As we head into 2020, it’s clear that online marketing strategies will be even more important. These include smart demand generation marketing strategies for B2B businesses. In fact, B2B companies have big opportunities to improve their demand generation this year. Here are the top 5 demand generation strategies for 2020.
1. Increasing Digital Ad Spending
Budgets are really tight for 2020, especially with the coronavirus driving everyone online for business and entertainment. Online marketing is effective and more budget friendly than traditional marketing, making it the go-to channel for marketing and advertising. Digital marketing comes with unique metrics that much traditional marketing doesn’t have. Tightening email restrictions and new global standards to guard against hackers make targeted online solutions a best bet for marketers.
Traditional marketing, especially in-person meetings and trade shows, will be canceled or reduced in size throughout 2020 which makes digital marketing even more important.
2. Rise of Buyer Enabling
The traditional buyer funnel is changing because personalization makes a buyer’s journey unique. Traditional funnel strategies are becoming less effective at gauging a B2B buyer’s interest. But, when companies offer full access to their content and other relevant resources, customers can make informed decisions throughout the buying process.
B2B marketers can’t predict the pathway buyers will follow; therefore giving them access to your purchase-decision information is more effective. Gartner has discovered that readily-available resources help buyers proceed through their decision-making journey easier.
3. Artificial Intelligence is Everywhere
Artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated allowing for a more personalized experience for customers. AI offers useful solutions to adopt in all areas of marketing including content production to chatbots, creating models that better-fit your product or service marketing.
AI gives tools to markers that offer improved analysis of datasets enabling customization at any sized scale, discovering actionable insights, and improving productivity along the supply chain. AI takes over routine tasks with better accuracy and speed. Smart software solutions make data collection easier, resulting in better data for driving decisions.
4. Higher Engagement with Video Marketing
Many B2B solutions are complicated and somewhat difficult to understand, making video marketing popular. Videos can walk customers through the education process for all or part of your product information. Videos can be persuasive marketing tools, educating customers in an entertaining and scalable manner. And shooting videos is getting less expensive with smartphones and other technologies.
Start making videos that engage customers on popular topics that perform well in other content marketing formats. By adding video content to your resource library, you can deliver relevant content that B2B buyers will remember.
5. Growth of Customer Data Platforms
B2B enterprise marketers often find themselves using different systems and workarounds instead of an integrated data platform. You may use a customer data platform for website data, customer relationship management platform, marketing automation platform, and other customer data sources to create a detailed and personalized customer profile used for marketing segmentation.
However, there is some debate in the B2B market whether to buy or build your own custom data solution. A good compromise is to buy a customer data platform system, then customize it for your organization.
