B2B

Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner at Winterberry Group, says B2B marketers still lag behind their B2C counterparts when it comes to digital marketing spending. That's starting to change, albeit gradually.

Voice assistants present B2B companies with an opportunity to bolster their marketing efforts, spread their creative wings, and develop new revenue streams. But in their pursuit of getting their message out via chatbots, marketers must be careful that they develop a consistent tone and can distinguish their brand from the competition.

B2B marketers tend to focus on the quantity of their thought leadership content, rather than the quality, which discourages potential buyers. Hiring journalists, videographers, and other talent versed in storytelling can help turn the tide.

Amid the pandemic and people working from home more frequently, demand for webinars and virtual events has surged in the past few years throughout the B2B sector, per a new study. But potential buyers don't sign up for webinars and/or online conferences to hear a sales pitch, so it's crucial that marketers develop valuable, thought-based content to include in their programming lest they alienate their customers and prospects.

The pandemic has altered the map when it comes to where people spend their money, with more and more dollars flowing locally. Brands can easily tailor a national message to local markets, of course, thanks to geotargeting and other online tools. But a new study shows that national brands tend to underinvest when it comes to guiding local partners about how to improve their online marketing strategies.

Saul Colt, founder and CEO of the Idea Integration Co., watched as B2B clients put their ad campaigns on hold during the pandemic. Only half of his business came back in 2021, so Colt decided to shake things up in 2022 and took a big financial risk, hiring 17 cartoonists and comic writers formerly of "MAD Magazine" and "The Simpsons" to beef up the agency's creative muscle and widen the field of prospects to pitch.

Facing an ailing economy, marketers' major priority this year must be creating a "customer health" score, according to a recent Forrester report. But as some companies look to bolster relations with existing customers, others are continuing to pursue net-new leads. Will it backfire?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is no longer the domain of giant tech companies with the resources to deploy bespoke programs targeting accounts that are likely to have the most profitable impact in the long run. According to a recent survey, most B2B organizations that have not yet adopted an ABM strategy plan to do so within the next 12 months.

Exemptions in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) related to B2B marketing expire in January 2023. Despite having more than two years to ready themselves, many companies are ill-prepared for the change.

Long-term planning may be turning into a bit of an oxymoron due to the furious pace of change among B2B customers and prospects. However, marketers still need vision when it comes to preparing for the future, as the B2B terrain is shaping up to look radically different just a few years from now, a recent study reveals.

Soon after Kim Salem-Jackson was promoted to EVP and CMO at Akamai in 2021, she realized the company was missing its "why," or how to articulate its brand purpose. After getting buy-in from the CEO, she proceeded to build a coalition across the company to answer the question and integrate the brand purpose throughout the organization.

The B2B purchasing cycle grew in the last two and half years, a new study reveals. To keep pace, marketers need to ramp up their efforts to collaborate with customers and prospects on business and research projects and help ease their pain.

Content marketing has become de rigueur among SMB companies, but the outcomes leave a lot to be desired. Instead of taking a scattershot approach to generating original content, SMBs need to pick just one content initiative that's valuable enough to cut through the proverbial clutter.

The pandemic seems to have altered the script when it comes to the most effective ways to reach business decision-makers, as B2B brands embrace a hybrid marketing strategy combining analog and digital messaging.

While some B2B firms continue to put their content behind a firewall because that's how they like generating leads, a rising number of companies think that providing free content is a better way of courting prospects and turning them into customers.

B2B marketers continue to monitor what remains an unpredictable economic environment, as the possibility of a recession looms.

Marketing budgets increased nicely in 2022, growing to nearly 10 percent of total company revenue, according to Gartner. But the upswing is muted by a downward economy. In an interview with ANA magazine, Ewan McIntyre, chief of research and VP analyst at Gartner, said marketers are already feeling the negative impact of severe inflation and must continue finding cost efficiencies and moving toward a digital-first strategy.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are fast becoming an effective tool for B2B companies to locate, engage, and retain new customers. But adoption rates remain low, and fully leveraging CDPs remains hampered by the inability among B2B marketers to break down their company's business silos and connect the digital dots.

Marketers have had years to prepare for the demise of third-party cookies, coming in 2023. But B2B brands continue to lag in their efforts to adapt, with just 21 percent planning to build out their first-party data strategies this year. As cookies fade, marketers need to recalibrate their technology stack and develop a process for sharing data across multiple departments.

Most B2B brands are taking a wait-and-see approach toward the metaverse, as they first get a firmer hold on other, less complicated digital channels. At the same time, B2B marketers must weigh this caution against the fact that younger people now transitioning into decision-making roles have been conditioned to a digital-first world in which virtual- and augmented-reality experiences are a natural part of their day.