2020 has given in all the reasons to evolve into the next level for every existing process! The survival fundamentals had to take multi-fold advancements to reach the current needs. In the world of B2B marketing, it’s a challenge to get your audience’s attention.
Audiences are in a rush and looking to save time. Thus, every little interaction with your audience is a precious opportunity for you and your brand.
Specific changes due to pandemic that the existing B2B marketers expected are:
Besides this, in a webinar about future trends of the B2B industry, Ms. Sharma Hyder, the CEO of Zen Media, and Ms. Brittany Blanchard, the VP of Account Services, Metric Theory has stated that the pandemic has a positive impact on the B2B industry. The sales and marketing teams are working closely together due to the demand created as a result of the pandemic. Not just that, the traditional ways of bringing in leads have taken a subtle shift to digital platforms, which are way more convenient and accessible to every individual. It’s no more just the sales in the front line. The content marketing, the blog articles you show on your website, your entire mission, and the vision you convey to your audience count!
Though the harmful outbreak creates an urgency of digital transformation, it is not as simple as others may see it. To bridge the gap between the speed and the demand, we will see many marketing trends evolving in the B2B industry, and they are as follows:
It has become obvious now, and your content needs to be more interactive to engage your audience. This would require extra inputs going into generating content to provide real value by solving their problems. Let your audience know that you can back up your claims with credible actions.
Why do you want multi-format content? With dynamic content, you can encourage the customer’s preferences in different ways. Your audience could be loving content in various formats like visual, audio, or a long read. Multi-format content fulfills the demand here!
People don’t want only information. They should be interacting with your brand and the brand’s content. Invite them to quizzes, conduct webinars, create interactive sessions on available social media platforms.
AI technologies like chatbots and virtual assistants will become a part of business buyers and marketers. The expectations of modern buyers demand processing vast amounts of data to deliver personalized experiences across multichannel. To implement, B2B marketers are involved in planning, evaluating, or implementing AI for marketing or sales initiatives.
With AI, you can enable faster data analysis and insight-driven decision making, quicker customer service through chatbots, automation of daily tasks, and many more. Drive your AI strategy to scale up your content production in 2021.
Understand the digital footprint of your target audience so that you can formulate an effective intent targeting strategy.
All the information like:
This data contributes to intent data and will be beneficial in leveling up your marketing game in 2021.
Obtain every detail of your target audience with an intended target, just a click away!
The current time demands collaborative work from marketing and sales teams.
The lead generation and lead qualification should be a shared goal from both teams. While the marketing team strategizes the marketing plan and sets up all the relevant marketing information, the sales team will generate higher revenues, contributing to the marketing budget.
All the units must be aligned according to the business goals to make the entire business win.
Be original and authentic, always with your content! There is no other way to stand out from your competitors if you do not generate genuine and original content.
And if you are struggling to find out a way to produce authentic content, there you go –
After looking into everything that 2020 got through us, it’s evident that customer retention plays a pretty important role in the B2B industry.
It is also stated that acquiring a new customer can be up to 25 times more expensive than retaining one. Hence, hold onto your existing customers. Try and support them if the recent pandemic impacted them. Along with profits, now it’s time to show little compassion towards your customers.
Omnichannel is the newest trend happening in B2B marketing! Every B2B enterprise should opt for it to reach out to the maximum audience.
These days, B2B buyers conduct their research about a brand online before approaching them for their essential services.
During this process, they may consult various avenues like websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many more. If you miss your presence on such platforms, it is clear that you are missing out on many opportunities to get in leads for your business.
Don’t just market on only one of the targeted channels. Target them all!
The predictive analysis makes it easy for brands to understand what their audience is precisely looking for.
It lets the brand know what other similar options are available with their prospective customers. The predictive analysis enables to achieve and implement relevant recommendations.
You can use it to read your audience’s online behavior patterns and predict what they are likely to buy and what you can recommend in the future from your products or services.
One of the most engagement-driven forms of content marketing is video content marketing in the B2B industry.
Online videos are making more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic. Nowadays, B2B buyers and researchers watch videos throughout their buying journey to ensure their security and performance are as expected.
Your audience can easily visualize the information in a blog article summarized into a video. This cuts down reading time and increases retention. Adding augmented reality to your video helps you level up your video quality to build a relationship with your audience. That shows how closely you mark a claim about your product and how helpful that could be in reality. You can include various stages of your product with a touch of reality and effectively market it.
Email marketing is a standard form of marketing in every other industry. This may fade out if you don’t personalize it for your audience.
Personalization with basic steps like addressing the reader by their name, email subject, relevancy included in the content, and maintaining pertinent specifications of the mail sent can bring a massive difference in the audience’s perspective.
Images can help you chop down the chunky and lengthy, wordy emails to a stipulated form of concentrated message for your audience. It also makes it interesting for the reader, and it is easy to understand. Make it witty, powerful, and interactive!
A report stated, LinkedIn plays the lead role in B2B marketing and generates 80% of B2B leads. It provides an opportunity for brand building, leadership, specific prospect targeting through organic content, and networking with advertising and sales solutions.
It is estimated that LinkedIn will be one of the most influential digital platforms for lead generation. LinkedIn is going to be the most inclining trend in B2B marketing in 2021.
Influencer marketing is generally followed by B2C marketers, whereas B2B marketers also can opt for it to promote brand awareness, build trust and improve reputation and expand their customer base.
Some interesting statistics about influencer marketing that you should know:
We hope you find the mentioned trends helpful and powerful enough to make efficient changes in your B2B marketing strategy. Tell us how you liked them and how effective did your plan turn out to be with them in the comment section below.
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