B2B Marketing Trends 2021

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing tends to be more informational and straightforward than B2C. This is because business purchase decisions are based on the bottom-line revenue impact where ROI is the primary focus. This is further assisted with personalised marketing based on roles, industry and interests.

Top B2B marketing trends in 2021

1. Account-based marketing
2. Marketing automation
3. Customer experience
4. AI and chatbots
5. Video marketing
6. LinkedIn
7. Local SEO
8. Content marketing
9. Segmentation and personalisation

Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that focuses its efforts and resources on a set of target accounts within a market segment. ABM uses personalised marketing for each account based on specific characteristics and needs of the account.

ABM is more than just lead generation. Marketing to the existing customer accounts to encourage upsells, repeat purchases and cross-sells to get the most value from the largest accounts.

Marketing automation

Automation is a B2B marketers best friend. Automation has and continues to become more ‘human’ and even help humans be more human. With marketing automation in place, marketers are able to have a better understanding of their customers and prospects and provide them with relevant and timely content.

Marketing automation can be set up to monitor your website visitor activity and inform you of when they interact with key content. This can automatically send them relevant emails or helpful content without the need for a team member.

Marketing automation can also aid in the qualification process helping speed up the handover of leads to sales and help provide a timely response and service.

For marketing teams to have to monitor every lead through the buyer’s journey would take up large amounts of time and resources. With marketing automation in place, each lead can work their way through the buyer’s journey at their own pace and only be a concern of the marketing or sales team when necessary.

Customer experience

It is becoming increasingly popular to provide audiences with a seamless and convenient process to interact with your business. Audiences are even expecting it and are put off when a company does not meet their expectations.

Audiences expect a website that is fast and easy to navigate. Simply reducing the barriers to entry will greatly improve your customer engagement and conversion rates. This extends past your website to all aspects of your business. Look at every interaction and communication you make with your customers, are they relevant, helpful and on their terms? If not, fix it, simple as that.

With the increased interest in privacy and data protection, it is important that your communications and interactions with your audience are on their terms. Are they expecting communications from you? Are your comms relevant and helpful?

AI and chatbots

An aspect of marketing automation is the use of AI and chatbots. They have the power to automate lead capture and solve problems quickly and efficiently in real-time with your website visitors.

The simplest and most used feature of these chatbots is as a digital receptionist that helps solve small problems while directing more complex issues to support teams or eager prospects to a sales consultant.

Through these chatbots, visitors can be assessed and directed to the right department so that only the qualified contacts get sent to your busy teams. Other visitors can be sent to FAQ/ resource pages for further assessment.

Video Marketing

As video continues to be the most consumed form of media today, it is no surprise marketers are making use of this medium and succeeding! Audiences are looking for an easy way to get to know your business and the solutions you offer, video is a perfect way to achieve this.

Video marketing gives you the tools to provide personalised content that can showcase the people behind the brand, break down complex solutions into easy to understand videos and engage audiences with multimedia content.

Video content can be hosted on an array of platforms and services, even embedded on your website as interactive video questionnaires and onboarding steps. Take a look into video marketing and see how your business can benefit and utilise the format.

LinkedIn

Every business in the B2B space is different and can make use of the different social media platforms in different ways but one platform continues to stand out from the rest, LinkedIn.

It’s no surprise that B2B professionals are using the platform and as such, LinkedIn offers highly segmented and refined audience targeting for your ads, content and messaging to reach the people that will benefit from your business.

Local SEO

SEO benefits you in the long term as quality traffic leads to better conversions and more sales for your website or business. Remember, if your website ranks high organically, it creates the perception that your website is an authority in a certain area.

You up your brand’s presence in your local area by optimising your content and web pages for search engines. SEO is much more stable when compared to PPC (pay per click) platforms. Great SEO delivers traffic forever. Paid or PPC traffic stops when your budget runs out!

When creating web content with SEO in mind, you are able to target your niche audience more precisely by building content around relevant keywords.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing method that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that is relevant, helpful, engaging and does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to drive/aid interest in its products or services.

This content trickles down to all aspects of strategic marketing where it is promoted through SEO, PPC, Social Media, PR and inbound marketing.

Segmentation and personalisation

Highly segmented lists and contacts are essential for personalised content. Gone are the days of generalised bulk mail. Potential and existing customers expect content that enters their spheres to be relevant and helpful.

Businesses today are making use of sophisticated CRM platforms like HubSpot that segment their audience into lists and tag them with relevant information so that they receive the right information at the right time in their buyer’s journey.

Final Thoughts

The most important and beneficial of this list is personalisation. If you can segment your audience you can share relevant and helpful content to them at the right time. Segmentation trickles down all of your B2B marketing efforts and should be your top priority to succeed in B2B marketing in 2021.

How many of these have you applied in your business? Each one of these has a place in the B2B space where you and your audience benefit from them.