B2B Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid

A common problem that we see companies encounter is incorrect product positioning.  A company launches a product think that its amazing. However – no one else really understands what you do. This is why positioning should be right up there on your priority list. Before you get deep into marketing strategy and tactics, you must get your positioning right.

Product positioning refers to the process of creating a unique image and identity for a product in the minds of the target market. It involves defining the product’s attributes and benefits, as well as the reasons why customers should choose it over competing products. Product positioning helps to differentiate the product from others in the market and create a unique value proposition for the target audience.

In marketing, product positioning is a critical component of the overall marketing mix, as it helps to establish the product’s place in the market, define its target audience, and guide marketing and advertising efforts. Product positioning is influenced by a variety of factors, including the product’s features and benefits, competition, market trends, and customer preferences and behaviour.

Marketing teams typically use a variety of research and analytical tools, such as market surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback, to gather information about customer needs and preferences. This information is then used to refine the product positioning strategy, to ensure that it resonates with the target audience and supports the overall marketing goals.

Product positioning is a strategic marketing process that helps to create a unique and compelling image for a product in the minds of the target market, and to differentiate it from competitors.

Getting product positioning correct can bring a number of benefits to a company and its products, including:

1. Increased Sales: By positioning the product in the right way, the company can more effectively target the right customer segment and increase its sales.
2. Competitive Advantage: A well-positioned product can differentiate itself from its competitors and create a unique value proposition for the target audience, giving the company a competitive advantage.
3. Brand Awareness: A clear and consistent product positioning can help to build brand awareness and recognition among the target audience.
4. Improved Customer Loyalty: By positioning the product in a way that resonates with the target audience and meets their needs, the company can improve customer loyalty and reduce customer churn.
5. More Effective Marketing: A clear and well-defined product positioning can guide marketing and advertising efforts, making them more effective and efficient.
6. Better Resource Allocation: By focusing on the right market segments and customers, the company can allocate its resources more effectively and achieve a better return on investment.
7. Increased Market Share: A well-positioned product can capture a larger share of the market and drive growth for the company.
8. Stronger Market Position: A well-positioned product can establish a strong market position and make it more difficult for competitors to enter the market.

A 5-stage approach to carrying out product positioning is as follows:

1. Market and Competitor Analysis: In this stage, companies gather information about the market, competition, and target audience. This includes understanding the competitive landscape, analysing customer needs and preferences, and identifying market trends.
2. Define the Target Market: Based on the information gathered in stage 1, companies define the target market for the product. This involves identifying the customer segments that the product will focus on and understanding their needs and preferences.
3. Develop Unique Selling Proposition (USP): In this stage, companies create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for the product. This involves defining the product’s key benefits, features, and attributes, and determining why customers should choose it over competing products.
4. Communicate the Positioning: Once the product’s USP has been defined, companies communicate the positioning to the target audience. This can be done through advertising, marketing, packaging, and other marketing channels.
5. Monitor and Evaluate: The final stage of product positioning involves monitoring and evaluating the product’s performance in the market. This includes tracking sales, market share, customer feedback, and other relevant metrics, and making changes to the product positioning as needed.

This 5-stage approach provides a structured and systematic process for carrying out product positioning and helps to ensure that the product is positioned in a way that resonates with the target audience and supports the company’s marketing goals.

A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a target audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. In the digital age, a content marketing strategy is essential for businesses of all sizes to establish a strong online presence and engage with their target audience.

The aim of a content marketing strategy is to build trust and authority with your target audience, establish your brand as an industry thought leader, and ultimately drive sales and revenue.

A sales funnel is a visual representation of the journey that a customer takes as they move from awareness of a product or service, to interest in that product or service, and eventually to the point of making a purchase. The sales funnel is an essential component of a successful marketing and sales strategy, as it helps businesses understand and track the progress of a potential customer from initial contact to final sale.

A sales funnel typically has several stages, including awareness, interest, consideration, and purchase. At each stage, a customer is at a different level of engagement with a product or service, and the marketing and sales tactics used must reflect this. By using a sales funnel, businesses can determine the most effective marketing and sales strategies to use at each stage, and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer journey and increase conversions.

