Top 5 B2B Digital marketing Trends that will evolve in 2017

While the B2C segment continues to dominate the use of digital marketing channels for meeting business goals, the B2B segment is fast catching up. Digital marketing is opening up new avenues for businesses to drive interest and engagement with other businesses that may be potential customers. Let’s take a look at some of the key trends that may define how businesses will use digital marketing this year to market their offerings to business customers:

1.Continued focus on content marketing

At an average today, businesses across different verticals spend 29% of their allocated budget on content marketing. This budget is deemed to increase by a sizeable margin as 39% of the businesses are contemplating on enhancing their content marketing spend. B2B marketers are also seeing increasingly greater returns on their spend on content marketing, as there is a growing belief that content marketing may be one of the most effective digital channels to generate leads for a business, especially in a B2B context. It also leads to increase in brand awareness and greater customer engagement. Businesses need to have a clear content strategy and consistent efforts across channels such as email/newsletter, social media, blogs, e-books, videos, infographics, webinars etc. in order to get the best outcomes from their content marketing.

2. Increased focus on mobile marketing

While mobile marketing is the clearly the future, yet B2B companies have been slow to adopt mobile as a platform to engage with their business customers. With key stakeholders consuming information on the mobile and using apps on the go, businesses can no longer choose to ignore this medium. In order to stay ahead of the game, businesses must have a comprehensive mobile marketing strategy, whether it is ensuring that all their online properties and content is mobile friendly or creating dedicated mobile apps for their customers/prospects, or pushing their marketing messages through mobile channels or finding ways to engage with their customers through mobile.

3. Leveraging data, AI and predictive analytics to offer tailored solutions

Personalization and extreme customer focus are the key tenets for success today. There is a need for businesses to leverage CRM data along with artificial intelligence and predictive modelling to create and offer highly customised solutions to their business customers. With such data, a businesses’ ability to cross-sell and up-sell to their customers will get enhanced, while driving clear value for their customers through the right products and services. Companies that use analytics successfully to give their customers the right offerings at the right time, will emerge clear winners.

4. Increased adoption of social media

B2B marketers are slowly starting to realize the potential of social media. Social media is a great way to drive traffic to a business’ websites, distribute content, and create awareness about its products and services. With a host of business specific marketing offerings and tools from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others social platforms, businesses can now track the ROI from social campaigns. Social media can help B2B organizations to reach potential customers across the world, across time zones, and start an initial connection, potentially reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Social media can also help with competitor information, which can be crucial for any business. In addition, Social media also helps B2B businesses with brand awareness and better results for SEO.

5. Leveraging the industry influencer network

A business can tremendously benefit if it successfully harnesses the power of influential brand advocates to help create brand awareness and even acquire new customers. By building relationships with people who are thought leaders/influencers in the industry, a business can engage them for anything ranging from content co-creation to outright advocacy. Influencers can help increase the reach of the marketing message, drive greater engagement and lend more credibility to a business’ offerings. Relationships with PR and media can help a business get access to top industry publications and coverage that can help it stay top-of-mind for its target audience. By engaging with industry analysts, a business can be a part of a widely circulated industry report and share its brand’s story.

With these evolving trends, it will be interesting to see how successfully B2B marketers leverage digital marketing to build deeper relationships with their customers and grow their businesses.

What are some of the other B2B digital marketing trends that you see evolving over the next year or so?

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