Top 10 Most Sizzling B2B Marketing Trends in 2021
The B2B marketing trends flourishes by capturing the interests of the buyer personas based on their past buying preferences & researching habits, their demographic, firmographic, technographic & psychographic data.
Modern B2B marketing trends must involve to hyper-target the prospects through several marketing campaigns & eventually, convert these potential buyers into their actual customers to accomplish their ultimate bottom-line goals such as an optimized Return on Investment (ROI), optimized users’ experiences & optimized sales revenue. The vivacious part of the business is that the research methodologies of the potential buyers change frequently & so does their interest.
The environment of B2B marketing strategy has changed considerably in the post-pandemic world. The year 2021 was a sort of pre-telecast of every apocalypse movie for businesspeople. The world has seen some common emerging business trends. Organizations across the globe are taking radical steps to refine and optimize their digital marketing tactics and personalization and empathy have become more important than ever before.
The use of MarTech tools and intent data have emerged amongst the most sizzling B2B marketing trends for marketers in 2021. Buyer data incorporates what the research prospects are conducting online. Sales and marketing teams must use a data-driven approach to catapult their digital marketing strategy to optimize their campaigns and to optimize the conversions and revenue.
Buyer intent data is collected through IP addresses and browser cookies and is primarily classified into first and third-party data. Also, as a result of the post-pandemic disruption the virtual events have picked up.
John Jantsch, Marketing Consultant, Speaker & Author quoted the importance of improved personalization as follows:
“Personalization happens when a marketer or salesperson can take a piece of content and make it more useful for a specific prospect or customer.”
A detailed buyer persona is essential for helping marketers identify ways to use targeting in digital marketing & drill down into a more specific niche market while still taking care of the privacy policy of the individual users to ensure that their personal data is safe from any kind of breach.
The B2B marketers constantly endeavor to keep abreast with the changing dynamics of the industry, as missing out on any of the latest trends may pose a threat to the marketers – to be left behind their counterparts from the industry. Following the keywords which are being repetitively researched by the prospects, the marketers can architect their content strategies.
Let’s delve into some of the hottest marketing trends within B2B dominion which help the marketers with client acquisition, engagement, conversion & retention.
1. Serving Personalized Pieces of Content
Gone are the days, when sending personalized content or email to the potential buyer was merely defined by addressing the customer by his/her right name to optimize the customer experience indexes.
Brandi Smith, VP of Demand Generation Marketing at Uberflip, stated that in the era of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), the marketers must serve hyper-personalized pieces of content to the potential buyers, to engross their attention, resolve their queries & generate greater revenues from their marketing endeavors.
Furthermore, she also advocated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) techniques to narrow down the interests of the buyer persona, so that they can be delivered with the hyper-personalized pieces of content resonating with their pain points; without the violation their personal securities or making them feel vulnerable about the processing of their data.
2. Cutting down The Clutter
According to Nissar Ahmed, senior director of Demand Generation at Atomic Research, helping the users overcome the noise of the Internet of things (IoT) lies at the heart of directing them to the conversions.
He emphasized leveraging data from buyers’ journeys to serve users with hyper-personalized pieces of content. He supports the segmentation of buyers based on their demographic, firmographic & ‘fit data’ to better analyze each cluster to tap into their buying preferences & queries, & accordingly, deliver them with hyper-personalized pieces of content. That using marketing automation tools helps to deliver hyper-personalized information to each of the potential buyers. De-cluttered piece of content features higher on the rankings by any search engine.
3. Email Marketing is Here to Stay
Integrating email marketing campaigns with an impactful content marketing
strategy, according to Ahmed, lays the foundation for the optimization of sales conversions for B2B companies.
Email marketing not only fetches audiences through several referral channels but also helps to build audience bases, through both the established & proven marketing channels.
4. Content Marketing has Evolved
Gaurav Harode, founder and CEO of Enablix believes that content has evolved & has become more interactive than ever before.
A well-defined & properly executed content strategy, customized to help the potential users through each stage of their buying cycles, helps to attract a large number of leads & also, in turn, helps to boost the Return on Investment (ROI) for the businesses.
The realm of content marketing has been shackled upside down in the post-pandemic era. Marketers have tweaked their digital strategies to keep pace with the disruptions of the post-COVID world around them. Not only the approach of the content marketers needs to be agile but they also must make the optimum use of the resources around them to gain the traction that they deserve.
The post-pandemic era has witnessed a rise in the use of video marketing. According to Wyzowl, 96% of customers have optimized their video intake since the past year.
According to a recent CoStar report, more than 40 major retailers declared bankruptcy last year, and 11,000 stores announced they are shutting down.
