6 Common Illnesses Associated With B2B Marketers

6 Common Illnesses Associated With B2B Marketers:from Business 2 Community by Sarah Pern

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.
1. Marketing Plan-aphobia
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:

• Sporadic bouts of marketing activity
• Difficulty measuring results
• Confusion around which activities generate leads
• Struggle to meet marketing objectives
• Unidentified target personas
• Complete and utter exhaustion!

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.
2. Content Snoratosis
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:

• Lack of content shares
• Insufficient blog subscribers
• Excessive self-promotion
• Lack of understanding of buyer’s journey

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.
3. Funnel Filler Failure
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:

• No frequent publishing of content
• No social media presence
• No keyword strategy
• Lack of online presence
• Low traffic count
• Lack of sales
• High stress level due to lack of sales

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!
4. Lead Conversion-itis
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:

• No nurture campaigns
• Absence of landing pages
• Lack of list segmentation
• Lack of lead scoring strategy

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.
5. Analytics Disorder

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:

• ROI
• Conversion rates
• Optimisaton
• A/B Testing

Cause: Lack of either will, tools or skills to effectively analyse marketing efforts.
Treatment: Setting up, tracking, regularly checking and optimising marketing activities.
6. No Skills Syndrome
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:

• Marketing staff frustration
• Inefficient use of staff time
• Lack of results from marketing

Treatment: initial assessment of staff skills in the following areas:

• Writing blogs
• Creating marketing campaigns
• Interpretation of marketing results
• SEO and keyword knowledge
• Fluency in social and online marketing

…followed by relevant training.

If you could do with a full B2B marketing health check, we have created a complimentary tool to help you figure out which areas can be improved:

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