B2B marketers suffer from various afflictions that affect the overall health of their business. The following are the 6 most common and lethal illnesses affecting B2B marketers today.
Marketing planaphobia is a common condition, especially amongst small-medium sized businesses. This condition, if left untreated, can have a severe impact on your overall business health, stunting growth.
Symptoms:
Cause: A severe marketing plan deficiency.
Treatment: Development of an educated overall marketing plan with regular analysis, check ups and injections of new and improved ideas.
Content Snoratosis is identified by marketing content inducing snoring in its target audience. Although, at first, snoring appears to only be a mild problem, the long term effects of boring content results in severe damage to overall business health.
Symptoms:
Cause: Content touting features, functions and benefits - written to promote the business product or service, whilst actively ignoring the needs and problems of target personas.
Treatment: A thorough content review and plan to ensure all communications are relevant to your buyers and the stage at which they are at in the purchase process.
Funnel Filler Failure is a disease caused by the infection of ‘antisocial bacteria’. This bacteria thrives in solitary conditions whereby the marketing activities are withheld from the rest of the world.
Symptoms:
Cause: The most common causes of Funnel Filler Failure lack of SEO keyword targeting, no corporate blog, and a fear of social media.
Treatment: Engagement in social media as a distribution channel, uploading content to sharing sites, blogging regularly and use of keywords to make sure your on page and off page SEO is up to scratch. In sum... be sociable!
Lead conversion-itis is a virus which specifically attacks the marketing muscles - leaving your marketing strategy weak. This issue coexists with confused and demotivated leads.
Symptoms:
Cause: The assumption that any contact you can get your hands on is ready to speak to sales.
Treatment: Introduce landing pages and nurture campaigns into your marketing diet to build up the strength of your marketing strategy.
This occurs when marketers aren’t tracking the success (or failure) of their activities.
Symptoms: The most obvious symptom is confusion, more specifically when asked about the following areas:
Cause: Lack of either will, tools or skills to effectively analyse marketing efforts.
Treatment: Setting up, tracking, regularly checking and optimising marketing activities.
Many small to medium sized businesses are resource poor when it comes to marketing. This can manifest itself in one of two ways, the wrong staff and the wrong software. Many small to medium sized organisations have individuals with good marketing skills, but most of these skills are on lockdown as they dont have access to the software that can enable their marketers to unleash them. Alternatively, the marketing staff don’t have the right skillset to sucessfully carry out the job.
Symptoms:
Treatment: initial assessment of staff skills in the following areas:
...followed by relevant training.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net