Top 5 – B2B Digital Marketing Trends 2022
The way we see the market has changed drastically over the last two years, mainly because of a radical shift in customer habits. The shift is still ongoing, and that means businesses across different industries must keep a close watch on what the customers want. Not only they have to tailor their processes to suit these new requirements, but change their marketing messages accordingly too. Here are a few trends that can steer marketing teams in the right direction.
SEO will not work – be it in a standalone or siloed fashion.
With more and more organizations trying to capture the first page of Google, the competition for the keywords are going to be intensified. The cost of these keywords are only going to shoot up. Marketers who use them in a combination with the PPC campaign will see their strategy working. Focusing on the keyword strategy is vital, as SEO wouldn’t be of any use if it doesn’t produce quality leads or enquiries.
Again, keep in mind on how you choose your keywords.
LinkedIn Campaigns, Sales Navigator in combination with Intent based Data
A CMO’s function is transitioning into a Chief Revenue Officer’s role, and this is adding pressure to an already exhausting set of CMO responsibilities. No wonder the average tenure of CMOs within an organisation is coming down! In my personal experience, CEOs nowadays expect their CMOs to be manage sales well too – and a CMO should not even hesitate to make a cold call to validate the leads themselves before it even reaches the field sales, if required.
But the basis of it should be Data. Data is the new oil – and there is going to be increasing demand for Purchase Intent based Data. In the coming year, you may see more data consumption by marketers – and companies like ZoomInfo, Bombora will Flourish. You will also see increase in usages of SDRs (Sales Development Representative’s and ABM Tools).
Despite of all of these, using LinkedIn is still very important because the entire B2B sector is built on Relationship Marketing. Unless you put in your efforts to build relationships, the interactions and results will be below par. If automation worked for relationships, there’d be a line of people who’d want that to manage their spouses! At the end of the day, human beings are emotional and their emotional needs cannot be met using a bot.
Email Marketing & Drip Workflows
Every single company is shooting out emails, knowingly or unknowingly – some to known audiences, and some to unknown ones. With spam filters and other technology advances coming in place, the competition to be on the inbox, or to even reach the inbox, is going to be really tough. Therefore, you better start working on the opt-in list. Emails work well if you’re trying to build a community or a tribe around the business, and with the existing customer base. If you’ve not started building a community or the tribe, you better start today. The opt-in list will come handy to begin with, followed by events, webinars and several online / offline events.
Automation & Personalisation
We live in an era where the thin line between different market segments is vanishing. So, what we learnt on demographics, geography and psychographics etc needs to be unlearned. Every Human brain is different and there each individual is a segment in itself. Here is where you need automation platforms that allow you to capture Segment of One or N=1.
We have to engage with the audiences in real time, and businesses need a segment of one marketing platforms which provide real insights like ‘person x visited from Chicago onto the website at so and so time and this is his click stream’ to achieve this. Once such a framework is in place, you’re going to succeed in engaging that audience – or you’re going to succeed in engaging Mr. x in the right way.
The demand for marketing automation and hyper personalization with dynamic content rendering is going to go up this year, and more and more B2B technology companies are going to focus on personalization, content rendering, and also automation platforms which will help them understand what segments are visiting their web page or mobile app.
Content Marketing, Creativity & Video
All the talk about data and automation in the previous trends (and elsewhere on the internet) might give an appearance that with dynamic content rendering, hyper personalisation and so on – creative writing is no longer important. But I would advise you to deliberate before you fire your content marketer / copy writer in favour of a shiny new automated marketing platform: He or she may be the one who might save you, because the number 1 focus must be content marketing and creativity, rendered in video.
This covers a whole gamut of things including your Brand Positioning, the way you convert data into stories, narrate them and seamlessly render it so that a prospect can get the underlying message easily. Just to give you an example, over 350 million people consumer online videos in India and over 950 million do the same in China. But video is only a medium of communication, and what really is required is the creative aspect of that communication. The brand positioning – how do you define the content, how audience is perceiving it – matters a lot more, and directs way of storytelling that is compelling for the viewers and useful for the businesses. With the Video consumption on smaller screens increasing worldwide, rendering your content for phone screens can be the smartest way to get to new users.