B2B Online Marketing Trends That Are Still Going Strong
Chad Faith
Director of Content
Are you an online marketer in the B2B sector? If so, your top two concerns may involve whether your approaches are helping to develop more quality leads or effectively feed the sales funnel. With that in mind, it is definitely a good time for you to take a step back and review the current B2B online marketing trends that are still in vogue. This ensures that you will become more aware about the innovation that is happening across all the main digital marketing channels, and then fine tune your marketing strategy.
Social Media Trend
Compared to Google+, YouTube, Twitter, Slideshare, and LinkedIn have proven to be more effective when it comes to B2B online marketing. Recent effectiveness ratings of LinkedIn and Twitter were 66% and 55% out of the whole cohort. What’s more, those platforms are expected to continue trending for some time. If you are thinking of joining the B2B social media bandwagon, you need to remember that while it is easy to set up an account on a new social network, it will take a significant amount of effort to run it effectively. The trick is to prioritize and focus on the most effective networks for your needs.
Mobile Marketing Trend
The shift to mobile is without a doubt one of the biggest trends for B2B online marketers. In fact, it has been this way for several years now. This is also happening due to Google’s recent implementation of pop-up penalties and mobile-first index. Research has shown that mobile now accounts of more than half of the traffic on the web. Potential and current customers of businesses are relying more on their mobile devices to research solutions on the go. Hence, as B2B marketers, one must ensure that their content is mobile-optimized to enable smooth processing for all users, on all devices.
Account-Based Marketing Trend
Also known as ABM, account-based marketing is a popular approach in B2B marketing. It is often utilized by larger organizations that require a collaborative strategy that engages executives, deliver professionals, subject matter experts, marketing, and sales. The goal for this collaborative team is to develop a well-orchestrated sales and marketing campaign for one or more accounts. In the past, ABM was just a mindset or tactic which was not well-supported by marketing automation services, because it only focuses on individual customer records. Today, the trend has gotten back on track due to renewed features that help target and nurture groups of people though re-targeting and email in an automated manner.
Website Personalization Trend
Previously, website personalization was not widely used within the B2B sector. This is pretty surprising due to the fact that personalization of emails using techniques like dynamic content insertion were popular. Today, web personalization is an established technique for eCommerce sites and is also more affordable for smaller companies. Recent trend reports show that there are now automation features that enable users to recommend the most relevant piece of content within the desired nurture path.
Content Marketing Trend
Content marketing has been widely utilized within the B2B sector for many years, but its significance started to rise when inbound marketing gave more attention to share on social media and blogs. Readers, over the course three to four years, have voted for the importance of content marketing. As long as one achieves the right balance of ROI, quality, frequency, and content quantity, they will continue to find that content marketing makes an excellent tactic for B2B marketing.
Marketing Automation Trend
Marketing automation is a stellar choice for B2B marketing, and will stay this way for some time. If you have not started exploiting marketing automation yet, it is time to do so. For starters, you may make use of remarketing on third-party sites to nurture your prospects who have previously expressed interest in one of your services or products. Alternatively, you can implement a multi-step welcome sequence via the use of dynamic content.