Happy New Year! And welcome to 2018 B2B marketers. It’s time to look into the coming months and see the trending topics that could lead to greater more growth and ROI from marketing efforts moving forward.
Here are four emerging B2B marketing trends you should consider integrating into your 2018 marketing plan.
1. Marketing automation.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate your everyday B2B marketing tasks to save time? With marketing automation not only will you be able to automate repetitive tasks, you can also nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content along the journey to purchase.
The technology is in its early stage of maturity, and marketers are figuring out how to best exploit the possibilities to deliver relevant and timely communications to prospects.
Marketing automation is more about nurturing your prospects than selling to them. It helps you streamline your inbound marketing strategy and enhance the communication by delivering content exactly when your prospects need it.
2. Content marketing.
As the customer journey becomes longer, businesses will need to deploy plenty of research on different stages of the customer lifecycle. Content marketing is highly effective for B2B marketers to educate potential customers about best practices for their industry.
Although nearly 90 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing as a core component of their online marketing strategy, only 37 percent of them have a documented content strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 benchmarks. Lack of strategy is the primary reasons why content initiatives fail, so be sure you have a plan and that you stick with it over time.
Set the goals you want to achieve through content marketing and measure them through KPIs. Although content marketing is cheaper, it’s not certainly free. To measure ROI, you need to calculate the cost of content production and editing. You’ll also need to measure various factors like traffic, brand awareness and customer engagement that you acquired through content marketing along with sales and revenue.
3. Content personalization.
B2B businesses are still slow to adopt it content personalization. Personalization of emails is a common tactic across all industries and can be very effective.
A study by Seismic and Demand Metric looked at the reasons why B2B business were not implementing personalization and found that a lack of resources, technology and data were cited more often than not. They also found that effectiveness of content personalization strategy is resoundingly high for those who have adopted it. The importance of personalization may make it one of those areas that warrant outside help if you need it to make sure you leverage its advantages.
4. LinkedIn marketing.
Just like the previous years, LinkedIn is expected to outperform other social channels for B2B businesses.
After being acquired by Microsoft in 2016, LinkedIn has released tons of features that are geared towards making LinkedIn the most efficient and cost-effective platform for reaching B2B audience. For example, the recently released In-mail Analytics features help you get more response and improve your entire team’s performance. Social selling is no longer an experimental strategy. It’s the new industry standards for B2B sales.
With technology on the rise, the possibilities for B2B businesses to engage with their potential prospects are endless. If you haven’t incorporated the new trends in your strategic planning for 2018, now is the right time.
If you could use some help with your digital marketing in 2018 contact us at Content-1. We’d be happy to help evaluate where you are and strategize as you reach for your goals in the coming year. www.Content-1.com