GrammarPhile Blog

We don’t believe in simply whining about problems. We’d rather be part of the solution. To that aim, here’s the follow-up to our last post on The 10 Biggest Problems with Most B2B Marketing Content.

If you find your B2B marketing content lackluster, ineffective, or willy-nilly to the detriment of your sales, your marketing team’s motivation, and your sanity, check out our suggestions for fixing the 10 most-common problems we’ve observed in B2B marketing content.

How to Fix the 10 Biggest Problems with Your B2B Marketing Content

• What is our product/service/offer?
• Who does it help? (Who are you trying to talk to? Who is your ideal customer?)
• Why does it matter? (If potential customers don’t identify with your purpose, benefits, values, differentiators, etc., then you’ll be hard put to make them loyal.)

2. Set aside your ego and fear of not being taken seriously. Being personable and an expert aren’t mutually exclusive. If you take stock of major pitfalls of the digital age, they generally revolve around a lack of humanity and healthy relationships, including between businesses and their clients. The most feared people may be monolithic enigmas, but the most loved people (and companies and brands) are the ones who treat others well while allowing themselves to be truly known.

Aka The Lime-Green Lycra Bodysuit

What would you do if your best friend bought a lime-green Lycra bodysuit to wear to a professional awards ceremony sure to be publicized on television?

After you briefly considered dousing the bodysuit in gasoline and lighting it on fire (it’d be hard to sell that as an “accident”), you’d shoot straight with them:

“This is a bad decision. The bodysuit is hideous. It would make the most attractive person on Earth look like a baked bean.”

And you’d be a good friend for doing so.

Now it’s our turn. Except the publicized awards ceremony is B2B content marketing. And the lime-green Lycra body suit is the 10 ways most companies inadvertently alienate everyone who comes across their marketing content.

Deep breath. Here we go.

The 10 Biggest Problems with Most B2B Marketing Content

1. It’s unclear. I’ve often gone to a B2B website and thought, “What do these people actually DO?” If people don’t understand what you do, the chances of them becoming a client immediately wither.
2. It’s rife with jargon and self-importance. Everyone is “reinventing” or “unleashing” or “transforming” something. If it’s a law firm, they practice “at the intersection” of three or four specialties. Even if you were to simplify the message, you’d be left with meaningless fluff. The copy sings “Me, me, me!” over and over, a little like a 3-year-old. And we all know how self-absorbed those little stinkers are, no matter how cute.
3. It’s boring. This is partly because the people approving the content lack the bravery to sound and be different. Guess who wants to read 12,087 iterations of the same thing? Nobody. Not even your mama when you’re the one who wrote it.
4. It’s poorly structured. It doesn’t consider our natural scanning tendencies (e.g., the Z pattern). There are poor or absent transitions from one thought or section to the next. There’s no intuitive narrative. It’s like the “junk” drawer in your kitchen. Full of potentially valuable stuff that’s entangled, hidden, or mixed together.