From writer's block to sales gold: overcoming common B2B content creation challenges

Content marketing has endless benefits—from driving traffic and generating leads to building trust with key audiences. And with companies investing an average of $185,000 annually in B2B content marketing, and budgets expected to continue growing, you cannot afford a failed content marketing strategy.  

Your company must create content that reaches its audience by cutting through the noise, while effectively showing why your solution is superior to that of your competitors. But without a growing budget, this is easier said than done. To align your B2B content marketing with your business growth strategy, you must first overcome common content creation problems likely holding you back.  

The biggest challenges still plaguing companies in 2023 when producing B2B marketing content  

1. Focusing on your business needs instead of the needs of your audience.
2. Failing to align content with the buyer journey. 
3. Struggling to generate high-quality content, consistently. 

The biggest challenge in B2B content creation is that, without company-wide commitment that leverages both internal and external resources driven by strategy and amplified by intention, you run the risk of producing marketing assets that fail to contribute to the company’s growth. 

Long story short? Without an effective B2B content marketing strategy, you’re potentially wasting a lot of time, money, and resources. 
 
Problem #1: Your B2B marketing content is more about you than your audience. 

• Top-performing content prioritises its audience's informational needs over the company’s sales and promotional message. 
• As such, content is not what you need to communicate (your sales pitch, the features of your product) unless it serves a specific purpose for your audience. 
• Content is what builds loyalty with customers, bringing in leads and subscribers and generating sales and revenue at the same time. 

How to solve this problem? Create content that serves your audience.  

• The average number of audiences that B2B marketers target is four, though smaller companies may have fewer audiences, and larger companies more. 
• Once you identify your target audiences, you will be better positioned to create content assets that meet their specific needs. You can hone this by creating buyer personas with specific challenges that your product/service can best solve.  

Problem #2: Your content fails to align with the B2B buying cycle. 

• Many marketing professionals get caught up with creating most of their content for the top of the buying funnel, treating mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel as secondary and third priorities.  
• Late-stage content designed to enable an actual purchase is lacking, which is clearly a missed opportunity. When buyers can’t find the information they need to support their decision to make a large purchase, they will keep moving until they find it.  

How to solve this problem? Map B2B content to the different buying stages.  

Not all content types work at all stages of the funnel. For example, blog articles, social posts, and real-world events might perform highest for brand awareness, while case studies and webinars could be more effective for converting leads to sales. Results for each content type will vary from company to company and between audiences, so it will be necessary to research and experiment to see what works best for you. That way, you can better plan your content for every stage of the buying cycle. 

This highlights an important B2B marketing tactic that is too often overlooked: the fundamental content marketing strategy must be buyer-centric. 

Problem #3: You struggle to generate high-quality B2B content, consistently 

• Consistent content production is essential for establishing your brand as a thought leader, yet many marketers struggle with this challenge.  

• Whether it’s due to writer’s block or lack of time and resources, creating high-quality content is simply more difficult than we initially thought.  
• This is because content isn’t all about writing. It’s also about design, subject matter expertise, and creativity.  

The absence of a documented B2B content strategy is usually the top key reason why content is produced sporadically and inconsistently. 

How to solve this problem? Go back to basics. A clear B2B content strategy is needed to align marketing with sales and all other facets of the business. 

To ensure that B2B content is prioritised and both internal and external stakeholders understand its value, it's crucial to have a clear content strategy in place. As part of this strategy, it is advisable to plan out a content calendar for at least six months in advance.  Along with monitoring the output of your competitors, this content plan will provide a benchmark for the amount of content necessary to impact your audiences.

Whether you need assistance with a buyer-centric content marketing strategy or help with producing high-quality content that educates, informs, converts, and delights, Flowmesh is your go-to B2B marketing outsourcing company.  

Put our service to the test. Drop us a line, send us a brief.  https://www.flowmesh.io/how-it-works