Traditionally, B2B companies, unlike B2C companies, have always operated with small budgets. Within the general practice of allocating 2-5% of gross revenues, a large portion of marketing budgets is generally spent on ads.
This move has a serious opportunity cost; if Warc's findings are anything to go by, advertising is expected to take a hit, dropping from 8.3% in 2022 to just 2.6% in 2023.
This means, for marketing teams around the world, that winter has arrived, either because they have to weather the seasonal change in customer behavior in the run-up to a new year, or because they have to prepare for smaller advertising budgets in 2023 after a year of economic uncertainty.
For B2B marketers facing reduced budgets, aligning their operations with changes in B2B consumer behavior to create a customized and effective marketing plan may be the best option for every euro.
However, even for B2B companies with a large enough marketing budget, today's hyper-competitive business landscape leaves them in need of additional headroom to outpace the competition and win with customers.
In other words, it's time to adjust your marketing plan according to recent research and the freshest marketing trends. This publication is all you need to get up to speed.
Here's all the information on new marketing trends: what to expect, where to take a step back, and where to channel marketing efforts and spend in 2023. You'll also learn about the dominant trends in the market, how to stay on track and how to leverage them for ROI. Let's get down to business!
What are the next new marketing trends?
Let's take a look at the 2022 timeline. Until COVID-19 highlighted the need for digital transformation, the adoption of digital technology across all business operations had only been adopted by 15% of B2B companies.
The new buzzword is "digital optimization": the use of digital technology to improve current systems and procedures, a large part of which finds its way into marketing.
With digital optimization now front and center in marketing operations, the headache for most teams is what percentage of their revenue to allocate to marketing.
Forrester's 2022 B2B Marketing Survey, which showcases the opinions of marketing leaders (1060+), shares some interesting insights. Just over half (51%) of companies that grew annual revenue by more than 20% in 2021 invested between 6.1% and 9% in marketing.
On the other hand, only one-third of the companies that declined invested an amount within that range. Your company's marketing manager probably understands that they need to justify their budget requirements, so they also need to identify where high-growth B2B companies are investing marketing dollars.
The same Forrester survey reveals that high-growth companies invest in marketing strategies that:
Cater to changing buyer behavior;
Condense the essence of brands to position companies as goal-oriented businesses;
Leverage customer engagement after the sale.
Without further ado, here are the 8 new marketing trends that deserve a place in your 2023 plan:
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is all the rage these days and is likely to remain so in the new year, as consumers rely on recommendations from people they identify with and admire. Even more so when these influencers are known for their honest reviews of promotional packages received or beta tested.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark report, shows that influencer marketing can achieve impressive results, with an average value of $5.20 for every dollar spent. This lends credence to the argument that people are more attracted to act on the recommendation of their trusted influencers.
In addition, working with influencers allows for targeted and personalized marketing, as they have created an engaged audience that companies can target, rather than having a generic message for a broad audience.
What's better? It's also proven to be a more cost-effective option, since companies can use micro-influencers with smaller but highly engaged followings, rather than spending large amounts on celebrity sponsorships.
Overall, influencer marketing offers many benefits for businesses, so you shouldn't overlook it as part of your marketing plan.
2. Personalized customer experience and fast response
Modern buyers want immediate responses and communications tailored to them; much of the 2022 B2B marketing plan met this requirement. Given the pace of technological innovation over the years, more and more B2B customers are choosing to buy online. As a result, customers will likewise demand faster and more personalized service.
To meet these needs, B2B companies must leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences and use communication channels such as email, chat and social media for quick responses. They can also empower customer service teams to respond quickly to queries and concerns.
This involves active social listening and joining customer conversations on social networks or communicating updates, products and initiatives via email newsletters. There is no personalization without data.
Digital marketing tools like Efficy Marketing can be invaluable by making the most of the available data needed to foster lasting customer relationships.
With Efficy Marketing, you can implement the segmentation tool to delineate audiences into different sets based on their demographics, psychographics, preferences and behavior. This way you can deliver relevant and personalized content when executing your marketing campaigns.
3. B2B marketing based on video, but powered by AI
522productions launched a product acquisition study, which found that approximately 70% of B2B buyers watch a brand's videos before making a conversion. Video's massive engagement makes it an increasingly attractive industry marketing trend.
