Keeping up with new developments in technology and the latest ideas and trends in marketing strategy is a key aspect of reaching real success in marketing campaigns and efforts. Many of the recent trends for this year share the common theme of customer-centric focus.  The buyers’ increasing emphasis on intelligence and genuine connection in their chosen brands demands a combination of strategies and tools for B2B marketers to successfully target and meet the needs of their customers. An e-book from Salesforce Pardot, “7 B2B Marketing Strategies You Need To Know About,” describes seven major strategies to employ that can help meet evolving demands using the newest technological tools and trends:

  • Customer-centric marketing. Customer satisfaction is chosen by 35% of B2B marketers as a top measure for their success, in a world where customers control the content and interactions that brands create for them. This technique aims to help them decide on your brand by choosing the proper tools to educate and engage them on what your brand is, and how it can offer a more satisfying experience than a competitor. The goal is to be prepared to meet diverse needs and desires, instead of relying on direct persuasion that buyers don’t need.
  • Account-based marketing (ABM). An older strategy experiencing new viability thanks to technological developments, ABM targets efforts onto entire accounts rather than single contacts through close collaboration between marketing and sales teams. It revolves heavily around sharing customer info with sales teams and utilizing it to carefully personalize the marketing campaign. ABM’s high focus and emphasis on personalization creates a customer-centric strategy that offers stronger connections with the chosen clients.
  • Sales Enablement 2.0. This tactic focuses on bridging any gaps between sales and marketing teams to better enable both to help each other. Make efforts to share marketing content with sales staff, as well as show them how best they can use it, and get feedback about how it is received to help everyone improve at communicating with clients and prospects.
  • Inbound & content marketing. Inbound marketing is a good way to reach buyers who are increasingly educating themselves about brand purchasing decisions. Content including blogs, white papers, and infographics are useful tools that prioritize the customer experience by engaging them to bring them onboard. In this strategy, all created content must add value for the target audience. Find the topics and problems that resonate with them, and focus your content on addressing those things through resource lists, instructions, or stimulating conversation pieces. Putting an emphasis on these things and tailoring your content to appear for the audience’s searches further demonstrates the value provided by your service.
  • Interactive media. This strategy combines content with design to create an engaging client experience. Marketers can use content including demo videos to make complicated information and concepts more accessible to buyers, or create quizzes that then link to related content based on which answers the prospect chose. A key aspect of the interactive media tactic is really emphasizing the social media possibilities by incorporating sharing buttons or ways to encourage buyers to tag friends and acquaintances or repost your content. The goal is to build the customer experience through interactive items that can then expand your audience.
  • Email marketing & lead nurturing. Email remains 40 times more effective for acquiring customers than either Facebook or Twitter, and it is still a very effective way to personalize communicating with clients. But in the digital age, a key change to email marketing is segmenting a list by levels of engagement in addition to job title or company size. By customizing emails to speak directly to groups of prospects or clients at different levels of engagement with your marketing efforts and content, you can engage in “lead nurturing” to effectively move each group further along the ladder of engagement. Tailor your emails to speak directly to the experience each group has had up to that point with the brand content, and you can use your information to show how you understand their needs.
  • Smart marketing. In a digital world one key to marketing success is turning data analytics into data intelligence. New tools and technology can be used to comb through data and find trends and insights into which buyers need what kinds of marketing and sales attention. Data intelligence goes beyond what the raw data shows about buyer engagement and looks at how to engage them next. Using a predictive analytics tool enables marketers to gain new insight into buyers from the same data they already had. The trends discovered using predictive analytics inform marketers not only on the current trends, but on how to predict upcoming ones and then adapt to shifting behavior before it really changes.

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