At the beginning of this year, I predicted several business-to-business (B2B) marketing trends for 2019; as we wrap up the year, I wanted to share where I see the biggest opportunities for B2B marketers in 2020. Clairvoyance aside, the following covers seven trends to guide and inform your 2020 demand generation plans.
1. Demystifying Intent Data
I believe the hype around intent data will reach an all-time high in 2020. I called intent data out in my 2019 B2B marketing trends article, but I believe marketers are just starting to scratch the surface on how to best operationalize these insights. For years, B2B marketers have obsessed about leveraging technology to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, but delivering a truly personalized message, in terms of content, timing and concern, is exceptionally difficult without intent insights.
Intent data refers to signals about a person or an account’s intention to do something. These intent insights are gleaned from digital footprints and can help you make your marketing experiences more relevant and personalized. From account prioritization to guiding your content marketing efforts, I predict the use cases and wins for B2B marketers leveraging intent will skyrocket next year.
2. Increase In Digital Ad Spend
Tight B2B marketing budgets are driving an increase in digital ad spend over other marketing channels. I believe the cost per impression (CPM) of digital ads combined with tightening email regulations and global compliance laws has made targeted advertising solutions a compelling avenue to reach buyers.
Traditional marketing tactics, like tradeshows, are taking a back seat in funding discussions as marketers get savvy about their ability to connect with their audiences via online paid media channels, which provide rich feedback on the return on these investments.
3. Importance Of Buyer Enablement
The traditional buyer funnel is dead — there is no linear buyer journey. We now know that arbitrary lead scoring based on weighted scores for top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel engagements is an ineffective way to gauge a buyer’s interest. Buyer enablement removes barriers to your resources and critical decision-making materials to allow prospects to find the information they need as they bounce around various stages of their buying process.
B2B marketers are not psychics (the theme of this article aside!). So instead of trying to predict your buyer path, why not make all purchase decision information accessible? Gartner has found that readily available information that helps buyers through their decision-making tasks matters more than product capabilities when making a purchase.
4. Artificially Intelligent Everything
What future trend article would be complete without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI)? AI solutions are creeping in on every aspect of B2B marketing, from content production to email assistants and chatbots, predicting best-fit accounts and chain-based attribution models. Yes, there are artificially intelligent solutions for it all.
AI solutions help marketers analyze large datasets to enable individualization at scale, uncover actionable insights and improve productivity by offloading mundane tasks to smart software solutions. But the critical question to ask when evaluating how AI can help your marketing efforts in 2020 is “How good is the data I’m using?” Artificially intelligent solutions are only helpful if you feed them reliable and quality data. If AI tools are in your marketing technology (martech) stack, ensure that you have a healthy culture of experimentation and that you test out commonsense responses of your AI engagements.
5. Video Marketing For Higher Engagement
Most B2B solutions are complex and difficult to understand, and I find many marketers are gravitating toward video to explain robust solutions clearly to their audience. The visual aspect of video makes it a powerful medium for learning and, therefore, persuasive when educating prospects through the buying process in an engaging, scalable way. What’s more, video has become less expensive and easier to produce than costly brand videos of the past.
If video is on your 2020 marketing road map, focus on creating videos around popular topics that perform well in other content formats. By thoughtfully turning these messages into video, you can deliver more relevant and memorable content that’s easier to consume.
6. Rise Of Customer Data Platforms
If you are a B2B enterprise marketer, there is a good chance that your day-to-day work revolves around dealing with a number of disparate systems and clunky workarounds. When it comes to getting a central source of customer truth, large enterprise organizations often struggle to get one picture of all the facts. A customer data platform (CDP) brings together your website analytics, marketing automation platform (MAP), customer relationship management (CRM) data, social media analytics and other customer data sources to build a unified customer profile for segmentation and reporting.
Some B2B organizations are attempting to solve their data issues by building data warehouses, which I’ve noticed has spurred a growing debate on whether to build or buy your CDP solution. Building your own solution may seem to be the fastest, most cost-effective route to start, but what organizations quickly learn is how challenging it is to normalize and map data for robust analysis. A best practice is to buy a CDP and use your expertise to customize for your organizational needs. However, if you choose to build your own, pick and choose which data you want to map first to deploy a controlled pilot.
7. Continued Account-Based Growth
Account-based marketing (ABM) has far surpassed the buzzword phase. ABM is not a trend or a tactic; rather, it is a strategic approach that orchestrates personalized outreach across marketing, sales and customer success to drive engagement and revenue for a target set of accounts. The way I see it, if you’re part of the minority not doing account-based work, now is the time to start.
As we look to the year ahead, will your marketing team lead the pack in these initiatives? What is your company’s stage of adoption and experience with these hot demand gen topics?