The last year of the pandemic has permanently altered the habits of many Americans who have grown accustomed to the ease of online shopping.
These new changes point out the evolution of the new normal.
5. Promoting Cross-Functioning between Content & other Marketing Strategies
Ahamed emphasizes the significance of content for the success of inbound campaigns.
He stated that content is now no longer the sloppy thing it once was. With the integration of the content teams & the AI, it is now easier than ever to work towards a personalized content strategy for the users, at each stage of their respective buying cycles.
Moreover, cross-functionality between brands’ marketing efforts & sales activities helps in the scrutiny of content strategies.
Incorporating content with the intent data of the audience is in turn, very helpful to clench the interests of the potential buyers, by delivering them exactly what they have been looking for.
6. Artificial Intelligence is No More a Mystical Concept
Ahmed believes that 2021 will be a year of realization for the small, mid-sized & large-scale enterprises alike that AI is here to complement the human roles in the businesses & not to replace them. AI, in fact, according to many surveys conducted globally, has been projected to create more jobs than it might adversely impact.
Moreover, AI helps businesses flourish by helping them with new insights from the analysis of their own & third-party data, as well as from the analysis of the data from the databases of their potential clients.
7. Chatbots are Getting Popular
Smith thinks that chatbots will increase their presence in 2021.
35% of the customers would interact with at least one bot to resolve their problems.
Bots can help potential buyers with directing a website visitor to a particular product type, color & size.
As more & more businesses will be using chatbots, we will witness more ways of leveraging bots, as well as, will be in a better position to measure their importance in targeting & directing a buyer persona to conversion.
8. MarTech Tools Leveraging the Power of Intent Data
The use of modern marketing tools allows marketers to harness the power of intent data that the human eye can’t see. Intent data has hidden powers that in the due course of time have become an integral part of the marketer’s marketing and sales narratives. Data creates context, marketing, and value that can be sued to run PPC advertising campaigns and to generate metrics that can be measured against the monthly, quarterly, and annual goal of the marketers.
The modern MarTech tools analyze data and can break data down to truly take advantage of the vast array of customer insights offered, and can analyze the data and turn it into actionable insights.
9. Brand Bonding Experience Leading to Strong Brand Performance
Putting customers first has become the most critical aspect for marketers to focus on to ensure customer success. According to a post by Mediapost.com, 87% of the customers state that they stay loyal to a few brands.
This clearly signifies that customer success ensures customer loyalty in the long run and most of the clients have chosen at least a few brands to be their favorite ones. However, we’re witnessing massive growth opportunities in improving customer service and elevating their levels of the customer service indexes.
10. Hiring for New Skills As Well As Upskilling
The post-pandemic era has given rise to multiple new skills, the most critical among them remain a compassionate and empathetic approach to the target audience groups across omnichannel and an innate capability to capture, analyze and collate the data points reflecting on the motivations and the problem areas of the target audience groups.
According to Deloitte, 41% of executives said that building workforce capabilities through upskilling, reskilling, and mobility are amongst the most important or second most important factors for contributing to a more resilient workforce post-pandemic.
This includes hiring staff with a high empathetic quotient as well as with a high intelligence quotient. This way the brands can adjust to the evolving expectations of the customers in the post-pandemic era.
Another approach to Human Capital Management (HCM) in the post-pandemic era involves making all the staff members tech-savvy and exposed to new approaches of digitization to enhance the customers’ experiences. The cross-functional pieces of training can be assigned to the employees confined only to the conventional tech stack in the pre-pandemic era. Upskilling the existing employees also ensures long-term employee retention and contributes to the elevated revenue levels for the brands.
The Importance of Mapping Trends
The B2B industry is growing exponentially & has been more dynamic than ever. To acquire new customers as well as for retaining existing customers, the B2B marketers must manage to reach their customers at the right time & deliver them the most significant solutions to the problems they are researching.
To build a symbiotic relationship with the potential buyers & help the customers with unique solutions, the marketers must keep themselves abreast of the latest trends in the B2B dominion.
Wrapping it up
The trends in the market are evolving & changing with the researching behavior of the buyer persona & with the update in the algorithms of the search engines & social media platforms. Serving the customers with personalized solutions to their problems isn’t difficult when the marketers have an understanding of which trends work the best for the industry, which of them are perennial, which ones are seasonal & how they keep on evolving with time.
We, at Valasys Media, help our customers with a wide array of personalized B2B services which have been specifically designed to help them through their core bottom-line endeavors, such as, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), optimization of sales revenue & optimized users’ experiences.
Availing of our services such as lead generation, account-based marketing, content syndication, business intelligence, content syndication & appointment setting services, helps our clients with the furtherance of perennially healthy sales pipelines. For more details on our services, feel free to contact us.