Anyone who works in Marketing or manages a company knows that, to be a good professional, our eyes must be on the present while our brain thinks about the future. This may be true in any profession, but it is especially true for Information Technology (IT) companies or technology-dependent businesses, such as Marketing. Therefore, we want to highlight some of the fundamental B2B Marketing trends to keep in mind for 2020, according to our predictions here at OUTMarketing.
ABM solutions integration
Topic Cluster
Employee Activation
Personalized Experience
Conclusion
ABM solutions integration
At its core, Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy in which marketing resources are focused on reaching a specific set of pre-established accounts. As we explained in the article Account Based Marketing: the 'zero waste' marketing , the main objective is to focus all energies on acquiring Customers who will be key to the company's growth.
This requires close alignment between the Sales and Marketing teams. Currently, this coordination relies on well-known MarTech solutions, such as CRMs and Marketing Automation. But these tools are not suitable for ABM, because they are designed to manage relationships with contacts we already know.
How do we reach out to unknown contacts at our target companies? This is where ABM platforms come in. In the near future, we will see greater technological integration between CRM solutions, Marketing Automation and ABM platforms, so that Marketers and Sales reps in your IT company can have a complete view of their customers.
Topic Cluster
When we enter a supermarket, we know that to find nectarines, for example, we have to go to the fruit section; it wouldn't occur to us to ask for fruit at the butcher's. From there, it becomes much easier to get to the nectarines. Just like supermarkets, websites are ideally structured so that we can find the main section and then move on to the sections we want. In this example, the fruit section is an analogy of a Topic Cluster.
B2B Marketing Trends - Topc Cluster
Topic Clusters are a Content Marketing strategy with very positive repercussions on SEO. They consist of organizing content into groups (Clusters), which revolve around the main topic, the Pillar Content.
Pillar pages are extensive, exhaustive and provide all thailand telegram viral the answers to questions a user may have about a given topic. However, since they deal with very broad themes (“Fruit”), Content Pillars address all subtopics more or less superficially. Delving deeper into each of the subtopics (“red fruits”, “tropical fruits”, for example) is the job of Clusters – pages that include more long tail keywords and where it is possible to work on internal link building .
For these reasons, Topic Clusters are the SEO solution that has gained the most followers in recent years. The IT company (and our partner) Resultados Digitais is the first to say that all of its pillar pages are on the first page of Google for the article's main keyword. For B2B Marketing, the benefits are easy to deduce: more organic traffic and qualified leads.
Employee Activation
Employee Activation is a strategy that shares some principles with Internal Marketing, but goes further. Internal Marketing recognizes that employee satisfaction is important to maintain a good internal brand image. Employee Activation aims to ensure that the company's brand image is also transmitted externally, precisely through the hands of employees. Basically, the aim is for them to become “micro influencers” in their business area.
In the world of B2B Marketing, building trust in your customers is just as important, if not more important, than price or features. That’s why your sales reps need to be prepared and motivated to make an excellent first impression of your company and to be the people your customers turn to when they need advice, tips, and know-how .
Your company can activate employees by asking, measuring and tracking the satisfaction and self-fulfillment they get from their work. Ask them how you can help them create platforms to share know-how and reach more people. Motivated employees “infect” customers and create more lasting relationships.
Personalized Experience
According to a 2018 Salesforce study , 67% of B2B customers switched to vendors that offered them a more human, personalized experience. What B2B companies should be asking themselves now is “how am I going to communicate with these people?” instead of “how am I going to communicate with other businesses?”
These days, it’s relatively common to use a Marketing Automation tool to communicate with some degree of personalization. In fact, personalization has almost infinite potential to make your employees’ lives easier. In 2020, look for other ways to personalize your B2B Customer experience with the following Marketing Automation solutions:
Contact segmentation: B2B segmentation allows you to send messages or content to contacts based on their interactions and interests.
Automation of repetitive tasks: for example, automatic lead scoring of contacts, CRM updates, sending emails based on triggers or nurturing prospects based on their persona
Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI can increase customer retention rates by helping you better understand customer needs – while also automatically putting that knowledge into action
Conclusion
We believe that the challenge of the future is to treat prospects as unique individuals: to offer personalized experiences, but in a scalable way for your company. Maximize Marketing automation by using artificial intelligence to increase the efficiency of your Sales and Marketing teams. Activate your employees to become micro-influencers and the best closers in your business area. Don't try to postpone the future.