Four B2B Marketing Trends We’re Keeping Our Eyes on This Year

With hopes of better months ahead this year, it’s an ideal time to look towards popular trends in B2B marketing and what they can mean for our own efforts.

Despite the turbulence of recent years, we remain fortunate to be able to quickly and reliably see online just what it is that is growing businesses and agencies across the world.

Today we’ve selected four of these trends. We’ll touch briefly on each, offering a description of their use and our opinion on why they are worth considering for your own campaigns and companies in the year ahead.

Client Retention Marketing

With so many economies and industries fluctuating in performance currently, retaining clients has never been more important.

Retention marketing simply refers to concerted, sustained efforts to maintain dialogues and relationships with existing clients. Ideal as part of an omnichannel effort involving content marketing, it’s valuable in its ability to help your business to keep performance consistent, profitable and with a minimal cost per sale.

Speaking in digital marketing terms, retention marketing should focus on key pillars of activity including customer appreciation, continuous client communication, surveying and testimonial acquisition, and a focus on improving your onboarding process.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ll happily join the thousands of other blogs on the internet that shout the value of B2B content marketing loud and true this year.

Boasting low costs to initiate, ease of scaling and the potential for significant compound ROI, content marketing is ideal for companies that find themselves with thirst for building relationships using a long-term strategy that creates strong brand affinity with B2B buyers.

This year, we recommend content marketing efforts to focus on keyword research and a clear, planned approach to search engine optimisation. In truth, there’s no magic answer to content; so much changes depending on your industry, brand image and specific offering. Knowing this, we recommend an approach wherein you test and split test different messages and tones across sets of long and short-form content.

Poll and query your client base as much as you can and be ready to increase your budget in areas and messages that demonstrate promise in your reporting.

Omnichannel B2B Marketing

With uncertainty being the name of the game in current times, it’s telling as to which businesses have survived and thrived – and what they’re doing to make that happen.

While there’s once again no one answer that fits every company, it’s never been a better time to move your business towards an omnichannel marketing approach. This will help to mitigate some of the risk involved in the current B2B landscape, giving you prepared channels that you can shrink and expand as your circumstances change.

Remember that omnichannel is more than just a set of several maintained channels. For it to truly work for your company, consider how you process and manage interactions with your clients.

As we’ve touched on before, smooth onboarding and a clear process for maintaining regular communication will help to bring your separate channels and efforts together. With this in place, you can look to make sure you have the main channels covered; physical store, internet, mobile, social media and print come to mind as key examples.

LinkedIn Lead Generation

We’ve covered LinkedIn Lead Generation in-depth in previous articles on the QliQ blog and our opinion hasn’t changed one bit. It still works superbly for B2B companies and remains a premier choice for B2B digital marketing campaigns and content marketing efforts.

Although studies vary, we’ve seen recent statistics that show that LinkedIn is responsible for generating as many as 80% of B2B leads being generated from social. Once again, the current business climate has left many companies with time to plan, adjust and implement new ways of working.

For inbound work, make sure that your page basics are covered. A visually appealing company profile that regularly produces engaging and unique content will become the cornerstone of your efforts on the platform, with further assistance from your staff and related LinkedIn groups helping to draw eyes to your page. That page will also benefit from having a structure that leads to conversion actions, such as a click-through to your website via recent updates or the company description section.

For outbound activities, LinkedIn’s advanced search feature is often slept on. Featuring very granular search options that go far beyond the basics of location, education and current and past companies, it’s well worth the premium membership if you’re looking to improve your B2B lead generation results at minimal cost.

Head over to our B2B marketing blog for more tips and advice on creating an effective LinkedIn marketing campaign.

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If you fancy chatting with us about what we’ve covered here today or how we can provide services such as these to your business, you can reach us direct at 01635 800868.