Part 3 in a 5-part series on how to make your B2B marketing content more effective. This series was inspired by our own learnings, and what we discovered when we created our free marketing content grader. Check back next week or subscribe to see the next post in the series.
As B2B marketing professionals, we’re guilty. We make a lot of claims. Many corporate declarations fall on skeptical, if not deaf ears – not exactly the most effective way to reach your audience.
Imagine a product heralded by its marketing team to make systems perform faster, require no maintenance (all the while making its users richer and thinner) without any hard proof. It’s easy to understand the healthy layer of skepticism prospects have developed.
In fact, this skepticism has created a huge barrier in between marketing messaging and the targeted audience, making prospects numb to any message, whether it’s true or not. Prospects have grown ever more skeptical and sophisticated. Without the numbers and credible source to back them up, unsubstantiated marketing claims tend to rate very low in credibility.
So how do you get prospective clients to believe you again?
Our State of Content Marketing Survey showed that many B2B marketing communications lack credibility. Results strongly indicated that prospects have the most confidence in unbiased 3rd party evidence and fact-based marketing.
As a result, there are three marketing tactics all B2B marketers should employ when creating credible campaigns and content:
- Leverage third party stories of your customers in your go-to-market messaging. This social proof can build believable and impactful narratives that their prospects will listen to. Over 54% of B2B marketers rated their current unbiased 3rd party customer evidence as extremely effective – in stark contrast to 15% that had such confidence in their content developed in-house.
- Use metrics & statistics in your marketing. B2B organizations rely on quantitative proof points on results in their buying decisions and will increase the credibility of your marketing efforts.
- Opinions from industry analysts and other 3rd party sources can lend the type of credibility that is crucial for B2B marketing efforts to gain attention.
How credible is your current marketing content? One quick way to evaluate your content’s effectiveness is with our free Content Grader. This online self-assessment tool will ask you about your marketing content. It then compares your answers to a database of 421 other B2B marketers, crunches the numbers, and emails you a detailed report on your content’s relevance and related factors.