Here's why: not only is it more consumable on the go, but it's an effective medium for telling highly visual stories or explaining products - a goldmine for teams looking to increase user adoption and conversion rates.
Using video, brands can leverage webinars and virtual events to promote engagement, allowing customers to participate in facility tours, showcase thought leadership and expertise through instructional videos and explainer videos, and facilitate effective customer onboarding by introducing your team and highlighting company values.
The emergence of the latest digital marketing tools and technology makes video marketing an imaginative proposition for B2B marketers looking to delight buyers with exceptional experiences. Take augmented reality, for example. It's a useful tool for marketers looking to give buyers a real-time experience of their product.
It can also serve as a key differentiator for marketers to increase conversion rates and maintain customer loyalty.
4. The more the merrier: go omnichannel
A new marketing trend that will continue to gain traction in 2023.
B2B marketers are succeeding with omnichannel marketing by leveraging multiple platforms to acquire new customers and data analytics from information that is a product of their interaction with those customers.
B2B customers require a combination of traditional sales channels (such as phone calls and video calls) and self-service (e.g., e-commerce and digital portals). Omnichannel marketing in B2B allows marketers to gain deeper insight into customer behavior, which means better targeting and a better understanding of attribution, leading to an inevitable increase in conversion rates.
An Adroll survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C marketers assessed the impact of omnichannel on their marketing operations. The survey found that 56% of marketers can understand which side of their marketing deserves more spend, and it also helps 44% of marketers justify their budget. With omni-channel marketing, 43% of marketers can analyze how best to optimize the performance of their campaigns.
In 2023, B2B companies that give power and freedom back to prospects in their interactions will score high, as customer expectations are driving the omnichannel marketing trend.
The rise of social media sites and technology as a marketing/sales channel will enable B2B companies to create unified campaigns and consistent brand experiences across all channels.
This will mean not only conversion, but also social listening. That is, taking stock of reviews and feedback on software to improve products. Marketers will also need to optimize content for omnichannel at different stages of the buying process, such as the instructional phases of each stage of the funnel.
5. Prioritize customer engagement after the sale.
For B2B companies in 2023, retaining customers to create an army of brand advocates requires a system that supports customer engagement after the sale.
High-growth companies understand this, which explains why marketing decision makers want to increase customer lifecycle and engagement, as satisfied customers are likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your company and provide valuable feedback for improvement.
Maintaining strong relationships with existing customers can help mitigate the high cost of acquiring new ones. Remember, the key here is to increase the value of post-sale engagement programs by sharing customer experiences to inspire customer support.
6. Interactive content
2022 saw an unprecedented increase in the adoption of marketing automation tools to optimize marketing operations. Emerging technologies can have a significant impact on your marketing results, especially in the area of interactive content.
We have already seen chatbots play a crucial role in facilitating customer interaction in recent years. Now, with machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence at the forefront, chatbots are ready to be deployed alongside other forms of innovation for interactive content instead of static content.
Now, more than ever, marketers know the benefits of two-way experiences that inspire engagement with content such as quizzes, contests, surveys, polls, polls, assessments, interactive maps and videos, games and interactive infographics.
7. B2B self-service portals
As in B2C, B2B buyers are also digitally inclined and expect this reality to be reflected in their professional buying interaction with brands.
Imagine having to call a sales agent on a weekly basis to buy a regular consumable when you could simply have a B2B self-service portal where you can seamlessly subscribe to these products. In these circumstances, you will surely become another statistic in their customer churn rate.
Marketers can refine on-demand self-service portals to help B2B customers locate relevant information for their inquiry (such as other services or products) by creating self-service user portals and knowledge bases to ease the burden on sales staff.
Some widely adopted self-service community portals include FAQs, "getting started" guides, help documentation, "how-to" videos, online communities, "search" function to find answers quickly, ticketing service, user manuals, etc.
Self-service portals generally anticipate where and how customers will need support. They also minimize your operational overhead if you leverage customer service best practices.
Most B2B customers are happy to resolve product or service issues on their own (perhaps with a little help from you) and that can only be a good thing for B2B marketers in 2023.
