As technological novelties change the B2B marketplace, marketing and sales teams need to keep up with industry trends to remain competitive. While following the latest and greatest B2B trends may not revolutionize your business, this knowledge can help you keep a pulse on the competition.
This is especially true now that we are crawling out of a problematic post-coronavirus period; focusing more on what’s ahead is crucial for any business.
So, how can you gain a competitive advantage and grow your business with new marketing plans? How can you keep up with the times and keep your firm’s content fresh and compelling?
Let’s dive in and absorb some of the macro-trends that will likely have the most significant impact on your firm today and in the coming year.
1.Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) ranks among the most discussed and shared topics right now by B2B marketers. According to a recent marketing blog that presents some of the current trends in the world of marketing.
Unlike B2Cs, it’s well acknowledged that B2B sales cycles take longer, with more turns, twists, and touchpoints along the customer journey.
As crucial as CRO is to B2Bs, it’s easy for marketers to become obsessed with driving traffic and ignoring the significance of optimizing their site. Without the ability to hold your prospects’ attention and transform this interest into something tangible, like downloading a white paper or buying a product, you merely have numbers. Successful CRO allows you to not only increase revenue per user but also grow your business.
According to Austin Peachey, SEO Manager at Obility, CRO starts with click-through optimization from search engines. He recommends that B2Bs conduct a thorough audit to identify the top performers, learn what makes them work, and then apply that knowledge through the site.
This extends to learning about your user (consumer) persona, solving for poor UX, and testing everything. If you observe that something is not performing up to standards for your site, you can set up a multivariate or A/B test to gather more data and decide on improvement.
2. Omnichannel
New analysis has made it clear – Omnichannel is here to stay for B2B sales. McKinsey describes Omnichannel as “the new normal in a year that has been anything but!” Their recent study revealed that the COVID-19 disaster has already cemented omnichannel interactions as the prime pathway for B2B sales.
While the in-person interactions are resuming post-pandemic, B2B buyers have made it clear that they prefer a cross-channel mix, opting for remote, in-person, and digital self-service interactions in equal measure.
Two in three B2B buyers still say that they prefer digital self-service or remote human interactions. This has increased the prominence and importance of traditional but updated forms of communication with buyers for lead generation, nurturing, and building long-lasting relationships.
B2B firms are now hiring professionals such as SalesHive to promptly increase sales through outbound lead generation through LinkedIn outreach, email prospecting, and cold calling instead of hiring and training expensive internal SDR teams.
B2B firms now realize that buyers today are digitally-savvy omnichannel connoisseurs with high expectations. It means that traditional B2B sales cycles are shifting – from one base, on-time consuming face-to-face interactions with sales reps to a modernized, expedient process with consumer-grade UX that stretches across online and offline channels.
3. Neuromarketing
As a catchphrase, ‘neuromarketing’ keeps on encroaching the marketing circles. Its initial application has been for B2C products, used to address how the brain reacts when it sees specific packaging, TV ads, or social media posts. Today, this concept is increasingly becoming the basis for some B2B marketing strategies.
Neuromarketing loosely describes assessing psychological and neural signals in marketing by obtaining insights into buyers’ motives, judgments, and choices. This, in turn, allows marketers to creatively contrive pricing, product improvement, advertisement, and other shopping areas.
While B2Bs don’t always allow for impulse buying, buyers still have impulse reactions to solutions marketing messages. This is done through eye-tracking and electrodermal response measures, functional magnetic resonance imaging; magnetoencephalography (MEG); and electroencephalography (EGC).
The deeper understanding and empathy for buyers gained through such techniques allows you to predict their behaviour more accurately and deliver the best possible customer experiences. Through neuromarketing insights, B2Bs get concrete handles for the type of word to use, UI and UX structure, sentence structure, and channel choices to increase the effect.
4. Hub & Spoke Content Marketing
This is another B2B marketing trend taking shape today and promises to stay a little longer. The continued recognition of content marketing is saturating the Web, forcing search engines (most particularly Google) to look for firms that are niche experts.
Exploiting the Hub & Spoke Content Marketing Model allows you to have more qualified traffic, higher search engine rankings, and better lead-to-MQL conversion rates. This model consists of the main page (the hub) with a section that addresses each sub-section. The spoke involves the sub-sections that dive in-depth into each sub-section.
From a keyword outlook, you can think of the ‘hub’ as the high-volume targeted keywords, while ‘spoke’ as a long train, lower volume, and supporting keywords.
The hub and spoke strategy are effective in increasing traffic. It also provides informative content to readers, which can help improve your conversion rate.
5. Account-based Marketing (ABM)
Although there have been very vocal advocates of ABM for several years, it’s only recently that this trend has gained momentum for B2Bs. Previous research by SmartInsights suggests that APB has become a top priority for B2B marketers (46%), compared to AI (38%), influencer marketing (38%), and video (41%).
This marketing technique allows marketing and sales teams to work in unison to identify and target accounts for specific marketing efforts. This is essential to adding personalization to your marketing efforts, allowing you to target demographics within your own prospects.
