With advancements in technology and new trends emerging, the world of marketing has undergone a lot of change in the last few years. B2C businesses are now advised to focus on content and social media marketing as it seems target audience will continue to search for products and services online in the future. But what about B2B business? What kind of marketing can we expect to work for them? If you’re running a B2B business, these are the questions you might be interested in. With that said, let’s take a look at what the future holds for B2B marketing.
Everyone will become a marketer
In this day and age, people don’t trust businesses as much as they used to. Even businesses don’t trust other businesses when it comes to marketing. Instead, they prefer to see their product or service in action or hear from someone who used it. The good news is, online reviews still do the trick and will continue to do the same in the future. Therefore, if you want your business to get noticed, now is the perfect time to ask your clients to review your business online. This should make potential customers more likely to buy from you and help your business move forward. If you’re still not convinced, just have in mind that studies have shown that 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as their friends.
The emergence of new metrics
For marketers, it’s extremely important to be able to measure their success and use the data they collect to make the necessary changes in their approach. The same rule applies to B2B businesses and no matter how many channels you rely on, knowing what works and what doesn’t is the key. While there are some set metrics that companies have been relying on for years, it seems like the focus will shift to some new metrics that might help B2B businesses even more. Let’s say you’ve been using cost-per-click metric to measure how successful your marketing efforts are. You should be ready to move onto some more important metrics, for example those that allow you measure the actual contribution of marketing throughout the funnel.
Even more marketing experts
Earlier, we talked about how everyone will become a marketer and help businesses attract new customers. However, this doesn’t mean just anyone can come up with new marketing strategies and ways to attract businesses to your product or service. In the last few years, we got a chance to see more and more people working in the marketing sector and it’s expected that there will be even more of them in the future. Small B2B businesses that can’t come up with the same marketing strategies industry giants can will, therefore, benefit from having more marketing experts they can barter services with. Just take a look at some of the most popular trading brokers and their marketing efforts. There are companies that specialize in offering B2B services for such firms and working with one of them might be exactly what your business needs.
Companies will invest more in marketing
There’s no need to say that marketing is an important part of running a business. Even the smallest companies out there have to invest in business promotion or they won’t be able to survive. Although we usually think of B2C businesses when talking about marketing, B2B businesses continue to recognize the need for marketing. With that said, it’s anticipated that B2B companies will start to invest even more in business promotion in the future. The fact that 40 percent of B2B businesses have said that they’ll increase their marketing budget for 2019 serves as evidence of this. Not only that there’s an increased need for marketing but with new marketing channels and trends being introduced, B2B businesses will have plenty of reasons to invest in business promotion.
The arrival of artificial intelligence
Running a B2B business isn’t easy. Although marketing is an extremely important part of it, your core operations include building a good product or service and fulfilling needs of your clients. This means you probably don’t have enough time to spend on coming up with new marketing strategies for your business and executing them. Luckily, there’s technology that can help. While invoicing software can help with more important with accounting, there’s artificial intelligence that can assist you with marketing. For instance, you can now rely on artificial intelligence to nurture new prospects using timely and relevant emails. On top of this, they can ensure each of your clients gets a personalized experience even before they talk to one of your staff members. These technologies will improve even more in the future and be able to offer even more assistance than they offer right now.
Final thoughts
B2B marketing continues to grow and there’s no doubt will see it undergo even more change in the next few years. Have the things covered in this post in mind if you want to ensure you and your B2B business are ready for all of the changes we’re going to witness.
