“One word that describes the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today” is the title of a discussion thread counting more than 1,000 replies in the LinkedIn “B2B Technology Marketing Community” discussion started by Holger Schulze. There is some insight in reading through the thread as the community contributes generously to the discussion.
One of the group members, Johann Edward from EIMS, was kind enough to compile answers of the thread in a graphic format and share insights in his blog post.
Top challenge: Generating content
It takes a lot of time, discipline, talent and content to write newsletters, blog posts and more. Nothing technical about that. It just takes a lot of quality human time and gray matter; and that’s a challenge.
Challenges 2 and 3: Relevance and Trust
Adapting your corporate and branding message to your target audience is a challenge in all types of communications. What are the criteria used by readers to establish trust in today’s digital age? Trust takes time and effort to earn and can be broken too easily. Think of a negative spiral of comments. It’s a shame that positive actions don’t have the same timely response…
Engagement, Time and Credibility
These three elements came up regularly by B2B Marketers answering the thread. It takes time to engage audiences and build one’s credibility in their eyes. Not only is it a challenge, but organizations are rapidly realizing that engaging an audience is a huge responsibility that requires plenty of resources.
ROI and Focus
ROI came fourth and Focus sixth. Are B2B Marketers looking for guidance on where their focus needs to be? What is the best way to generate regular, relevant content that achieves measurable ROI?
Another angle to it
Here is another twist to Mr. Edwards’ raw data which he kindly shared with me. I took the chance to interpret the answers in themes to get another “view” of this data.
I came up with these: ROI, Delivery, Content, Focus, Trust, Noise, Engagement, Metrics.
ROI
The bottom line really hurts. Soft arguments don’t cut it. B2B marketers are as concerned as their clients are to make a bottom line difference at the end of the day. So ROI is at the top of list.
Execution: Delivery, Content, Focus and Trust
Execution is also a real concern. Delivery, Content, Focus and Trust are quite equal. Content marketing is a definite challenge in execution and strategy. Content and channels multiply. B2B marketing requires a lot of work and often enough, staff in place is not sufficient to strategize and execute the job.
Engagement and Noise
B2B organizations are probably not fully in the engagement phase yet. Social media is for many a series of distribution channels, not an interaction one. Symptomatic to this channel multiplication, Noise occurs. Priority is not there yet either as content challenges are the main concern.
Metrics
Surprisingly enough, questions pertaining to metrics don’t score high in the results. Perceptually, that challenge is more of a technical one. Even though metrics (read feedback) is key, B2B marketers seem to have a grasp on this or use external resources for it. Your comments are welcome for this part.
Conclusion
In everyday B2B Marketing, it’s all about sales. Clients invest in ROI and Content marketing. Appropriately targeting market segments and reaching them at the proper moment is not only a science but an art. B2B Marketers have shared in this thread their frustrations and concerns. You are welcome to share their stories and work creatively to address them.
Join the conversation.