Audit your content and map to your funnel / sales cycle

Before you jump into creating more content, have a look at what you have got. Do an audit, but map this to the sales funnel. This is going to show you gaps and priorities on what to start creating first, and will identify content that could be recycled or repurposed. You should filter this through personas and target audience to ensure you have content that matches their pain points, and to sectors if that is relevant for your business.

It is vital to audit the content you have, there may be content types that you have produced that would be a better fit if it was reformatted into another content type. For example, a white paper could have been a better fit as a series of blogs.

A content matrix is a tool used to review and organise content, identify gaps, and prioritise content creation. It is a useful tool for ensuring that your content is aligned with your business goals and target audience, and for ensuring that your content is comprehensive and covers all the topics that are important to your audience. Here are a few examples of a content matrix:

1. Topic Matrix: This type of matrix categorizes content into topics, and includes information on what content has been created, what content is planned, and what content is missing. This matrix can be used to identify gaps in your content and prioritize content creation.
2. Buyer’s Journey Matrix: This type of matrix aligns content with the different stages of the customer journey, such as awareness, consideration, and decision. This matrix can be used to ensure that you are creating content that is relevant and useful to your target audience at each stage of their journey.
3. Competitor Matrix: This type of matrix compares your content to that of your competitors, and includes information on what topics your competitors are covering and what topics they are not. This matrix can be used to identify areas where your content can differentiate from that of your competitors, and prioritize content creation accordingly.
4. Channel Matrix: This type of matrix categorizes content by the channels through which it will be distributed, such as social media, email, and your website. This matrix can be used to ensure that you have a balanced distribution plan and that you are using the right channels to reach your target audience.

Repurpose your existing content to other formats

Repurposing content involves taking existing content and adapting it for use in a different format or channel. Repurposing content can help maximise the value of your content and reach new audiences, while also saving time and resources. Here are a few steps to go about repurposing content:

1. Identify high-performing content: Start by identifying the pieces of content that have performed well in terms of engagement and conversions. These pieces of content can be repurposed to reach new audiences and drive additional value.
2. Determine new formats: Consider the different formats in which the content can be repurposed, such as blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, and social media posts. Determine which formats will best suit the content and your target audience.
3. Update and refine the content: Before repurposing the content, update and refine it to ensure that it remains relevant and valuable to your target audience. Make any necessary updates or revisions to the content, and consider adding new information or insights to make it more valuable.
4. Customize for the new format: Once the content has been updated and refined, customize it for the new format. This may involve creating new visuals, changing the tone or length, or adding additional information.
5. Promote and distribute: Finally, promote and distribute the repurposed content through your chosen channels. Be sure to use the appropriate keywords and hashtags, and include calls to action to drive engagement and conversions.

By repurposing high-performing content, you can reach new audiences, extend the lifespan of your content, and maximise the value of your content marketing efforts. With a little creativity and effort, you can turn a single piece of content into multiple formats and reach new audiences with each iteration.

User experience (UX) in marketing refers to the overall experience that a customer has with a brand, from first awareness to post-purchase evaluation. It encompasses all the interactions a customer has with a brand, including website navigation, product design, customer service, and advertising.

In marketing, UX is important because it can directly impact customer loyalty and brand reputation. A positive UX can lead to increased customer satisfaction and engagement, while a negative UX can drive customers away and harm a brand’s reputation.

To ensure a positive UX, marketers must focus on creating a seamless and intuitive experience for customers, whether they are interacting with a website, a product, or a customer service representative. This requires understanding the customer’s needs, pain points, and preferences, and designing the customer journey with these factors in mind.

If you really want to succeed, provide products and services, and market them in a way that’s really going to connect with your prospects. Usability means making sure something works well and that a person of little experience can use it for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

Usability is about making your marketing touchpoints seamless, instead of customers and website visitors getting frustrated and furious at you, your copy, and your site’s performance.

Some key elements of UX in marketing include:

1. User-centered design: Designing products, websites, and other customer touchpoints with the user in mind, taking into account their needs, pain points, and preferences.
2. Usability: Ensuring that products, websites, and other customer touchpoints are easy to use, intuitive, and accessible.
3. Accessibility: Making sure that products, websites, and other customer touchpoints are accessible to people with disabilities.
4. Personalization: Customizing the customer experience to meet the individual needs and preferences of each customer.
5. Speed and performance: Ensuring that products, websites, and other customer touchpoints load quickly and perform smoothly, reducing frustration and improving the overall experience.

