When marketing goes wrong - 3 spooky B2B marketing mistakes and how to avoid them 👀

Marketing mistakes are scary, whether it's a typo on a landing page or an ill-targeted email campaign.

🎃 This Halloween, let’s face our fears head-on 👻

Look, mistakes do happen every now and then. We live in a very busy, noisy world where things are bound to slip through the cracks and even the best of us can unknowingly make errors.

There's the keyword: unknowingly. You cannot fix what you don’t know is a problem. So, rather than accepting these mistakes as inevitable, let's discuss the scariest B2B marketing mistakes along with helpful tips on how to avoid them. 

Mistake #1: Focus on the wrong thing and you'll miss valuable opportunities

Just because you know your product will make your ideal customer’s life better doesn’t mean that they do. 

Focusing entirely on your product features rather than their benefits is a common yet disastrous mistake. That's why B2C firms that sell sports shoes, usually sell dreams of success or better well-being, while perfume companies sell beauty and romance.

These outcomes are more valued by consumers than the actual products, as they solve their problems or help them reach their desires, making this type of messaging an extremely successful marketing strategy. Outcome marketing is a framework encouraging conversions by prioritizing a customer’s desired outcomes rather than pushing the sale of your product. 

There is a substantial overlap with B2B customers, who are also looking for outcomes such as greater business efficiency or business growth. They want to know how your software will make their lives easier by helping them to complete their projects on time and under budget. B2B companies must focus on a product strategy that demonstrates how their product solves customers’ problems and delivers value, not on an exhaustive list of features.  Focusing too much on features can turn B2B buyers off with an endless list of technical details and jargon. 

Ultimately, if the tool isn’t going to provide extra for you or give you any benefit, then there’s no point in buying it. Features may be valuable when making a sale and closing a deal, but not usually during a first, second, or third point of contact. Remember that B2B buyers experience emotions, too, and these plays a large part in their decision-making.

Risk aversion, respect, and pride all fall into the concoction of the decision-making process and help justify that the buyer is making the right decision for them and their business. For instance, it used to be said that ‘nobody got fired for buying IBM’. By providing your promised outcomes, you can increase your business value and customer loyalty based on mutual trust that you can deliver their desired goals. 

In looking for outcomes, B2B customers require a compelling, complex, and multifaceted proposition that comprises of features, products, and services, while also providing emotional fulfilment through storytelling. Think about it, what good Halloween story was ever written in bullet points outlining events? We need the setting, buildup, climax, and resolution.

Remember, as Jay Baer once said, if your stories are all about your products and services, it’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. 

Mistake #2: Fear (and budget cuts) shouldn't stop you in your tracks

Halting your spending and deprioritizing long-term investments during the slow season can cost businesses more over time.

Did you know that a 1/5th of B2B marketers say that proving their effectiveness is their ‘biggest challenge’? This, in the context of the current macro-environment, is causing businesses to think more carefully about their spending.

Unfortunately, marketing tends to be the first victim of budget cuts. Kind of like that innocent couple minding their business in the middle of the night in a horror film who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and comes across Mike Myers. 

Why is this the case? Many businesses cut marketing costs because they view marketing to be secondary to what they normally offer. Businesses often take marketers for granted when everything is booming and see it as an unnecessary expense when business is stagnant.

Many consider it a risk-averse move. But marketing is a commercial and revenue-driving department. By cutting its funds we risk shifts of focus from growth and innovation towards cost optimization, more cost pressure, margin erosion, and ultimately reorganization pressures in an attempt to ride out the storm.

Halloween films often reflect their budget, too, and you get what you pay for. Yes, the story is crucial, but poor special effects, no sound, and no actors can ruin the movie. But that’s just our opinion. So when everyone is too busy cutting marketing spending, it might just be your time to shine.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for this. If your marketing budget does get the chop, there are a few strategies that can help you do more with less. For example, consider what marketing resource is scarcest in your company: funds, knowledge, or bandwidth? Focus on optimizing that in the context of its returns. 

Check out our helpful guide for internal cost-cutting initiatives that you can start today if you're trying to cut costs without sacrificing quality.

Mistake #3: Ghosts might live in the past, but you don’t have to

Don't be afraid to experiment, test new ideas, and ultimately change.

We love a good, old-fashioned ghost story. But you don't have to live in the past. The same goes for your marketing strategies and tools. Digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving, and new solutions to your problems are emerging regularly.

Although not all trends and strategies are worth trying, you also don’t want your marketing to go stale. Sure, there is security and no risk with tried and true methods, but there also isn’t a chance for a larger reward from reaching clients where they want to be reached. If you fail to adapt to the needs of the market, you risk becoming irrelevant and crushed by your competitors who have capitalized on the digital space. 

Why do so many companies fail to adapt? The age-old ‘why fix something that isn’t broken’ is often the go-to narrative in protest of adopting new technologies, however, here is where your messaging can enlighten them that there is a problem, they might just not know it yet. 

For example, the PDF was revolutionary… until it was not. As attention spans are getting shorter, marketers have to get smarter. It’s no longer enough for your content to be lecture-like, static, and inflexible.

Today’s content is dynamic and should create experiences readers yearn for. Interactive content is about using reader psychology principles for connecting, communicating, and comprehending. If you didn’t know that these are vital for marketing in the 21st century, then you might not think sticking to the PDF is a problem. 

Here’s where A/B testing comes in handy as you can test different content formats and platforms very easily. See below how interactive and dynamic formats like Turtl outperform static and dated legacy formats like PDF in engagement, attention, and conversion by miles. 

The Turtl Takeaway: In marketing, hiding from your problems isn't going to make them go away

The scariest thing about these 3 marketing mistakes is that they can cost your business money, time, resources, and brand reputation. Marketing is an ever-evolving practice that requires expertise, time, and investment.

You can avoid these mistakes by investing in a value-led messaging strategy and optimizing your marketing costs and efforts by trying out new solutions and platforms. Such platforms are scientifically-designed to help you cut content production costs, gain data insights to help you reach your customers at every stage in their buyer journey, and produce visually-stunning pieces to host your marketing messages that ‘wows’ every time.

Rather than hiding under the covers and hoping the monsters disappear, why not face them head-on and get ahead of the curve?