B2B Marketing Trends & Studies That Every Marketer Should Know

Prologue

The B2B marketing world is dynamic & trends here are subject to very negative sentimental connotation – partially because they are ephemeral & partially because it's very tough for the brands to extract & keep abreast with the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know about in real-time.

The magical & mystical B2B marketing landscape crystal holds that the competition amongst the B2B brands will be fiercer in the year 2020 than it has ever been before.

Marketers need to evolve their B2B marketing strategies as trends, technology & tactics in the b2b world are never stagnant.

According to a prediction by Forrester by the year 2021, 48% of the B2B marketing organizations will be organized to support customers’ journeys. Thus, the year 2020 will see B2B marketers pivot from products to experiences.

Keeping an eye on the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know, helps marketers quantify their endeavors in terms of marketing statistics & assists them to focus on & optimize their SEO, content marketing, social media, video marketing, lead generation, advertising & email marketing endeavors, so that they can connect with their customers & optimize their reach to the target audience to boost conversions.

The following are the major trends in B2B marketing channels, that we have handpicked amongst the myriad of tactics that would be gaining popularity in the B2B marketing world in the year 2020 & beyond:

1. Customer Centricity & Personalization will Remain Undisputed #1:

Forrester has predicted that the year 2020 will witness an accent in the business customers’ relationships; while the business providers will be partially driven by expectations for consistency across all the buying routes and in part by the improving reliance on both marketing & sales to provide the service of timely engagement.

The siloed channels for mainstream marketing will lose essence & in the year 2020 we might expect the marketing world to be dominated by the following trends:

• Sales enablement will improve as more transactions close digitally
• The scope of sales enablement will expand & it will operate more frequently within the marketing organization

• The value prop for B2B customer data platforms (CDPs) will shift from data integration to activation

Keeping at pace with the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know, allows the brands to work towards delivering exemplary customer experiences (CX).

The B2B buyers love the personalization & despise being treated like anyone. The landscape of B2B personalization trends will be more competitive than ever.

In the quest of their tailored solutions to the problems, the B2B buyers seek personalization from email to landing pages and from advertisements to content recommendations.

Learn more: Benefits of Content Personalization for B2B Marketers

2. Intent Data:

Intent data has promising, yet majorly untapped potential in the B2B marketing world.

According to a survey conducted by the Demand Gen Report ABM Benchmark Survey, only 25% of the B2B companies use the intent data & monitoring tools while another 35% of respondents were planning to use Intent Data within the coming 12 months. 

The statistics above clearly signifies that many of the marketers will be using Intent Data shortly. Data is the ultimate currency for tech-savvy marketers to leverage upon. The in-depth use of intent-data was leveraged for businesses in the year 2017.

Intent marketing forms the foundation of sales & marketing, fueling business success. Targeting the right audiences at the right time & during their specific stages in the buying cycles is amongst the foremost benefits of Intent data which congeals intent data amongst the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know.

The trends from intent-data can be combined with B2B marketing topics & B2B personalization trends including the demographic, psychographic, technographic, firmographic & ‘fit-data’ as well as based on psychographic analysis of the audiences on the website, can be used for segmenting & sub-segmenting the market into diverse clusters.

The ability to predict what the buyers are interested in allows the marketers to gear-up for precognitive marketing & opt for a predictive & intelligent content strategy for optimizing users' experiences (UX). This optimizes content & campaigns for a wider reach & optimizes the audiences' experiences.

Intent data can be first-party (tracking the number, engagement & conversions of the visitors) on the website or the third-party intent data (a collection of data from the research done on the external websites.

Learn more: How Intent Data Analysis Helps B2B Companies Boost ROI

3. Podcasts:

According to Statista.com, there are 73 million podcast listeners in the U.S. as of 2018 & the number is expected to rise in the coming years.

The on-demand & digestible audio-storytelling format makes podcasts a stackable piece of content as compared to other media.

Podcasts qualify on the list of B2B Marketing Trends & Studies that Every Marketer Should Know about & provide limitless possibilities for the diversification & evolution of content.

Learn more: 6 Top Marketing Podcasts for B2B Marketers in 2020

4. Agile Marketing:

Next on the list of B2B Marketing Trends & Studies that Every Marketer Should know about is agile marketing.  Agile marketing is often a hybrid technic encompassing Scrum, Kanban & Lean principles that ensure experimentation & validates learning.

Agile teams are efficient, abide by business deadlines without the burnouts & contribute towards quality work - to improve the visibility of team processes & outputs.

Learn more: 13 Ways Agile Content Marketing benefits B2B Enterprises

5. Video Marketing:

According to a HubSpot survey of over 3,000 customers, 56% of the audiences in the age group of 25-34 years & 54% in the age group of 35-44 years want to see more video content from their favorite brands.

Amongst the B2B marketing ideas 2019, that mushroomed, videos were amongst the most hyped ones to play around with.

Search Engine Journal predicts that in the year 2020 video content & visual storytelling will continue to rise.

With the rising popularity of YouTubers, dynamic imagery & Augmented Reality (AR), the popularity of videos is fairly high when it comes to making it to the list of the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know about.

Learn more:  Top Video Marketing Strategies 2019

Wrapping It Up

B2B marketing is all about learning, unlearning & re-learning. There is no steadfast list of B2B marketing Trends & Studies that every marketer should know all the time.

Trends in dynamic B2B marketing topics & sales best practices are often ephemeral, vanish-able & capable of surfacing up like phoenixes from the ashes every now & then.  Keeping abreast of the above list on the B2B marketing trends & studies that every marketer should know about & matching pace with the industrial best practices, even competitively benchmarking the B2B personalization trends & other best tactics helps the marketers in thriving in the marketing world.

The B2B marketing Forbes' forecasts stress that marketers will be more proactive in engaging with the buyers in 2020.

Undoubtedly, when the business ecosphere is highly competitive the trick to optimize sales revenue & other core bottom-lines lies in understanding the present & envisioning and architecting a better future – based on how the present scenario plays, flourishes & sustains in the background.

Valasys Media is a renowned name when it comes to B2B service providers. Our custom-made services include lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services all of which are engineered as per the business requirements of our clients.

Contact us for a wide breadth of B2B technology & marketing solutions.