The Biggest B2B Marketing Trends of 2023
Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, B2B Marketers, Business Strategists
2023 is already upon us! As more and more companies realize the importance of having a digital presence – without it, it’s like you don’t even exist – the world of digital marketing continues to evolve. In 2022, we saw the rise of short-form video content across various social media platforms, and organizations realizing how effective having a presence on the web can be for brand awareness. Let’s discuss what we think is worth incorporating as part of your marketing strategy going forward as you kick-start your marketing campaigns next year.
How B2B Marketing Trends will Evolve in 2023
Short-Form Video Content
The popularity of short-form video content continued to rise in 2022 and will rise even further in 2023. With the abundance of content available to consumers nowadays, you must make sure your content stands out. Keeping content bite-sized has proven to be an effective strategy that resonates with customers and prospects, as a medium that entertains and pinpoints a singular focus to educate and retain.
Long-Term Subject Matter Expert (SME) Relationships
Search Engine Optimization
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but the reign of SEO continues. While certainly not new, search engine optimization continues to remain as important as ever. As algorithms continue to grow and evolve, it is imperative to ensure you are claiming your spot in search engine results pages. Even today, most people begin their buyer journey with a simple web search, so investing your efforts in search engine optimization should still be a top priority.
Artificial Intelligence
Robots are getting smarter and smarter! Nowadays, many customers expect an instant response from brands, even outside of typical business hours. You can implement chatbots powered by artificial intelligence to be available for 24/7 communication with your customers. These virtual assistants can answer common queries and optimize support services, which can make visitors engage more frequently on your website.
Machine Learning
By utilizing machine learning (ML) as part of your B2B marketing strategy, you can improve your decision-making by analyzing large sets of data at one time to generate granular insights on your customers and industry. With ML-enabled marketing automation, you can drive down your costs by automating many of the tasks that are still important but take time away from tasks that provide more value. You can also take customer segmentation and content personalization to a whole new level.
Demand Generation
Client Referral & Loyalty Programs
With Web 3.0 on the horizon, making the collection of data through third-party cookies will become wildly difficult. Brands are looking for ways to boost first-party data collection and retain high priority customers. Companies are realizing the importance of personalization and the creation of effective loyalty content, as it yields higher open rates than generic emails. Companies looking for ways to make their customers feel more valued while deepening their connection should explore building out loyalty programs and client referral programs.
Mobile Optimization
As you have likely seen already, consumers are spending more and more time on their phones. However, some brands are still creating content without considering whether it is optimized for mobile users. For any marketing campaign, whether it be a blog, email, newsletter, social, or website content, it is important to ensure that you optimize it for mobile users. User experience is extremely important and a big factor that determines whether customers are likely to engage and convert. Plus search engines are heavily weighting rankings on the mobile-first experience.
Integrating Sales & Marketing
Many companies have a sales team and a marketing team, and while you would think they constantly communicate with one another, this too often is not the case. Build a unified buyer journey that both your marketing and sales teams can speak to and ensure there is constant communication between the two teams. Your sales team should collaborate and share data with the marketing team to help target the right prospects and circulate a consistent marketing message, otherwise known as ‘smarketing’.
Outsourcing Marketing
There are many more tactics in B2B marketing than what we covered above, but it is difficult to hit them all. This is why many organizations outsource their B2B strategic marketing, whether that be outsourcing their entire marketing department, or hiring a third-party for projects like a website refresh or a specific campaign. All the tactics we discussed should be included as part of your strategy, but rather than trying to do it all yourself, consider hiring an outside expert to scale faster, leverage marketing experts in your field, and augment your resources.
Avoid Common B2B Marketing Mishaps in 2023
Now that we’ve given you a list of things you should do to elevate your marketing strategy this year, let’s discuss a few things that you should avoid doing. Refrain from:
- Purchasing Lists: Some organizations purchase lists of leads and then target people on these lists, even though they haven’t consented to receive communications. This is actually a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, GDPR in the European Union and CASL in Canada, because consent is required to contact individuals, and when you buy a list, you haven’t received their consent. In addition, the health of your list is not guaranteed. The contact information could be stale, causing poor outreach performance and even blacklisting of your domain. Not to mention opening you up to numerous fines in violation of these consumer protection laws.
- Email Spam: Be aware of how many emails you send out and the types of content you put in these emails. If you email your audience too often, such as every week, you are likely overdoing it and they are more likely to unsubscribe completely. The option to unsubscribe, however, still needs to be given, otherwise you risk violating CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL.
- Lack of Evergreen Content: You want to ensure you are creating content that is relevant and will continue to be relevant in the future. When you publish content on your website, it might appear in search results for years to come, and you don’t want to be turning visitors away because of outdated content that hasn’t aged well.
- Content with No Strategy: Often, companies and organizations create content just for the sake of putting content out there, with no strategy or plan for promotion. You could be creating extremely valuable content, but if there is no strategy or purpose behind it, it may not resonate with your audience and at that point you might as well be speaking to yourself.
- Not Monitoring Results: You could be doing everything right, but you won’t know it if you’re not correctly tracking your results. Whenever you launch a marketing campaign, you should ensure that the correct analytics and tracking tools are in place so you can calculate the impact of your efforts. By monitoring your content closely, it becomes easier to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Elevate your B2B Marketing Strategy in 2023 with the Mavens
With so many different approaches and strategies to marketing, how do you pick which ones to focus on? Fret not, the Mavens can help you come up with a customized B2B digital marketing strategy for your business.
Reach out to the multi-award-winning agency for all your B2B marketing needs and we will help you craft an optimal marketing strategy for the year.
