Learning From Content Marketing Failures
Today’s lesson is to allow the failures of others be lessons for you before you have to fail yourself.
Once in the world of marketing, after years of schooling and training, you will find that failure is inevitable and should be anticipated. Most successful marketers have endless horror stories of their failed attempts and mistrials but it is through these losses that have ultimately lead them to their successes. What I have started getting in the habit of doing in my research, instead of purely researching the greatest methods of effective content marketing, is researching where marketers went wrong and how they fell short.
In this video below, there are four big hitting B2B marketers ranging from Head of Strategy, Senior Managers and Consultants to Marketing Managers that all share their stories of how they fell short in prior marketing campaigns in a conference setting (so clearly learning from others’ mistakes is something that the industry is well aware of).
The first marketer to speak up was Anton Buchner, a Senior Consultant for TrinityP3, which is comprised of global marketing management consultants, saying that where he and his team first went wrong was not considering what their audience wanted to better develop a marketing strategy tailored for their audience’s preferences. Anton stressed that he and his team thought they had amazing content and they did their due diligence to promote said content via social media platforms and even advocates and promoters to get brand awareness.
So in this example, we can see that even if you do everything right and to the book, or everything you think that needs to be done in order to achieve success, you have to make sure that what you are promoting is appealing to your target audience in the first place. As Anton later says, once they analyzed customer feedback, they were able to gage the different levels of customers, which in their case was different consumer knowledge of beauty products. It was after their customer feedback that they were then able to segment their audience into three groups, Very Advanced Knowledge of beauty products or regime as he calls it, Mid-level then finally to basic level. Once they clustered these different levels of consumers, they then tailored their content strategies to the three different groups by giving more advanced content to the advanced group “class to class type stuff” as Anton mentions. He admittedly said that in hindsight, this segmenting of customers should have been rather obvious but proved to be easily overlooked.
So when defining your content strategy, even in B2B marketing, try to avoid over looking factors like these by getting lost in what you think will sell and instead consult the people’s opinions that you wish to target and sell to.
Again, referring to the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger, things only go viral if there is Emotion involved. As Berger summarizes, “When we care, we share.” Anton regrettably shared that he and his team just assumed what they had, content wise, was bound to go viral and that they felt that they were doing what needed to be done even though they never consulted their audience to see what they as consumers, the people that are in control of making things go viral, wanted. This is where Berger’s intellection of emotion comes in in that when curating content, mainly pertaining to B2C but still helpful in B2B, think to put more focus on the feelings rather than the function in order to arouse your audience and foster some sort of connection between your content and your audience.
When considering B2B marketing, as Luana Zugman puts, Senior Manager in Strategic Marketing for Thomson Reuters, rather than focusing on entertainment or social currency and the factors that drive emotion, B2B customers are looking for what’s helpful to them as a business and what will drive their business. But this isn’t meant to say that in B2B marketing you have to be all data and no appeal, it just means that when developing marketing strategies for either B2B or B2C, you just have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and facilitate their needs and what they want to hear about your product or service. Another great recommendation that Luana brings to the discussion is that marketers should talk with their sales and customer service staff as these employees have the most interaction with the customers. Whether it be face-to-face interaction when the sales staff is working on the ground level to find and meet customer needs or the customer service staff that’s sole purpose is to get customer feedback to ensure customer satisfaction. These co-workers in their respective fields are your resource as a marketer and should be used when defining your content marketing strategies.
