, participants (beyond the marketing team), distribution channels, and the intended objective. The company should also plan for periodic adjustments based on content performance, market feedback, and current events.
Furthermore, content teams should have an editorial charter that defines the company’s values, brand universe, storytelling elements, tone, editorial line, etc.
It is generally at this stage that companies realize that creating content that effectively contributes to business performance is not the task of one or two writers alone. It requires a collective, coordinated, and rigorous effort that will likely involve the assistance of external experts.
4. Misunderstanding the effective channels for distributing B2B content
Neglecting to choose the right distribution channels limits the impact of content, leads to wasted marketing efforts, and diminishes ROI.
Often, choices are based on instinct and traditional marketing practices rather than a data-driven approach where channels are selected based on performance metrics, historical campaign data, or external benchmarks.
Typically, marketing efforts are confined to the usual trio of corporate blogs, LinkedIn accounts, and occasionally email campaigns.
How to choose the right channels for B2B content?
The prerequisite is somewhat complex: companies need to be sufficiently mature in their digital transformation efforts to implement the right tools and measure KPIs across multiple channels to make informed decisions.
Furthermore, marketing teams should explore potentially more effective channels than their usual practices, such as:
- Collaborating with high-traffic sector-specific media;
- Utilizing webinar platforms;
- Partnering with thematic newsletters targeting specific audiences;
- Presenting premium content at industry events (keynotes, customer case studies, masterclasses);
- Content syndication, and more.
Once these challenges have been identified and solutions implemented to meet them, B2B marketers will need to start implementing their new business-oriented content strategy. Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) is an important ally in this process, provided its scope of use is clearly defined to avoid going off-track. This will be the focus of the third episode of this series.