8. B2B SEO Reoptimization
Converting a B2B customer is easier after showing respect for their weaknesses. To put it in SEO terms: have a solution-oriented, answer-driven search engine optimization (SEO).
This means creating content that answers queries without barriers; for example, most B2B customers are not patient enough to click on a link to find that content of yours that could answer their questions.
In futuristic terms, regular SEO updates make it a timeless B2B digital marketing tool. The injection of AI into SEO makes it something of a mixed bag for marketers. While SEO-optimized content, meta titles and link building still have their influence on ranking results, Google's latest waves of algorithms, namely Google RankBrain, have changed the landscape of Google rankings.
On the one hand, Google is now focusing on the context of search queries, putting the focus on providing only the best information, regardless of whether that content lacks keywords. In that way, the essence of the content (quality, i.e., how useful, up-to-date and relevant the content is to a user's search) takes precedence over form (keywords, meta titles and other known SERP ranking elements).
There are also other algorithms such as bidirectional encoder representations of transformers (BERT), which similarly focus on search and user intent. The periodic deployment of self-learning algorithms makes SEO a rather risky business.
One way to beat Google at its game is to focus on re-optimizing existing content and producing fresh content, leveraging an optimization strategy with updated SERP trends.
Anyway, what is the future of marketing?
The future of marketing is called "data." With personalized experiences at the core of B2B customer expectations, leveraging data to perform customer diagnostics and monitor customer behavior to iterate better buying cycles will prove to be a survival skill.
Put another way: B2B companies must leverage data proactively, not reactively, to ensure buyer satisfaction.
For B2B in 2023, positioning your business for change should involve aligning your internal team and your external customer experience to efficiently build trust. CRM marketing is a sure way to achieve this.
As a result, technology and data-driven marketing will be more personalized, happen in real time and rely heavily on data. With these elements at the heart of the B2B marketing plan, a B2B marketer can confidently present their plan and budget to management.
As your organization prepares for 2023, Efficy Marketing is ready to help you drive your B2B marketing using a complete and extensive set of digital marketing tools and functionality. Want to find out how? Book a Demo now and discover our futuristic set of tools and features to shorten your sales cycle and improve your results.
This move has a serious opportunity cost; if Warc's findings are anything to go by, advertising is expected to take a hit, dropping from 8.3% in 2022 to just 2.6% in 2023.
This means, for marketing teams around the world, that winter has arrived, either because they have to weather the seasonal change in customer behavior in the run-up to a new year, or because they have to prepare for smaller advertising budgets in 2023 after a year of economic uncertainty.
For B2B marketers facing reduced budgets, aligning their operations with changes in B2B consumer behavior to create a customized and effective marketing plan may be the best option for every euro.
However, even for B2B companies with a large enough marketing budget, today's hyper-competitive business landscape leaves them in need of additional headroom to outpace the competition and win with customers.
In other words, it's time to adjust your marketing plan according to recent research and the freshest marketing trends. This publication is all you need to get up to speed.
Here's all the information on new marketing trends: what to expect, where to take a step back, and where to channel marketing efforts and spend in 2023. You'll also learn about the dominant trends in the market, how to stay on track and how to leverage them for ROI. Let's get down to business!
What are the next new marketing trends?
Let's take a look at the 2022 timeline. Until COVID-19 highlighted the need for digital transformation, the adoption of digital technology across all business operations had only been adopted by 15% of B2B companies.
The new buzzword is "digital optimization": the use of digital technology to improve current systems and procedures, a large part of which finds its way into marketing.
With digital optimization now front and center in marketing operations, the headache for most teams is what percentage of their revenue to allocate to marketing.
Forrester's 2022 B2B Marketing Survey, which showcases the opinions of marketing leaders (1060+), shares some interesting insights. Just over half (51%) of companies that grew annual revenue by more than 20% in 2021 invested between 6.1% and 9% in marketing.
On the other hand, only one-third of the companies that declined invested an amount within that range. Your company's marketing manager probably understands that they need to justify their budget requirements, so they also need to identify where high-growth B2B companies are investing marketing dollars.
