Ten common challenges with B2B content (and how to resolve them)

I’ve been around B2B content and thought leadership for almost two decades and, in that time, I’ve seen just about every problem that companies have in creating distinctive, insightful and useful thought leadership. But what’s interesting is that, regardless of the sector or size of company, the same problems come up again and again.

Here are some of the most common – and my (very brief) prescriptions on how to deal with them.

1. Stakeholders are pulling in different directions. Having a successful thought leadership programme requires the involvement of many different teams, from leadership to PR, commercial, digital and marketing. Yet all too often, these stakeholders have differing views about the reason for doing thought leadership and what success looks like. The commercial/marketing disconnect is the most common of these misalignments, but far from the only one. Securing alignment is not impossible – and in fact the solution is simple. You need a clear, up-front strategy and time spent with each stakeholder group to understand their needs and secure their buy-in. By involving key people from the outset, your campaign has a much greater chance of success.
2. There’s not enough clarity about objectives. Too much content gets created for the sake of it without considering the underlying business rationale. A finished report or any other type of content asset is not the end goal: it’s what you do with it that matters. The best thought leadership has clarity of vision and has clear connections to core business objectives, not just marketing ones. Objectives should also be specific. It’s not enough to say you’re looking to raise awareness – you also need to think about what type of awareness, among which audiences and for what reasons.
3. No one really knows who the audience is. We know that the audiences for B2B content are complex because buying groups are large. But in my experience, companies often do not spend enough time thinking about their audience and who they are trying to influence. The emphasis is too often on what the company wants to say, as opposed to what the audience wants to hear. This “inside out” approach means that thought leadership is likely to miss the mark because not enough time has been spent on the needs of the audience, who they are and what’s on their minds. An “outside in” approach that starts with audience needs is far more likely to be effective.
4. The marketing team does not have enough control over the content. Many large companies have a highly decentralised model for creating content. This “cottage industry” approach means that there is often a cacophony of different voices pushing out perspectives on a wide range of different themes. From the perspective of the audience, this is confusing and, because there are so many pieces of content being pumped out, none of them stick in the memory. It’s difficult for marketing teams to gain complete control over content – and they probably shouldn’t do so because otherwise they lose the benefits of being close enough to the market. I typically advise a “glocal” model where you harness the great thinking being produced across the business but try to contain it within a set of parameters that ensure greater consistency and clarity of messaging.
5. The company is scared to have a point of view and plays it too safe. No company sets out to create bland content but that is often what happens. There are several common reasons for this: sometimes, strong perspectives get watered down or weakened by compliance teams or concern over client sensitivities; or in other cases there are simply too many people involved in creating content, which means that messages get blunted and blended, thereby taking away their power. It can be tempting to play it safe, but the urge should always be resisted because it almost guarantees that your audience will take nothing away from your content. To be remembered, you need to have a point of view that aligns with you brand and is distinctive. Don’t be afraid to be bold.
6. The content isn’t getting recognised or having impact. This is what I have often called the “If you build it, they will come” problem. What happens is that the company spends so much time on crafting the perfect piece of content that they don’t leave enough time (or budget) to thinking about how they will activate and get it in front of their audience. As a result, they end up with nice assets but no impact – so it is an entirely wasted investment. The key is to think about activation up front as part of the strategy setting – not, as I sometimes see, half-way through the project when the content has already been largely finished.
7. There are too many competing ideas.I n the advertising industry, it’s well known that the more messages you try to communicate, the less likely any of them are to land. It’s no different with B2B content, although many companies seem to think otherwise. If you have lots of ideas as a business, it’s tempting to communicate all of them to your audience. But this temptation should be resisted as, if you try to say too much, your messages simply won’t land. It’s much better to settle on a single key message and repeat it to maximise the chances that it will be absorbed.
8. The ideas are buried in long reports. This is a related problem to the previous one. Often, companies produce great content, but the audience has to work too hard to extract the key ideas. Great findings and insights are buried deep inside a long PDF, as opposed to being up-front and obvious. Poor design often makes this problem worse, with confusing charts, long blocks of text, weak headlines and not enough thought given to the user experience. The answer of course is to keep the message simple and accept that your audience may only spend less than a minute looking at your content. So, if you want them to go away with one message – make sure it is up front and easily understood.
9. The company keeps chopping and changing from one theme to another. There’s a tendency in thought leadership to think in cycles. Many companies produce a large, flagship report every year. It takes a lot of effort and, once this has been launched, the marketing team is often exhausted and so they dial back the activity before starting the cycle all over again. The problem with this “big bang” approach is that there is a lot of impact in the short term, but this quickly dissipates when the company stops promoting the campaign. Strengthened brand associations are only temporary, and the company must build them up all over again when they launch the next year’s report. The alternative is to think about an always-on model where you combine the power of the large flagship campaign with a programme of more frequent activity that takes place throughout the year.
10. There’s not enough rigour in measuring success. Measuring the impact of B2B content has always been challenging because the real benefits are felt over the long term. But many companies do not have the patience to focus on longer-term effects and instead prioritise KPIs that are more immediate and easier to measure, such as short-term engagement metrics. Sometimes these are useful, but often they are not. The key is to be clear about the overall objectives for the campaign and ensure that the right metrics are in place to track progress towards them. Sometimes, these metrics will need to be qualitative, or even anecdotal, but so long as you are able to demonstrate progress and close the circle between objectives and metrics, your campaign is likely to be more successful.

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