The dawn of a new year has many of us reflecting on the things we did right, the things we did wrong and a way to make improvements in the future. Applying this to marketing, we’ve rounded up the top five B2B marketing trends you should be watching, and applying, in 2024.
These marketing tactics are not new. In fact, many companies are already using these tactics in their marketing strategy. 2024 is the year to start doing things smarter, rather than trying all new tactics.
Video, Video, Video
Video on your landing page increases conversions by up to 80% and what’s more, people tend to prefer video over written text. Watching a short video is becoming more preferable to reading a short article, especially for customers are the beginning of their journey.
Video marketing is crucial no matter what industry you are in. It helps to create a more well-rounded picture of the products and services you are trying to sell. Videos are powerful because they can help potential buyers view your products and see how they work before they have it in hand. Videos can also act as a tool for technical support and answer the frequently asked questions customers have about your products or services.
Videos that feature real people telling real stories is an excellent content marketing opportunity. A personal approach to marketing (see Trend #2 below) allows you to build a strong connection with your audience. Video marketing can include anything from product demos and customer testimonials to webinars and event teasers. Creating video content will pay big dividends.
Personalization with ABM
Account-based marketing (ABM) and personalization have become an essential part of B2B marketing. ABM focuses on targeted marketing to specific high-value accounts. By leveraging data analytics and AI-driven technologies, ABM platforms give marketers the efficient and strategic opportunity to communicate with decision makers where they’re already browsing on the internet.
ABM can help increase ROI, enhance customer relationships and improve relationships between the sales and marketing teams by “delivering the right message on the right channel at the right time to the right audience,” according to RollWorks.
AI Enhances Customer Experience
AI is permeating many facets of marketing, from ABM to ChatGPT, AI technologies are creating a revolution in B2B marketing with automation, data analytics and predictive content generation. AI algorithms can analyze a tremendous amount of data and help to create personalized content that resonates with a company’s audience, drive engagement, improve customer experience and achieve a higher conversion rate.
AI is trending quickly, but marketers have been using AI for years behind the scenes. New implementations of AI technologies are just now doing things better and faster. When it comes down to it, AI in the pocket of a marketer is a way to capture, review, analyze and act on data in a more efficient way than if only humans were part of that process. It doesn’t need to be a scary process and can be a very effective way to improve your marketing efficiency, whether for a small team of people or at the enterprise level.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Google have been using AI data analysis for years without the label of AI on the data analysis that’s being performed. “We’ve been using it for over a decade to create the member experiences that people value most on our platform,” according to the VP of Artificial Intelligence at LinkedIn. Additionally, large language models (LLMs) are gaining traction and are transforming search engines very quickly. LLMs can achieve general-purpose language understanding and generation. This will most definitely change how we see things when asking Google a question and getting an answer back.
Podcasts and Audio Content Marketing
There’s something about consuming information on the go, especially for extremely busy business professionals. Whether it is driving to and from work or a meeting, walking your dog or making dinner, podcasts and audio content have a way of grabbing our attention and engaging us in an extremely convenient way as we do the mundane.
Combine this with the knowledge that a large population prefers learning via audio rather than written or visual content consumption. Meeting your audience where they’re comfortable learning applies not just to outlets but also formats. Just like how creating video content is gaining momentum, audio content added to your marketing strategy is another way to broaden your reach to more of your target audience more often. Webinars and virtual events are good examples of a combined audio and video content format that enhances your marketing strategy by moving beyond just text-based content.
Nurture Email Campaigns
This topic might be surprising as a trend to watch in 2024. Email is nothing new. What’s trending in email marketing is the combination of AI and personalization trends with the email distribution format. Nearly all companies have some level of email in their marketing plan.
In 2024, start looking at your results data and your customer journey, then create a strategy that matches the customer actions with specific content pieces to help move them along their journey. This will help you move into a more sophisticated strategy than sending every person on your contact list the exact same content at the exact same time each month. Previous engagement levels with your content, industry or product line tracks, and other metrics can inform your email frequency, content included and even when to remove people from your lists who aren’t engaging.
Refining Marketing Tactics in 2024
The overarching theme of these trends is targeting. B2B marketing in 2024 and beyond involves implementing a more purposeful strategy of channels and formats. Honing your marketing strategy from baseline content and coverage to a more refined strategy includes purposeful pruning of tactics that aren’t working to combine tried-and-true methods with trending approaches.
Make 2024 the year of more data-driven approaches to meet your customers where they are, rather than hoping they come to you. Fine tune your formats, content topics, frequency of distribution and more with these emerging trends in B2B marketing and you’ll begin to see better engagement and ROI.