Personas

Customer personas are fictional representations of a brand’s ideal customers. They are based on real data and insights gathered from market research and customer interactions. In marketing, customer personas play a crucial role in helping brands understand their target audience and create effective marketing strategies.

Here are a few reasons why customer personas are important in marketing:

1. Targeted messaging: Customer personas help brands create targeted messaging and advertising that speaks directly to their ideal customers. By understanding the wants, needs, and pain points of their target audience, brands can create messaging that resonates with them and motivates them to take action.
2. Improved customer experience: Customer personas can help brands create a better customer experience by allowing them to design their products, websites, and customer service processes with the customer in mind.
3. Better decision-making: Customer personas can provide valuable insights into the behavior and preferences of a brand’s target audience, which can inform better decision-making in areas such as product development, pricing, and marketing initiatives.
4. Alignment across teams: Customer personas can help align teams across an organization, as they provide a shared understanding of the target audience and the goals of the brand’s marketing efforts.
5. Increased efficiency: By understanding their target audience, brands can make more informed decisions and allocate resources more effectively, which can lead to increased efficiency in marketing efforts.

To punch up your personas a notch and really embrace UX, you need to deepen your persona with a customer empathy map.

A customer empathy map is a tool used to better understand the needs, feelings, and motivations of a brand’s target audience. It is typically used in conjunction with customer personas, which are fictional representations of a brand’s ideal customers.

A customer empathy map is a visual representation of the customer’s perspective, and it helps marketers and product teams to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and understand their needs from their perspective. It typically includes four main sections:

1. Thoughts and feelings: This section covers what the customer is thinking and feeling at different stages of their journey.
2. Pain points and gains: This section highlights the customer’s pain points and what they hope to gain from their interactions with the brand.
3. Influences and motivators: This section covers the factors that influence the customer’s behavior, such as social and cultural influences, as well as what motivates them to take action.
4. Touchpoints and channels: This section covers the various ways in which the customer interacts with the brand, such as website, customer service, and advertising.

To use a customer empathy map, start by creating a customer persona, which will provide a basis for understanding the target audience. Next, gather data and insights about the target audience, such as surveys, customer interviews, and social media analysis. Use this information to populate the empathy map, focusing on the customer’s thoughts, feelings, pain points, gains, influences, motivators, touchpoints, and channels.

Once the empathy map is complete, it can be used to inform marketing and product development decisions. For example, the empathy map can help identify pain points and areas where the customer experience can be improved, or it can inform the creation of targeted messaging and advertising campaigns.

User experience in marketing

Once you have a persona and customer empathy map, the first focus should be around your company’s website. Is it a good website? Are your landing pages working? Beyond your site and marketing materials looking good and being on brand, are they easy to follow, can users find the right information, can they perform the right actions at the right time?

User experience, also known as UX, is the overall experience a person has when interacting with a brand, product, or service. In the context of marketing, user experience is a critical factor that can impact a customer’s perception of a brand and their likelihood to make a purchase.

A positive user experience is characterized by ease of use, intuitive navigation, and a clear understanding of the product or service being offered. A poor user experience can lead to frustration and a negative perception of the brand, resulting in lost sales and damage to the brand’s reputation.

There are several key elements that contribute to a positive user experience in marketing, including:

1. User-centred design: This approach to design focuses on the needs of the user and ensures that the product, website, or service is designed to meet those needs.
2. Clear and concise messaging: The marketing materials should clearly communicate the benefits of the product or service and what sets it apart from competitors.
3. Intuitive navigation: The website or product should be easy to use and navigate, with clear and consistent design elements that guide the user to the information they need.
4. Personalisation: Personalising the user experience can help build a deeper connection with the customer and increase their engagement with the brand.
5. Mobile optimisation: With the increasing use of mobile devices, it is critical that the user experience is optimized for mobile, with a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.

