Enter 2022 and we will have B2B marketers witnessing a range of technology trends. The overarching principle driving these changes is that the customer demands a lot more. The growing competition and race for profitability amidst the pandemic have put the customer in the driving seat. The old paradigm of leading the customer is gradually being phased out, favoring a new one — follow the customers and cater to their requirements.
As technology changes the B2B marketing strategies, marketers’ teams must remain on top of industry developments. As a B2B marketer, you may have difficulty deciding where to invest your time and resources with a constant stream of new technology and execution techniques.
This is why we are covering five technology trends that you should be aware of in 2022. Getting hold of any or all of these would mean staying relevant and on top of the growing competition.
Trend #1. Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a modern approach pivoting B2B marketing where marketers and sales personnel collaborate to identify and convert best-fit clients. The Account-Based Marketing (ABM) goals were highly impacted due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, as told by 42% of marketers. Also, 49% of the respondents said they had shifted their priority from acquiring new clients to retaining current ones.
Unlocking success with this approach will need sales and marketing teams to collaborate closely to aid marketers in finding the most qualified prospects for an ABM strategy within the target population.
Small businesses may profit from this strategy with a powerful blend of their sales and marketing teams using ABM to target their marketing resources and efforts most effectively.
Compared to other marketing activities, ABM provides a 97% higher return on investment. Among the 100 B2B marketers surveyed by Demand Gen Report and ABM In Action, only six admitted to not using ABM. Ultimately, AMB helps align sales and marketing activities for B2B businesses by ensuring efficient use of marketing resources.
Trend #2. Email Personalization
Email marketing is the most successful channel for reaching out to a wider audience. As per Content Marketing Institute’s report, 68% of B2B marketers consider email newsletters one of the best ways to nurture leads. This is why it gets critical to personalize emails that render quality leads with improved conversions over an email.
Another report suggests that 70% of marketers who adopted email customization achieved an exceptional return on investment (ROI. Thanks to the variety of templates and technologies that enable personalization, outreach, and audience segmentation simpler than ever before.
Also, during the pandemic, the world switched to digital signatures to save time and effort, and minimize unnecessary physical contact and paper waste. Digital signatures can be readily leveraged in your emails for enhanced security and credibility.
B2B email personalization is a big step forward from mass emails that don’t get any results. Marketers can now run email campaigns, analyze those, and use AI to forecast (discussed in the next point) more easily.
Trend #3. AI-Powered Buyer Experience
Another technology that is helping B2B marketers develop ever more tailored B2B buyer experiences is Artificial intelligence (AI). It helps create a unique customer journey across numerous channels. You can opt for an automated scheduler, spam score checker, automating A/B tests for email marketing, and much more.
Using AI in your B2B marketing will help plummet your costs and errors while boosting your ROI. B2B Marketers can link and analyze customer data to produce consumer insights that integrate marketing, sales, and customer service.
As per Salesforce, 21% of sales leaders hugely rely on AI applications, with most collaborating with marketing teams to share these applications. Like how email personalization helps drive more conversion, tailoring other aspects of marketing can also help unlock different growth metrics.
Personalization boosts lead generation, retains customers, and drives upselling. Moreover, it also enhances the remainder of the customer experience. For instance, 82% of marketing executives attribute personalization to a significant or moderate increase in consumer advocacy, while 92% attribute it to brand growth
Trend #4. Video Marketing
There are some technology trends that B2B marketers cannot afford to overlook, and this is one of those. Especially as a modern-day digital marketer, you need the power of technologies such as video content to make it more accessible and appealing.
Video marketing is highly beneficial to B2B companies as it provides a visual reference to the buyer’s journey. Moreover, you can also create case study videos that bolster your marketing efforts. This one is becoming quite a trend as more and more B2B businesses are adopting videos to reach out to their customers. Recent data suggests that 70% of B2B buyers watch videos when they research a product before they buy it and case studies videos are quite popular.
Spending on video advertising is predicted to grow in years to come, especially when the pandemic pushes many businesses to make purchase decisions virtually. Adopting video marketing for B2B would mean entertainingly communicating key business information.
Branded films may assist B2B buyers in learning about new trends and honing existing abilities. By 2024, spending on video advertising will reach $12.66 billion, up from $10.18 billion in 2019.
Trend #5. Multi-Channel Marketing
The chances are that you are already blasting enough emails as a part of your B2B marketing campaign, rampaging through email lists week after week. But, without a multichannel marketing plan in place, your business might be losing out on the possibility to grow further.
Most successful marketers know the importance of multichannel marketing as they keep accessing various channels to reach out to different businesses. This includes digital and offline marketing operations. B2B marketers can adopt a range of techniques to achieve success with this kind of campaign, most notably by tapping into the desires and preferences of their consumers via different media platforms.
Below are some of the many ways to simplify multi-channel marketing and accelerate creating a cohesive experience:
- Conduct research before deciding on or investing in a new platform. For instance, if you are thinking of running adverts in a mobile app, identify its target audience and check the app CTR.
- Create a definite plan for the business objectives that your content will drive.
- Keep track of your marketing efforts using lead tracking software like Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zoho CRM, etc.
- Invest time in fine-tuning all marketing channels, including regular updates.
Wrapping up
Every year with technological advancements, B2B marketers need to stay updated with ongoing market trends. Adopting such fast changes requires a keen eye, a quick mind, a dynamic approach, and awareness to adopt the best in B2B marketing.
Everything boils down to accepting the change and repositioning your B2B brand with anything from personalization to artificial intelligence that helps you stay on top of the game. Becoming a successful B2B marketer would need you to keep tap with the latest technologies and be prepared to adopt one or all these trends.
The newer trends keep emerging and are a testament to the marketing industry which is ever-evolving and dynamic. Brace yourselves for the new year by identifying the trend that can boost your business and swiftly adopting it.
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This article first appeared in www.business2community.com
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