The same Forrester survey reveals that high-growth companies invest in marketing strategies that:
Cater to changing buyer behavior;
Condense the essence of brands to position companies as goal-oriented businesses;
Leverage customer engagement after the sale.
Without further ado, here are the 8 new marketing trends that deserve a place in your 2023 plan:
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is all the rage these days and is likely to remain so in the new year, as consumers rely on recommendations from people they identify with and admire. Even more so when these influencers are known for their honest reviews of promotional packages received or beta tested.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark report, shows that influencer marketing can achieve impressive results, with an average value of $5.20 for every dollar spent. This lends credence to the argument that people are more attracted to act on the recommendation of their trusted influencers.
In addition, working with influencers allows for targeted and personalized marketing, as they have created an engaged audience that companies can target, rather than having a generic message for a broad audience.
What's better? It's also proven to be a more cost-effective option, since companies can use micro-influencers with smaller but highly engaged followings, rather than spending large amounts on celebrity sponsorships.
Overall, influencer marketing offers many benefits for businesses, so you shouldn't overlook it as part of your marketing plan.
2. Personalized customer experience and fast response
Modern buyers want immediate responses and communications tailored to them; much of the 2022 B2B marketing plan met this requirement. Given the pace of technological innovation over the years, more and more B2B customers are choosing to buy online. As a result, customers will likewise demand faster and more personalized service.
To meet these needs, B2B companies must leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences and use communication channels such as email, chat and social media for quick responses. They can also empower customer service teams to respond quickly to queries and concerns.
This involves active social listening and joining customer conversations on social networks or communicating updates, products and initiatives via email newsletters. There is no personalization without data.
Digital marketing tools like Efficy Marketing can be invaluable by making the most of the available data needed to foster lasting customer relationships.
With Efficy Marketing, you can implement the segmentation tool to delineate audiences into different sets based on their demographics, psychographics, preferences and behavior. This way you can deliver relevant and personalized content when executing your marketing campaigns.
3. B2B marketing based on video, but powered by AI
522productions launched a product acquisition study, which found that approximately 70% of B2B buyers watch a brand's videos before making a conversion. Video's massive engagement makes it an increasingly attractive industry marketing trend.
Here's why: not only is it more consumable on the go, but it's an effective medium for telling highly visual stories or explaining products - a goldmine for teams looking to increase user adoption and conversion rates.
Using video, brands can leverage webinars and virtual events to promote engagement, allowing customers to participate in facility tours, showcase thought leadership and expertise through instructional videos and explainer videos, and facilitate effective customer onboarding by introducing your team and highlighting company values.
The emergence of the latest digital marketing tools and technology makes video marketing an imaginative proposition for B2B marketers looking to delight buyers with exceptional experiences. Take augmented reality, for example. It's a useful tool for marketers looking to give buyers a real-time experience of their product.
It can also serve as a key differentiator for marketers to increase conversion rates and maintain customer loyalty.
4. The more the merrier: go omnichannel
A new marketing trend that will continue to gain traction in 2023.
B2B marketers are succeeding with omnichannel marketing by leveraging multiple platforms to acquire new customers and data analytics from information that is a product of their interaction with those customers.
B2B customers require a combination of traditional sales channels (such as phone calls and video calls) and self-service (e.g., e-commerce and digital portals). Omnichannel marketing in B2B allows marketers to gain deeper insight into customer behavior, which means better targeting and a better understanding of attribution, leading to an inevitable increase in conversion rates.
An Adroll survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C marketers assessed the impact of omnichannel on their marketing operations. The survey found that 56% of marketers can understand which side of their marketing deserves more spend, and it also helps 44% of marketers justify their budget. With omni-channel marketing, 43% of marketers can analyze how best to optimize the performance of their campaigns.
In 2023, B2B companies that give power and freedom back to prospects in their interactions will score high, as customer expectations are driving the omnichannel marketing trend.
The rise of social media sites and technology as a marketing/sales channel will enable B2B companies to create unified campaigns and consistent brand experiences across all channels.
This will mean not only conversion, but also social listening. That is, taking stock of reviews and feedback on software to improve products. Marketers will also need to optimize content for omnichannel at different stages of the buying process, such as the instructional phases of each stage of the funnel.