Poor copywriting in marketing can have several negative consequences for a business. Some of the main issues are:

1. Lack of clarity: Poor copywriting can make it difficult for the target audience to understand what the product or service is all about, resulting in confusion and a lack of interest.
2. Low engagement: Poorly written copy can be boring and unengaging, causing potential customers to lose interest and move on to competitors.
3. Decreased conversion rates: Poor copywriting can decrease conversion rates by failing to effectively convey the value proposition and the unique selling points of a product or service.
4. Negative brand image: Poor copywriting can damage the brand image by giving the impression that the company is unprofessional or not serious about its business.
5. Missed opportunities: Poor copywriting can miss out on potential customers who may have been interested in the product or service if the messaging had been more compelling.

Using only features, advantages, and benefits (FAB) in copywriting has several disadvantages and issues, compared to using storytelling in marketing:

1. Lack of Emotional Connection: FAB copywriting focuses solely on the product or service and its features, but it may lack the emotional connection that storytelling can provide. People are more likely to remember and be influenced by stories that resonate with them emotionally.
2. Generic and Unmemorable: FAB copywriting often results in generic, unmemorable messaging that fails to stand out from the competition. Storytelling, on the other hand, can be a more effective way to differentiate and make a lasting impression on potential customers.
3. One-Dimensional: FAB copywriting is limited to presenting the product’s features, advantages, and benefits. However, storytelling provides context, meaning, and a deeper understanding of the product, making it a more well-rounded approach to marketing.
4. Missed Opportunities for Brand Building: FAB copywriting does not allow for the development of a brand narrative or the opportunity to connect with customers on a deeper level. Storytelling provides a way for companies to build a brand and create a more loyal customer base.

While FAB copywriting has its place in marketing, it should not be the only approach used. Combining FAB with storytelling can be a more effective way to connect with customers, differentiate from competitors, and build a strong brand.

How do you write customer-centric converting copy?

Writing customer-centric copy that converts requires a focus on the needs, wants, and pain points of the target audience. Here are some steps to help you write customer-centric copy that converts:

1. Know your target audience: Start by identifying your target audience and researching their needs, wants, and pain points. This will help you create copy that resonates with them and addresses their specific challenges.
2. Focus on benefits, not features: While features are important, the real value for your customers lies in the benefits they receive from your product or service. Focus on how your product or service will improve their lives and solve their problems.
3. Use clear, concise language: Keep your language simple, straightforward, and easy to understand. Avoid using technical jargon or industry-specific terms that your target audience may not be familiar with.
4. Make an emotional connection: Connect with your target audience on an emotional level by sharing stories and anecdotes that demonstrate how your product or service has helped others. This can help build trust and credibility.
5. Highlight unique selling points: Make sure to highlight the unique selling points of your product or service, and how they set you apart from the competition.
6. Include a call to action: Make sure to include a clear call to action that tells your target audience what you want them to do next. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information.
7. Test and refine: Test your copy with a small group of your target audience and refine it based on their feedback. This can help you refine your messaging and improve conversions over time.

Following these steps, and you can write customer-centric copy that converts by addressing the needs, wants, and pain points of your target audience and highlighting the benefits of your product or service.

The problem is that if everyone is saying the same thing, it all blends into the same noise.

What is the secret to writing great copy that converts

The secret to writing great copy that converts lies in understanding your target audience and focusing on their needs, wants, and pain points. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:

1. Know your audience: Understand your target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points. This will help you create copy that resonates with them and addresses their specific challenges.
2. Focus on benefits, not features: People are more likely to be motivated by the benefits they will receive from your product or service, rather than a list of features. Focus on how your product or service will improve their lives and solve their problems.
3. Use emotional language: Connect with your target audience on an emotional level by using language that evokes a feeling or a reaction. This can help build trust and credibility.
4. Keep it simple: Use clear, concise language that is easy to understand. Avoid using technical jargon or industry-specific terms that your target audience may not be familiar with.
5. Highlight unique selling points: Make sure to highlight the unique selling points of your product or service, and how they set you apart from the competition.
6. Include a strong call to action: Make sure to include a clear call to action that tells your target audience what you want them to do next. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information.
7. Test and refine: Test your copy with a small group of your target audience and refine it based on their feedback. This can help you refine your messaging and improve conversions over time.

By focusing on the needs and wants of your target audience and using language that connects with them emotionally, you can write great copy that converts and drives results for your business.