For the last 15 years, marketing technology, digital advertising, and content marketing saw huge booms.
As 2019 come to a close, we looked at the year on the horizon to try and anticipate upcoming B2B digital marketing trends. Let’s look at digital marketing trends including tools and channels that will grow or continue to be popular in 2020.
B2B Marketing Tool Integration
Retaining customers is equally important as gaining new customers. This awareness led to the rise of B2B Enterprise Marketer role, which is a term coined for someone who’s in charge of both retaining existing customer base and generating new leads. Strategizing and actioning for both goals typically require separate tools and systems, from a Customer Data Platform for website analytics, Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) to execute regular outreach initiatives, to Customer Relationship Management tool to engage existing customers.
2020 could bring a rise in the development of tools and platforms that tries to integrate the capabilities of these disjointed tools.
Data-driven Approach
Over the years since their inception, Google Ads and Google Analytics have brought a lot of data before us. B2B marketing data, similarly, became more ubiquitous; marketers had almost all data they could ever dream of at their disposal. From how many people visit their site, which page is popular, down to which page generates leads.
This is going to stay in 2020, hence marketers equipped with data knowledge in the past years have an early start to master analysis and data-driven initiatives.
Marketing and Sales Integration with Account-based Focus
2019 gave rise to the buzzword “Account-based Marketing (ABM)”. As the concept takes on, there will be a growing number of companies that strive to practice ABM. ABM proposes a closer integration between marketing and sales in keeping outreach messages consistent, nurturing the leads and creating a personalized targeted advertising that comprises of proposals and demos, pre-purchase email cycles, post-purchase email cycles, and so on.
This is a contrasting move compared to current practice in some companies, where marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, are handed over to the sales department, and the marketing team engagement ends with the handover.
Video Content to Gain Engagement
According to Youtube Statistic as of December 2019, over 1.9 Billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month globally. B2B marketers can diversify content types with blogs and videos. Youtube videos can be shared across various channels, such as LinkedIn. The appearance of video in someone’s feed break the texts upon texts that they are seeing, thus giving more chance for the video to pop out.
Email Remains to be a Common B2B Marketing Channel
We can expect email to remain an integral part of B2B marketing channel. It’s simple to grasp and practical in delivering B2B message across. It allows personalization, automation, and can be very powerful with the right measurement tools like tracking clicks from email using Google Analytics.
Now you’re equipped with some ideas on where to take your B2B marketing efforts in the coming year. Upping your B2B marketing game is not always easy, but as the new year begins, there are chances for you to get on some of the 2020 trends.