B2B Marketing Trends to Keep in Mind

The landscape is changing rapidly and B2B marketers everywhere are finding ways to grapple with the task of keeping up to it. What this means is that businesses who want to engage their employees, customers or competitors through social media have to provide quality content that is viral in nature and must use different multimedia platforms available. Everything needs to be accessible from the mobile platform. To make informed decisions, big data is become more of a must have for marketers. There is also the need to adopt agile marketing and to go beyond just following a marketing plan and to learn how to respond to change instead.

Employee advocacy and social selling

A business’ employees were their best brand ambassadors, before the world of social media came into power and threw that theory out the window. Today, with Twitter, Facebook and other such social media networks, the potential audience of an employee has been increase immensely. Earlier, employees were restricted from communicating online about the brand or business with which they were affiliated, in an effort to control what was being said. But today, marketers have realised that these social media conversations could be capitalised on. Today, employees are encouraged to communicate about the businesses they work for and the brands they handle.

Content marketing

A customer today has his hand in many online pies and is fully aware of what is going on. Customers have access to all kinds of real-time information regarding product features, pricing, and even your competitors.  All this content and information that is readily available to your prospective consumer will affect buying decisions at every stage. This is why content that is engaging and useful is the key to wooing customers. Marketers need to start investing their time, energy, strategy and budget on content marketing efforts. Some of the efforts by successful business include focusing on   social content hubs that comprise customer and brand-generated content which can be viewed and shared across different social networks regularly and consistently.

Consumerism and mobile

Mobile has shifted from being the third screen to being THE main screen. It is now the chosen way that both employees and consumers want to interact. This could be through apps, tablet devices, social media or cloud services. Mobile is now the main focus of corporate applications, and consumerism of IT today reiterates this change. This change has led to a skew in employees beliefs that their experience with technology at the workplace needs to be as entertaining, fun, simple and engaging as their experience with technology in their personal lives. Employees today are being encouraged to follow a BYOD (bring your own device) system in the workplace. That makes it crucial for marketers to consider mobile as paramount for employees and consumers as a way to share content, to stay informed, and to engage.

While B2B marketers still need to adhere to the principles of strategic marketing, these cues and trends should be considered when devising strategies.