The world of B2B marketing is changing constantly, particularly in the modern era of social media, audience analytics, and automated ad tech strategies. Your brand needs to stay ahead of these changes in order to successfully reach your audience, especially now that consumers are savvier and more likely to be skeptical of advertising. Here’s how you can take advantage of the latest B2B trends of 2018.
Interactive Content
As part of your content marketing strategy, like many brands in the B2B space, you have probably relied on PDF content and blog content to generate leads. In 2018, you can expect interactive web experiences to play the lead role in engaging your visitors in more animated, visual, and compelling way.
Virtual Reality
While virtual reality is becoming more common for both big and small brands, the challenge is in finding a way to utilize VR in a way that reaches your target audience and that makes sense for your brand. VR marketing is an emerging technology, so now is the time to check out your options and stay ahead of the curve.
User-Generated Content
According to a recent survey by Stackla, during the next year, consumers will be craving authenticity from brands. In fact, the survey found that authenticity is important to 86 percent of consumers when choosing brands to support, and 60 percent claimed that user-generated content (UGC) is the most authentic type of content.
Chatbots
From Facebook to other live chat applications, chatbots seem to be popping up everywhere. Once chat-based artificial intelligence (AI) takes off, prepare to see chatbots being utilized in everything from getting in touch with customer service to placing orders to answering FAQs. Embed sales material and messaging as your company produces them to ensure they drive real value.
Influencer Marketing
A hot topic in 2017, influencer marketing has continued to trend upward. This year, expect to see more job openings for in-house influencer marketers, and for influencers to perform as the new media but much more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Account-Based Content Marketing
Account-based content marketing (ABCM) helps your B2B company to target unique personas and individuals within an organization. Marketers now have the opportunity to avoid a one-size-fits-all type of advertising approach in favor of a unique, highly targeted, user experience that offers customized content featuring personalized images, micro-sites, landing pages, and calls-to-action.
Voice Search
Voice search is a technology that is rapidly being adopted, and it is quickly changing the way your customers interact with the world around them. When you ask a question, you get one direct answer. Your marketing strategy should make sure that the three main voice providers (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have the correct information and facts about your business so they can provide correct answers.
Event Marketing
Event marketing is seeing a big resurgence this year, and your brand should lean toward those types of marketing activations, when possible. Music tour sponsorships and similar branding events are making a comeback as brands try to present cooler venue activities for audiences to interact with while getting the opportunity to broadcast to a much larger digital audience.
