B2B marketing has evolved enormously over the past decade as technology has dramatically changed its landscape. Here are three of the biggest B2B marketing trends that you need to be aware of for 2015:
Content Marketing
One of the biggest trends in 2014 and 2015 is that content marketing is starting to become a major focus for B2B businesses. Over the last several years, marketers have found that great content is the key to attracting a greater slice of the B2B pie. Here are some recent stats that show how important content marketing has become:
- 70% of B2B organizations reported that they created more content in 2014 than they did in 2013.
- Developing more engaging content was the top priority for B2B businesses in 2014.
- Over half of B2B businesses have more than one person developing new content, and over 40% of these businesses publish new content more than once per week.
- A quarter of B2B businesses spend over half of their marketing budget to content.
Content is clearly vital to B2B marketing, but it isn’t enough on its own. To be truly effective, it needs to be combined with a terrific customer experience.
Customer Experience
Content marketing is useful for finding an audience and attracting them, but the customer experience is what keeps them coming back for more. A recent survey found that these are the most important aspects of building an exceptional customer experience (in order of most important):
- Strategy. You need to build a long-term plan on staying aligned with your customer’s needs.
- Culture. All teams must be onboard with putting the customer first at all times.
- Technology. The correct tools must be available to your organization and your customers, no matter the cost.
- Skills. Your marketers must have the skills necessary to analyze customer data and provide useful content.
- Data. You must have access to the right customer and marketing data, and be able to leverage it effectively.
People have too much work to do, so you need to
make their experience as efficient as possible!
Effective Targeting
Tossing a general marketing strategy into the vast sea is no longer a viable strategy. People have started to trust traditional advertising less. Technological advances have made it easy to target advertising, making general marketing less relevant than ever. If you want to reach your audience, you need to target precisely.
The key to an effective targeting strategy is picking a niche and figuring out exactly what they want. Your niche needs to be one of your key customer demographics. Ideally, it should be untapped. After that, you need to use data analytics to figure out what their needs and questions are, and create content that answers those questions and fills those needs.
Targeting your marketing should lead to increased effectiveness, even if the reach is smaller. If you’re able to use your content to target this niche effectively as well, you’ll quickly become a leader in your chosen niche.
There’s too many customers to target everybody,
you need to take it one niche at a time!
If you’re having trouble with these trends, or you need help creating strategies and keeping up with the trends of the future, consider us here at Blue Wave Marketing as your marketing consultant. We have over 20 years of marketing experience in an incredible variety of channels. To contact us, all you need to do is visit us at our website or call us at 617-576-3100.
