The B2B digital marketing landscape has shifted significantly in the past few years. And as the economy continues to grow more digital, having an online presence for your B2B company has become more accessible, necessary, and lucrative. However, the constantly evolving digital landscape also comes with some unique challenges for marketers.
In this article we’ll go over the latest B2B digital marketing trends you can capitalise on to drive growth and engagement.
In this article:
- What metrics to track in B2B marketing
- B2B Content Marketing
- Multi-channel Marketing
- Customer retention
- User Experience and SEO
- Mobile-first Marketing
What Metrics can B2B companies track to assess the effectiveness of their marketing?
The first action you must take when evaluating marketing efforts is determining the intended outcome of a marketing campaign and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure its success. Businesses need to be meticulous when selecting the KPIs that are significant and measurable when creating any marketing campaign.
After all, not all KPIs are created equal. For example, you may want to track the number of impressions your marketing campaign has generated.
Impressions are a useful measure to use when the campaign’s objective is to expose the brand to as many people as possible.
But, since the purpose of most marketing initiatives is to generate leads, it may be more advantageous to focus on tracking the degrees of interaction and engagement from your content. By measuring this metric, you can see what content is resonating with your audience and tailor your strategy accordingly.
Vitality and Longevity
A month’s worth of data can differ greatly from an entire year’s data supply. So, when analyzing campaign data, make sure to consider the statistical significance of your data. This requires an assessment of the quantity of data and the standard deviation to ensure any insights drawn come from sufficient data.
For instance, the amount of website traffic or page hits generated from a social media campaign can vary significantly in the first few days. With these sways in results, making changes to the campaign hourly would not help generate stronger results. Instead, it would cause any data you gather to remain insignificant. Consider allowing any campaigns you run to go for a predetermined amount of time then reassess their effectiveness.
5 B2B Digital Marketing Trends
Here are 6 trends you can leverage in your digital marketing plan:
1. B2B content marketing
Content is still king. Creating content that engages your audience is crucial to building your brand and this is no different in the B2B space. Whether it’s through social media posts, articles, or videos, your content marketing can establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
Engaging your audience
When it comes to B2B content marketing, it’s especially crucial to know your audience. The content you create should target decision makers in your industry. Content created for business audiences will more often need to be data-driven, cover key events in the industry, and offer actionable insights.
Update your SEO strategy
SEO remains one of the most valuable aspects of digital marketing. In terms of expanding your organic reach, nothing beats being the top result on a Google search. However, the field of SEO has changed dramatically as Google continues to refine its algorithm. Google uses machine learning and artificial intelligence as part of their ongoing quest to make their search engine think like humans.
What this means is that SEO is no longer just about using exact keywords and phrases to rank for a particular keyword. As Google keeps trying to think like humans, humans need to stop thinking like a machine to rank on Google. Their search algorithm has gotten better at understanding content so you can rank for longtail keywords without explicitly using that keyword in your content. For example, if you search for a question like “how long to boil pasta”, the top results don’t use the exact search term but are clearly answering the search query in their content.
In August, Google released their Helpful Content Update. In this update they specified that content should be written for humans first and that their algorithm will emphasise content that prioritises the value it provides to users over the SEO results.
The content improvement has clarified Google’s objectives: content overviews, relevance over ranked searches, and high-quality, original material. With the help of this latest update, poor-quality content that is not original will have a lower chance of appearing on the search results page.
Keyword research
This isn’t to say that keywords are completely irrelevant. Keyword research is vital to understand trends in your audience, to know what they’re searching for. And sure, you should still enhance your on-page SEO, just know that exact keyword matching doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore. However, finding trending keywords in your industry can be useful for tailoring your content and making it more relevant.
2. Multi-channel marketing
The digital world, and digital marketing with it, has expanded exponentially in the last few years. People are using multiple touchpoints in their interactions with brands: whether that’s using different social media channels or different devices.
As a result, B2B multi-channel marketing has become an increasingly effective strategy. Between 2016 and 2021, B2B buyers doubled the amount of channels they used, with customers interacting with brands through an average of 10 channels in 2021.
Providing a multi-channel experience for your target audience will create a more well-rounded brand experience, create connections, and ultimately create more revenue.
3. Focus on customer retention
It’s one thing to gain new clients; but keeping them is another challenge entirely. Generally speaking, it takes more money, time, and effort to acquire a new customer than to sell to a repeat customer. To put a number on it, the likelihood of selling to a new customer is between 5 and 20%, whereas with a repeat customer that number increases to 60-70%.
So, by boosting customer retention, you can grow your revenue more efficiently. To encourage customers to continue working with your business, it’s essential that you make them feel appreciated. This can be through unique offers and bargains or just through little touches of personalisation.
4. UX and SEO
SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore. In fact, sometimes it’s not about words at all. Google has evolved in its efforts to provide a better search experience by implementing its “Core Web Vitals”. Core Web Vitals measures things like page speed and mobile friendliness to evaluate the user experience of a particular page. As a result, pages that load quickly on both mobile and desktop will rank higher in search results.
User experience should be a central aspect of your SEO strategy. In conjunction with the Helpful Content Update, Core Web Vitals shows how Google’s priorities have evolved over time. And to get the most out of SEO, digital brands will need to evolve with them.
If you want to know more about how User Experience can transform your digital marketing, check out our UX and Marketing white paper for an in-depth guide on how you can take your online presence to the next level.
5. Mobile-First Marketing
With each coming year, it becomes more critical for B2B firms to implement mobile optimisation in their marketing strategy. Over half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is steadily increasing. From an SEO perspective, you may have already noticed that your pages rank differently on mobile and desktop.
In fact, according to a report by Semrush, 31% of URLs that ranked on desktop were not ranking on mobile search results. So, by not optimising for mobile, companies run the risk of effectively losing half of their organic search traffic.
One of the biggest new trends in mobile-first marketing is the implementation of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). PWAs have been revolutionary in improving the speed, accessibility, and engagement rates of mobile websites by offering users an app-like experience from their web browser.
Sounds enticing right? To explore the wonderful world of the PWA, take a peek at our article on “Why PWAs Are the Future of Mobile Web Design”.
More B2B Marketing tips
Looking to take your marketing strategy even further? Then have a read through some of our other marketing guides:
