5 Common Misconceptions About B2B Content Marketing Development

As the popularity of content marketing continues to grow, its misconceptions about what works and what doesn’t also continues to increase. Many marketers and business owners believe that any piece of content is better than none, but as more and more people become dependent on the web for great content and news, we’ve learned that that isn’t always the case.

Below are some of the major misconceptions about content that B2B marketers need to focus on when shaping their content strategy for the next month, quarter, or even year.

Once you write it, you’re done

Many marketers are satisfied with simply writing a piece of content, editing it, hitting “publish,” and then finally, scheduling a few social shares before they are done. However, a great content strategy doesn’t stop at the time a post is published and shared once or twice.

Set up a recurring sharing strategy where you continue to share your content, as long as it is relevant, for months and even years after it’s published. There’s several different strategies for creating a social media editorial calendar, but what works for many businesses is to assign each day of the week a specific theme, and to stay with that.

For instance, a window manufacturer could have themes like this:

• Monday: Piece of content about their windows and other products
• Tuesday: A blog post about the industry
• Wednesday: A photo of the company, its culture, or what’s going on in the workplace
• Thursday: A throwback photo of old advertising or industry meetups
• Friday: An educational outside article that is of interest to the target market

While the theme of each day will vary depending on industry or available content, knowing what you need to publish each day makes the entire creation and sharing process much easier.

Any content is good content

Too many marketers know that they should have a blog on their company’s website, but instead of taking the time to create really good content, they just post anything they can, in a haphazard, non-researched way. One-paragraph blog posts usually aren’t enough content to entice your readers or the search engines who may be crawling your site.

While not all blogs need 1,000 to 2,000 words posts to be successful, having succinct blog posts that are interesting to your target market, well-researched, and put together in a way that makes it easy to read will be of much higher value. If you are going to spend time putting together blog posts, take the time to do it right.

Your content should be the same across all channels

It’s one of the oldest sayings in the book- variety is the spice of life. This wise saying holds true when it comes to B2B content marketing. While repurposing blog content into other formats, like video or audio transcription, can be awesome for reaching more of your audience, publishing the exact same content across multiple social media channels or content platforms isn’t always the best idea.

For instance, many LinkedIn users are taking blog posts they’ve written and republishing them on LinkedIn’s content publishing platform. While no one has directly seen a penalty from having the same duplicate content on two different websites, it does flag as duplicate on CopyScape, which checks URLs or pasted text content for duplicate versions online.

When users see that your content is the same across all platforms you have an account on, they will lose interest. Make it worth their while to connect with you in a variety of different ways by providing lots of different content, which will keep the engagement level up.

At the very least, if you are going to republish blog content on another platform, as for canonical redirects to the original post by the publisher or, if it’s a site like Medium or LinkedIn, link to the original post at the bottom.

When it comes to creating content, create each piece with a specific platform in mind. You’ll likely have more engagement and better referral traffic to your site.

You shouldn’t share others’ content

Some B2B companies still give pushback when it’s suggested that they share other companies’ content on their social media channels or even link to them as a source in a blog post.

However, providing a wide variety of content from several different sources sets you up as a thought leader in the space. Your target audience will begin to think of you as a valued resource whenever they want information, because they know you consolidate what they need to know in one central location.

Sharing or citing another great piece of content in your own posts usually has no negative effect on your own business. If anything, those you link to and share will become more likely to do the same for the content you are producing.

All content should be evergreen

While evergreen does produce more “bang for your buck” when it comes to the amount of times you can reshare it and cite it on social media and in content, it can also benefit your company to post timely news or event content on your site.

By posting timely content, you are keeping up with the industry, demonstrating freshness to Google, and hopefully garnering links and traffic from your audience that wants more information as soon as it is available.

This is a tactic that we do here at KoMarketing, and it helps our audience stay up-to-date on the latest news and studies in B2B marketing. For longer content, we also offer blog posts that are usually more evergreen.

Having a mixture of these types of content helps our audience stay educated, relevant, and interested in what we have to say as a company.

Screenshots taken October 19, 2015 of Copyscape, casabellawindows.ca by author. Featured image via Pixabay.