Menu
Exciting times come for B2B marketers although they will be under pressure to cut down their spending. Developing smart strategies to reallocate budgets to the right marketing channels and platforms is a good idea. With continuing disturbances in the markets, marketers will become more involved in the business. They will gain the authority to create a strategy for driving growth and value, in a flexible and agile manner. It’s about time to embrace and apply new, smart ways to your marketing efforts. We listed 8 trends that will influence B2B marketing this year.
Client retention will be a main focus for many businesses. And that starts with:
– understanding your client’s needs and pain points,
– delivering value to customers through thought leadership content,
– applying growth marketing techniques to optimize spending on your digital marketing and
– focusing on customer success using account-based marketing.
These are eight marketing strategies to apply when you need to make the most of a limited marketing budget in 2023:
In today’s diverse environment, sales and marketing must learn to speak the same language. Keep track of who their customers are, how they convert, and how they can affect their journey. It is important to align sales and marketing to make both functions more efficient and improve lead quality and conversion rates.
To drive strategic growth, marketers have to get a clearer big-picture. They need to understand how their marketing impacts the bottom line. Have a better understanding of the operations and be aware of the sales pipeline.
Sales and marketing should share ownership for delivering results.
To make the best of your budget, move away from mass marketing and take a targeted approach with account-based marketing (ABM). With ABM you approach your highest-value accounts with personalized engagement. It will help you to build stronger relationships. Start with a CRM platform and a list of valued clients and potential target accounts. This is why marketing and sales alignment is so important. Both teams should work together to understand their current customer base, determine who their best customers are, and then identify more accounts like them. Develop personas for each client’s group. Study their needs and pain points and tailor your messages to address their problems. Build content and experiences for every target account, based on their specific preferences. Optimize marketing efforts by opportunity type: acquisition, upsell, cross-sell, and retention.
Move away from mass marketing and take a targeted approach with account-based marketing. Approach your highest-value accounts with personalized engagement.
Businesses fail to understand their customer pain points and identify with them. This is a barrier to building a strong content strategy. While there is a lot of B2B content out there, most of it focuses on promoting services and company achievements. Instead, content should create value for customers, help them solve their problems, meet their challenges, and reach their goals. Most of the B2B content is not engaging and lacks personality.
Start by creating the content goals. Long-term brand building should be fuelled by an emotional branding strategy and based on the content that forms an emotional connection with your customers.
Thought leadership content helps businesses elevate their brand perception, build trust, and improve their reputation. Think about original research and long-form articles as an investment. You can turn the data points into many blog posts and infographics, which you can then divide into several social media posts. You can use thought leadership content tailored for particular client segments in a demand-generating campaign.
Engaging content is crucial in Account Based Marketing. Develop high-quality, highly-targeted content and then manage that content at different stages of the sales cycle.
Content has never been more important. Start by creating the content goals. Long-term brand building should be fuelled by an emotional branding strategy and based on the content that forms an emotional connection with your customers.
Growth marketing comes from the start-up environment where companies are dependent on growth for survival despite their very limited marketing budgets. Growth marketers find the most efficient ways to scale up and drive revenue. They apply segmentation and client targeting at every stage of their customer journey, from awareness to referral with personalized content and ads.
Growth marketers analyze data and feedback gained through marketing campaigns and experimentation. They found out what works and what doesn’t, and make constant improvements to the strategy.
So how can you apply a growth marketing mindset in your B2B marketing? Let’s take paid advertising, an important tactic of any growth marketing, as an example. According to the LinkedIn study, 71% of B2B ads do not deliver any growth.
Paid Ads can be the fastest way to bring quality traffic to your website. Most B2B marketers yet don’t have the knowledge or resources to maximize the return on their ad spend. Growth marketing is all about learning and experimenting. Testing endless approaches, campaign setting, copy, design to make the most of the limited budget.
Make it right. Set goals, targets, and channels. Test, analyze, and optimize. Send your ads traffic to a personalized landing page, experiment with design, tell good stories with copy, be creative, bring value and provide solutions to problems.
According to a LinkedIn study, 71% of B2B ads do not deliver any growth. What can you do? Experiment and analyze, and make constant improvements to the strategy.
Customers increasingly make buying decisions based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. They want to buy from companies that have a purpose that reaches beyond their core business. Even in the B2B sector, clients seek to connect with brands on an emotional level, not only on a rational one. They want to trust B2B partners not only through the quality of services but through the stories they tell. They want to hear about how they work to become better at what they do, how they treat their employees, and how they serve the community.
Marketing 1.0 was product-driven, and Marketing 2.0 was customer-driven. Now we entered the purpose-driven Marketing 3.0 era. The era where companies build their communication around a social cause that aligns best with their values.
If you want to stay ahead of competitors and differentiate yourself on the market, connect with your clients in a meaningful way. Merging profit and social impact should be part of your strategy.
Customers increasingly make buying decisions based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. They want to buy from companies that have a purpose that reaches beyond their core business.
Video has been one of the fastest-growing marketing trends in recent years. It has the power to educate, entertain, and engage the audience. It helps you to gain thought leadership, boost website traffic, and build social media engagement.
Whether it’s a 30-second how-to-video, an Instagram Reel, or a live stream video – it effectively engages your audience and improves the customer experience.
These days, outsourcing marketing is often the only way that successful B2B firms keep up with the pace of change and navigate digital transformation. Professional services marketing evolved; it became more complex, content and technology-driven.
Many businesses contract third-party marketing partners (interim CMOs, marketing agencies, consultants, specialized freelancers) to fill in the gaps, or even take over every aspect of their marketing. Both strategic (like go-to-market strategy or brand building) and operational (content production or social media support) functions are outsourced. Third-party marketing partners have the specialized expertise, network, and professional staff to provide a full range of services and bring value where you need it the most. They also take responsibility for the program’s delivery and performance.
Since the pandemic and wider acceptance of remote work, the demand for interim roles for senior marketing executives has increased. Fractional or interim CMOs become part of the team and form collaborative partnerships with your company.
Whether you want to improve the quality and consistency of your marketing but have no budget for a full-time marketer, or you want to outsource certain functions, such as content production, outsourcing marketing to a reputable partner is for you. Benefits: outsourcing is more cost-effective, your internal team can focus on core business and it is your partner who is accountable for delivering results.
Don't let the lack of in-house marketing resources stop your company from growing. Marketing is crucial in reaching your business objectives. Get in touch with a third-party marketing partner to build and implement an awesome marketing strategy.
Although ChatGPT has only been out for a few months, it has made a significant impact, putting marketers and even Google on high alert. ChatGPT provides an alternative way of searching for information, can simplify complex concepts, and generate ideas and content. It seems ChatGPT is a powerful tool that might revolutionize the way we do marketing.
Test the tool. Experiment with queries, generate more and better ideas and content, analyze data, and gain insights into your audience. It might help you save time.
In 2023 marketing budgets will not necessarily tighten, but marketers will more than before need to justify the spending and prove the value their actions add to the business. There will be more focus on delivering growth and building meaningful brand awareness that will influence revenue. Relevant, personalized content and thought leadership will play a main role. Building relationships, and connecting with clients in a meaningful way using Account Based Marketing, growth marketing, and video will help you keep top accounts. And results will be much easier to measure than with broader marketing efforts. Increasing numbers of companies will turn to third-party marketing partners to bridge gaps and bring innovative solutions.