5 content marketing mistakes costing Nigerian B2B companies customers

B2B content marketing is inherently more complex than its B2C counterpart.

The sales process is typically longer, ranging from several months to a year. Your prospects are most likely a buying committee that includes several decision makers, not just an individual. Your buyers are also paying with company funds, which means they need to be sure your product can deliver immediate business impact.

All these factors make B2B content marketing challenging to execute well. Many Nigerian businesses struggle with common pitfalls that can undermine their efforts. Here are the top five mistakes to avoid:

• Neglecting audience and customer research. If you don’t know who you are selling to, what motivates them to buy, and their behaviour during the buying process, then you’re likely to target the wrong people, or worse, target everyone.
• Lack of a content strategy. Your marketing strategy maps the path to success by connecting your business goals to marketing tactics. It ensures you do not waste time and effort marketing the wrong things to the wrong people in the wrong channels. For instance, imagine a cybersecurity company with a product that helps large organizations secure their servers, creating viral TikTok videos without ever mentioning security challenges, data breaches, or how their solutions protect businesses.
• Chasing vanity metrics instead of business outcomes. It’s tempting to celebrate and focus on high website traffic and social media likes, but these don’t necessarily drive revenue. For B2B companies, what matters more are metrics that indicate business impact: qualified leads, demo requests, and ultimately, closed deals. A fintech startup might get tens of thousands of website visitors, but if only five request a product demo, there’s a fundamental problem with targeting or content quality.
• Neglecting the product/service. Businesses often create content that isn’t clearly related to their offerings. Your prospects need to know exactly what your product solves, so they are sure you match their criteria during the procurement process.
• Working with the wrong influencers. This is veering into social media marketing, but it’s worth mentioning. Bigger doesn’t mean better. B2B buyers need to be influenced by people whose opinions and recommendations they care about. That means you can’t always go with an influencer with the biggest followers; instead, go with those with an audience that matches your target customer profile.

Luckily, these mistakes can be easily fixed.

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• Research your customers and understand the nuances of the market. To start, run focus groups and surveys, and collect data and insights from customer calls. This will help you know who you are selling to, their problems, the objections they might have when buying, and their buying process. Then, you can target your marketing and provide them with the information they need to choose your brand.
• Create a content strategy that ties to your business goals. Start by identifying the current situation of your business. Then review the business goals that marketing can influence. Use what you’ve learnt from audience research to choose your channels. Next, create the tactics that you’ll use to achieve them. Avoid copying the competition’s playbook. It can inspire you, but it shouldn’t become your strategy.
• Track what matters. Use your business goals to determine what metrics you prioritize. For example, lead generation might matter more than brand awareness if you want to increase your customer acquisition rates.
• Share content that features your product as the solution. Not every single asset or post has to mention a product, but a significant amount should be related to what your product does. That way, people know your brand and know it can help them, so they will likely consider you when they are ready to buy.
• Focus on influencers who can convince B2B decision makers to take action. Consider using micro influencers. These are people with smaller audiences whom B2B buyers trust and respect. A micro influencer with 10,000 relevant followers beats a big influencer with 1 million followers who aren’t interested in your product.

I’ll close with the most important thing. Hire the right people and let them do their work. If you’re a founder reading this, the most important thing is the team you bring on to help you reach and acquire customers. Choose people with a good track record, and trust them to do their work.

Stella Inabo is a content marketer at Float, a B2B software company. She writes from Abuja.