B2B marketing has quickly become an industry where even the freshest recruits are able to know more than the seasoned veterans of the industry. That’s how quickly things are changing in the modern world, as new types of customers, technologies and business relationships continue to emerge.
Staying up to date with the latest industry trends can be a strenuous undertaking, requiring a constant finger on the pulse. However, there are several things you can be doing to ensure you are as up to date as possible, with a flexible system in place that allows you to react and adapt to any shifts in the landscape in real time.
Growth-Centric Marketing
Today, every aspect of B2B marketing revolves around revenue and growth. Unlike its sibling B2C, where things like brand awareness are still as important as ever. If you’re a B2B marketer today, every campaign you do must be able to prove its ROI, otherwise, it’s essentially useless. This is the major shift we have seen over recent years, as analytics and fine-tuned data become more and more central to the marketing process.
The New Way
With data sitting at the heart of everything, SEO, inbound marketing, and content marketing have come to rule the day. Content creation is now equal parts creative and analytic data interpretation. This is where the creative process now begins. Hours must be spent digging through metrics, understanding audience and industry trends, and only then can content plans be sculpted to fit around the findings.
Everything your business puts out needs to have a purpose. Converting and responding to buyer persona challenges is a must as these are the only things that generate results. Ranking as high as possible in search engines is incredibly important today. One or two places can be the difference between a business having an outstanding year or going under. It’s that critical. Climbing the rankings is not easy, especially because everyone (once clued in) make it their priority. And rightly so. It requires a diligent and intelligent approach to get right, but it is so worth it.
Hybrid Marketers
Marketers of today must now boast new skillsets and be willing to spread their energy across a variety of challenges. It requires a potent mix of data-interpretation and creative response to build a campaign that will connect, engage and get real results. And this is what we’re seeing happening today.
- 89% of B2B marketers now use content marketing
- With 62% saying their efforts are more successful now than they were a year ago.
- However, only 6% are using sophisticated methods (Bubblegum Search)
That is, only 6% of B2B content marketers are accurately measuring where the positive effects are occurring. As we move forward, this is an area that must and will improve, as businesses begin to realise how effective it is to understand their marketing ROI on a micro level.
For everything you need to consider when building your next digital marketing campaign, you can download our handy guide and checklist, taking you through the key steps to building a digital strategy truly fit for today’s B2B marketing landscape.