5. Prioritize customer engagement after the sale.
For B2B companies in 2023, retaining customers to create an army of brand advocates requires a system that supports customer engagement after the sale.
High-growth companies understand this, which explains why marketing decision makers want to increase customer lifecycle and engagement, as satisfied customers are likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your company and provide valuable feedback for improvement.
Maintaining strong relationships with existing customers can help mitigate the high cost of acquiring new ones. Remember, the key here is to increase the value of post-sale engagement programs by sharing customer experiences to inspire customer support.
6. Interactive content
2022 saw an unprecedented increase in the adoption of marketing automation tools to optimize marketing operations. Emerging technologies can have a significant impact on your marketing results, especially in the area of interactive content.
We have already seen chatbots play a crucial role in facilitating customer interaction in recent years. Now, with machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence at the forefront, chatbots are ready to be deployed alongside other forms of innovation for interactive content instead of static content.
Now, more than ever, marketers know the benefits of two-way experiences that inspire engagement with content such as quizzes, contests, surveys, polls, polls, assessments, interactive maps and videos, games and interactive infographics.
7. B2B self-service portals
As in B2C, B2B buyers are also digitally inclined and expect this reality to be reflected in their professional buying interaction with brands.
Imagine having to call a sales agent on a weekly basis to buy a regular consumable when you could simply have a B2B self-service portal where you can seamlessly subscribe to these products. In these circumstances, you will surely become another statistic in their customer churn rate.
Marketers can refine on-demand self-service portals to help B2B customers locate relevant information for their inquiry (such as other services or products) by creating self-service user portals and knowledge bases to ease the burden on sales staff.
Some widely adopted self-service community portals include FAQs, "getting started" guides, help documentation, "how-to" videos, online communities, "search" function to find answers quickly, ticketing service, user manuals, etc.
Self-service portals generally anticipate where and how customers will need support. They also minimize your operational overhead if you leverage customer service best practices.
Most B2B customers are happy to resolve product or service issues on their own (perhaps with a little help from you) and that can only be a good thing for B2B marketers in 2023.
8. B2B SEO Reoptimization
Converting a B2B customer is easier after showing respect for their weaknesses. To put it in SEO terms: have a solution-oriented, answer-driven search engine optimization (SEO).
This means creating content that answers queries without barriers; for example, most B2B customers are not patient enough to click on a link to find that content of yours that could answer their questions.
In futuristic terms, regular SEO updates make it a timeless B2B digital marketing tool. The injection of AI into SEO makes it something of a mixed bag for marketers. While SEO-optimized content, meta titles and link building still have their influence on ranking results, Google's latest waves of algorithms, namely Google RankBrain, have changed the landscape of Google rankings.
On the one hand, Google is now focusing on the context of search queries, putting the focus on providing only the best information, regardless of whether that content lacks keywords. In that way, the essence of the content (quality, i.e., how useful, up-to-date and relevant the content is to a user's search) takes precedence over form (keywords, meta titles and other known SERP ranking elements).
There are also other algorithms such as bidirectional encoder representations of transformers (BERT), which similarly focus on search and user intent. The periodic deployment of self-learning algorithms makes SEO a rather risky business.
One way to beat Google at its game is to focus on re-optimizing existing content and producing fresh content, leveraging an optimization strategy with updated SERP trends.
Anyway, what is the future of marketing?
The future of marketing is called "data." With personalized experiences at the core of B2B customer expectations, leveraging data to perform customer diagnostics and monitor customer behavior to iterate better buying cycles will prove to be a survival skill.
Put another way: B2B companies must leverage data proactively, not reactively, to ensure buyer satisfaction.
For B2B in 2023, positioning your business for change should involve aligning your internal team and your external customer experience to efficiently build trust. CRM marketing is a sure way to achieve this.
As a result, technology and data-driven marketing will be more personalized, happen in real time and rely heavily on data. With these elements at the heart of the B2B marketing plan, a B2B marketer can confidently present their plan and budget to management.
As your organization prepares for 2023, Efficy Marketing is ready to help you drive your B2B marketing using a complete and extensive set of digital marketing tools and functionality. Want to find out how? Book a Demo now and discover our futuristic set of tools and features to shorten your sales cycle and improve your results.