Staying on top of B2B marketing trends is essential for any successful brand or company today. Yet, it seems that just when you get going with your current strategies, something changes.
What follows depends on your approach. Do you risk missing out, choose to scramble to make those changes, or build upon or adapt to what you already have in place?
As we move further into 2024, certain trends are gaining momentum, changing the way you need to think about your digital marketing strategy.
Find ways to incorporate and embrace the 2024 trends we identify below so that your brand or company can continue to be competitive, relevant, and successful this year and beyond.
What you don’t want is to get left behind.
“Marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 25 years in the B2B space,” says Karen Walker, Intel’s CMO in Marketing Week.
Now is the time, then, to find ways to incorporate and embrace the 2024 trends we identify below so that your brand or company can continue to be competitive, relevant, and successful this year and beyond.
Setting the Stage for B2B Marketing in 2024
Before jumping into drastic changes, however, it is important to set the stage for your B2B marketing in 2024. First, you don’t have to throw out your entire current B2B marketing strategy. Instead, you need to review and adapt to the realities presenting themselves in 2024.
The rise of AI tools and the use of chatbots dominated the trends for 2023. These are not going away, but finding ways to use them more efficiently may be necessary.
According to Ann Handley, the chief content officer with MarketingProfs, “most of us are just getting going with generative AI. That means there is a clear and rich opportunity to lead from where you sit.”
2024 will continue to present technological advancements and changing customer expectations. Measuring your marketing ROI may become challenging and require a different mindset to ensure you are on the right path. In other words, you’ll need to stay open to the latest B2B trends in marketing and find ways to make them work for you.
Now, let’s look at five of the B2B marketing trends to consider for 2024.
The Rise of Personalization: Tailoring Experiences in B2B
No longer is personalization a B2C marketing strategy only. It began seeping into the B2B market in late 2023 and continues to grow in importance.
As such, this rise of personalization in the B2B world has created a need for businesses to focus on offering tailored, relevant content and experiences that address the unique preferences and needs of each customer.
That is to say, instead of lumping businesses together, look at each one individually. Find ways to make them feel recognized and important to you.
Personalized messages, according to Arthur Gehring with Brainshark, “provide value to both the business and the user.”
That is, they feel seen and heard, and you gain information and loyalty.
A few ways to accomplish this is to find ways to provide any of the following:
- Personalized recommendations
- Personalized emails
- Personalized product offerings
- Personalized content tailored to their particular needs
By doing so, you can enhance engagement and boost conversion.
Content Marketing Evolution: From Information to engagement
Content marketing continues to be at the forefront of any B2B marketing strategy, and calculating its ROI will remain an essential task. However, it is the type of content that will continue to evolve. The newest trend is that high-quality content is transitioning from being just a source of information to inspiring active engagement.
While evergreen content will be a mainstay for years to come, engaging with your audience needs to go beyond social shares and comments. The next logical step is to incorporate interactive content into your digital marketing strategy.
For example, interactive content includes such elements as the following:
- Quizzes, which educate an audience about a product or service
- Polls, allowing for the gathering of feedback
- Surveys, to compile data to help drive decisions
With technological advancement, interactive content can now be shared on various platforms, including websites, emails, social media, and even mobile apps. In turn, this approach is revising everything from B2B advertising strategies to email newsletters.
Over half of all B2B marketing teams are investing more money than ever in content creation. A major portion of those budgets is zeroing in on how to stand out and engage potential customers actively. As such, engagement is one of those B2B content marketing trends you don’t want to ignore.
Account-Based Marketing: Focusing on High-Value Targets
While not new to the B2B marketing realm, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is seeing a noticeable uptick in 2024. This increasing momentum is due to the recognition by B2B companies that the ABM approach is highly effective at targeting particular groups.
Instead of continuing to take a broad approach utilizing more generalized strategies, B2B companies are successfully focusing on creating more tailored experiences for their high-value accounts. This ABM approach is benefiting from the variety of improved options available in account-based marketing software today.
Sustainability and Social Responsibility: Aligning Values with Strategy
An increasing awareness of how important it is to protect the environment and share in the responsibility for the planet as a whole is driving a new approach to marketing in the B2B sector. As such, sustainability and social responsibility measures are increasing.
These measures, however, have to become an integrated part of a business, permeating to all levels, top to bottom, to be believable. Transparency in communications about a brand’s values will also be essential, to foster trust and boost customer loyalty.
Methods that brands are currently employing in this realm include:
- Engaging in storytelling on digital platforms.
- Showcasing steps taken and the results.
- Sharing any insights gained through sustainable practices.
- Participating and collaborating with groups focused on sustainability and social responsibility to show how serious this new way of being is to them.
Data-Driven Decisions: Leveraging Analytics for Insight
Instead of relying only on industry insights, B2B companies today are moving more into collecting data about actual customers to develop marketing strategies. In other words, they are mastering data analysis and gaining valuable insight.
By analyzing data such as sales performance, customer feedback, social media engagement, and web analytics, companies can gain more perspective on what customers want and which marketing initiatives will be beneficial.
Intel CMO Karen Walker sees this as a power play of sorts. “You are the customer’s advocate, because you get to listen to them and hear what they’re thinking and what they’re talking about and what they’re talking to each other about. That’s really powerful.”
With such insight, marketing teams can then create targeted campaigns that will increase engagement, boost conversions, and foster customer loyalty.
As a bonus, many more advanced analytics tools are available today to help teams achieve these insights and make such data-driven decisions.
Preparing for the Future of B2B Marketing
The future of B2B marketing begins with a changing mindset about how to reach your target audience and how to stay tuned-in to the latest trends.
For 2024, the expansion of trends in B2B marketing, such as personalization, interactive content, ABM marketing, value alignment, and data-driven decision-making, will become more important to your marketing efforts and, ultimately, your bottom line.
Yet, you can expect some of these trends to eventually expand and change as well. As a result, B2B marketers will need to stay open to seizing evolving opportunities in order to remain relevant and successful in the future.
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As 2024 progresses, B2B marketers will need to adjust and adapt to the trends that dominate the market. Creating more engaging content will be an important component of that new strategy.
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