10 Focus Areas for B2B Marketing Teams in 2020

In 2 weeks from now, we say goodbye to the final "teen" year of this century - 2019. As we welcome 2020, I am taken back to my school days when futuristic technologies, trends & prediction were associated with this milestone year. Over the past decade we have witnessed technology shifts around us at a rapid pace. Disruption across industries and businesses have happened and still continues. The only way forward for Organizations is to up the game each day and stay ahead of competition.

The MarTech landscape had an exponential growth from a modest 150 in 2011 to 7000+ tools in 2018 and counting. Organizations today look to move aggressively towards AI and Predictive modelling based techniques. Marketing as a function is now more sophisticated and transformed. It is no longer looked as a Cost-Centre, but considered as an extension of Sales (driving conversions at Top of Sales Funnel). In this changing environment it is of utmost importance for Leaders to prioritize goals, take decisions that have lasting impact and challenge Marketing teams to acquire new skills.

Areas to focus in 2020

1. Look beyond MQLs and focus on Accounts : Marketing works with Persons, Sales work with Accounts and often this gap results in reduced effectiveness of marketing campaigns. B2B Marketing in 2020 has to look at aggregated efforts that drive an Account towards business Vs focusing on individuals. It is strongly advised to initiate Account based marketing with your Top Accounts (a topic for some other day).
2. Make Data quality a priority : Who owns data in your Organization? The answer has to be EVERYONE. If you gave a different answer (like IT), you must address this immediately. Bad data hurts Marketing the most...risk due to compromise of consent policy (GDPR), increased bounce rates, bad domain reputation and more. Bad data has negative ripple effect giving inaccurate insight that in-turn impacts organization strategy and decision making. Read this post on how bad data can impact your AI and Analytics investments.
3. Embrace AI and Predictive Model: Spending on AI-based marketing technology (martech) solutions is projected to reach $52.2B by 2021. AI has the capability to scale your operations faster and with more accuracy (provided you have already satisfied #2 above). Top 2 areas to invest are: Account Selection and Customer Journey Personalization via AI. Check-out these 5 cool use cases for AI in B2B Marketing by MIT
4. Focus on Audience Quality than Quantity: Get away from the notion that more audience is better. This is the age of one size fits few. Adopt micro-segmentation and build digital journeys around them.To build engaging digital experiences, you have to do better profiling and segmentation. Gartner predicted in 2015 that organizations that excel in personalization will outsell companies that don’t by 20%.
5. Create awesome Content: The purpose for content is to make it worth engaging. A unique perspective into a topic certainly draws attention...something where customers can relate to their business pains and quickly find potential benefits (or risks if overlooked). Read my post where I share how to make Content powerful.
6. Look beyond Impressions and Shares for Social Media ROI: B2B Marketers today need to change their approach towards Social media marketing. Targeted Social media campaigns focused on MQL generation should take a priority. Likes/ Shares are good to spread the word, however conversions are what matters more. Check out the Conversion metrics here from Hootsuite.
7. Invest in Videos to deliver better engagement: Videos are easy to consume and allow you to reach your audience with a clearer value proposition. A LinkedIn Study says videos have a 5X higher chance of receiving a comment and perform 3X better than text based posts. The case for Videos is further strengthened from the fact that 70% B2B decision makers are Millennials who prefer mobile devices. Sharing this article from Entrepreneur.com on benefits to B2B Org investing on videos
8. Customer Experience driven Website: Your website should be the encyclopedia for your enterprise and yet needs to provide a Magic-kingdom like experience. Wowing your customers as they know you better. All your in bound marketing efforts should tie Make every effort to engage the customer with relevant, personalized experience. And never redirect customers away from your website to a Social Media page/ Youtube where they are likely to meet your competitors.
9. Invest in training your team: Most of the times, we get obsessed with tools/ techniques and forget to re-skilling our teams. I strongly recommend investing in training and developing a self-learn knowledge portal. This will not only help with early adoption of tools but at the same time help identify Champions in your team who can share their success stories/ feedback resulting in more adoption.
10. Strengthen bridge between Sales and Marketing: Make some Sales buddies in 2020...I really mean it. You may be a CMO or an Analyst, applies to everyone in Marketing. Sales teams work under extreme pressure, driven by revenue targets. Empathize with them, try understanding their pain areas, extend your help and plan a joint strategy. Marketing can help Sales break into competitor accounts, help retain customers or influence a deal in final stages of decision.

I hope this list will help fellow Marketers to focus better and be more effective. Wishing an awesome start to 2020...keep rocking !

Subhayan is a Marketing Technology Leader with Cognizant. In current capacity he is playing a key role in Demand Generation and MarTech strategy alignment. He is an experienced B2B marketing professional with deep interest in Data driven Analytics and AI-Predictive model based solutions.