by Claudia Bruemmer

Business-to-business marketing is growing at a rapid pace, but B2B marketers have many challenges to face. What are these challenges? The answer comes from the Marketing Sherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, which surveyed B2B marketers about marketing barriers and top challenges to success. Facing these challenges in today’s market makes it more important than ever for wholesalers and manufacturers to identify these obstacles within their own organizations and develop solutions that will keep them competitive.

The Marketing Sherpa report identified the barriers listed below as obstacles preventing B2B marketers from overcoming their greatest challenges. B2B marketers must identify and address these barriers within their businesses, and then develop solutions in order to succeed. Following are the top barriers identified by the survey.

• Lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time – 62%
• Lack of ability to stop executing and think strategically – 39%
• Limited ability to develop content – 35%
• Lack of sufficient insight on target audience – 32%
• Lack of alignment between sales and marketing – 32%
• Lack of reliable data to drive decisions – 31%
• The economic climate – 30%
• Lack of clarity on goals and objectives – 27%
• Not enough education of marketing staff on best practices – 26%
• Lack of a clear value proposition – 25%
• Lack of insight in competitive research – 25%
• Lack of support from IT – 19%
• Difficulty gaining C-suite support for new strategies – 17%

B2B Lack of Resources. The top barrier to B2B marketing success seems to be the lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time (62%). This correlates to the economic climate, which was also identified as a barrier to success by 30 percent of respondents. The only way for wholesalers and manufacturers to deal with this is to carefully review staffing and budgeting, as well as accurately estimating the time necessary for completing projects.

B2B Content Marketing. Many of the above barriers can be difficult to track and correct, but the third one, the limited ability to develop content, was identified as a challenge by 35 percent of B2B marketers. This challenge can be corrected by adopting effective B2B content marketing practices, which begin with understanding your customers’ needs. Below are some best practices for successful content marketing.

• Focus on Your Customer. B2B marketers need to speak to customers as often as possible, and a good opportunity to do this is to attend several trade shows every year. Good content on your website will meet customer needs. When your content is aligned to customer needs, and using the customer’s own words, interest in your products will soar.

• Define Your Process and Delivery Policy. Once you have great content on your site, your marketing and IT departments must make that content easy to find and access. Sales portals and other technology like Content Management Systems, CRM, salesforce.com and marketing automation systems can help you create a well-defined delivery process so the necessary content is available when and where customers need it.

• Centralize Your Content. Content “tagging” and company-wide information architecture are very important for making your content findable by customers and sales teams. You must have a centralized program to make this possible.

•Test Your Results. Effective B2B content marketing doesn’t stop after you post information on your site. The 80/20 rule often applies, and that means 80% of the content people read may not produce the results you want. Therefore, your content marketing is an ongoing process of finding out what worked and why, then using that information for the next round of content creation.

In summary, B2B marketing is growing at a rapid pace, but there are many challenges to success. B2B marketers face obstacles that run from a down economy to a lack of resources in staffing, budgeting and time, and limited ability to develop great content. Facing these challenges makes it important for wholesalers and manufacturers to identify these obstacles within their own organizations and develop solutions to keep competitive.