What Will Be Hot Next Year in B2B Marketing?
You may not care if the outfits you wear to work every week are the height of fashion, but one area where you definitely need to care about trends is in the field of marketing. Staying on top of marketing trends means keeping apprised of what's important to your customers, so it also means staying relevant yourself.
Consider this: if you’re a business that caters to a younger market, there's no way that you'd reach out to customers in 2016 by advertising in the phone book. And things are always changing in the world of marketing, so here's a sneak peek at where you should be focused for the coming year.
1. Marketing Campaigns Will Be Personalized to Individual Customers
As more and more data is created and made available online, marketers have an increasingly large pool of information to draw from when it comes to drafting customer profiles. And the more information that’s available to you about your clients, their businesses, their strengths and weaknesses, and their needs, the better you can personalize and tailor your marketing campaigns to them.
Imagine if you had the inside scoop that a potential client of yours just purchased a new technology and was having trouble implementing it. And imagine you had the exact tool they needed to incorporate that technology seamlessly into their business and could target your latest marketing campaign to address their need. There's a good chance you're going to get that sale, right? Well that tactic, called personalized tracking, will become increasingly common in the B2B marketing world.
2. Analysis Will Become a More Critical Part of Marketing
Personalized tracking isn't really anything new; it’s just a more involved and more individualized version of what's been happening for years with analytics tools and customer profiling. But as this type of behavior tracking becomes more popular and more important in marketing, so too will there be an increased need for people who are adept at analyzing that data. As such, marketing will eventually be just as much about in-depth analysis as it is about branding and advertising.
3. Social Media Will Become an Increasingly Important Marketing Resource
You know all that online data that marketers and businesses have access to and can use to track customers? Most of that information is coming from social media, meaning that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social sites can be mined for vital information about customers and potential clients.
And since most businesses have accounts and pages of their own in an attempt to reach their customers, these sites can be used for B2B marketing research as well. So what's new? Relationship data companies now specialize in unpacking all the information available on social media to make it more accessible for marketers, and to help you manage the data more effectively.
For now, and for the foreseeable future, quality content will still be king in the world of online marketing, B2B marketing, and marketing in general. But at the same time, things like technology, social media, and the data available online will also be taking center stage. The internet, as always, will continue to make your job easier and harder at the same time, because the more data that’s out there, the more access you have to relevant information about leads, but the more time and effort you have to put into sorting through it all.
Don’t worry, though; there are data and tech companies out there that are aware of this, and perhaps the biggest trend in the coming year will be the increasing number of tools available to B2B marketers that will help you use all this information to your advantage.
