5 marketing trends for B2B tech companies

Are you wanting to stay ahead of the digital marketing game? then you need to get on board with these 5 major digital marketing trends for B2B tech companies.

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 1. Utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Personalisation

AI is by far one of the most apparent themes appearing in the digital marketing world. AI plays a huge part in the way marketers do their jobs today. The main reason for this? AI can track behavioural patterns and compile customer information from social media platforms and websites alike, in a way that a human could only dream of doing so. With the ability to collect vast amounts of very important data on a customer, AI can turn a mainstream marketing campaign into a personal pursuit of customer loyalty and higher conversion rates.

One critical variable that AI can help obtain is location. For example, this can help target specific customers in certain areas. Other useful variables AI can help to obtain are customer preferences, contexts and habits. This information can be concatenated to create the vital information needed for a fully personalised marketing campaign.

2. Video Marketing

People today are demanding more than just content marketing and blog posts. The former is still important, but studies have shown that video marketing is in high demand, and it seems to be working better than ever before. According to Contently, people are spending more time watching a digital video than they are on social media. There are many different scenarios where a video can be more beneficial than blogging: interviews, live streaming and ‘how to’ videos are just a few examples. All of which are far more interactive and visually-rich than a basic content marketing campaign. If you don’t believe me, check out these stats from Forbes on video marketing:

• According to YouTube, mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year.
• Video is projected to claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019.
• Adding a video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by 200-300%.
• 90% of customers report that product videos help them make purchasing decisions.
• 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.

Furthermore, video marketing can be used as a tool to increase brand awareness, a company can use video for ‘behind the scenes’, ‘meet the team’ and so on. This is a great way to advocate how great your colleagues are and to gain trust from potential clients, as well as making marketing more real-life and personalised.

3. Adoption of Marketing automation tools

If you haven’t already, I suggest you start using an automation tool. What is marketing automation and why adopt it, you may ask? Marketing automation refers to certain platforms like Marketo or HubSpot and other similar technologies. These help a company more effectively market its products. Be it by stringing a campaign across multiple useful channels, or just to mechanise the mundane repetitive aspects of a marketing campaign. Whatever you use them for, marketing automation tools are necessary to scale and score leads. They help to significantly increase a return on investment from your sales/marketing team.

What’s more, is that automation tools are very easy to integrate with a WordPress site, take a look at these helpful articles to get some advice on what the best procedures are for integration. For B2B Tech companies, automation tools are not marketing trends, they are marketing obligations.

4. LinkedIn retargeting

Social media marketing is so last year. LinkedIn is the new Instagram, according to a recent report by LinkedIn, 92% of B2B marketers prefer to do their marketing via LinkedIn as opposed to other social media channels. Moreover, according to the report, 46% of the website traffic to companies is driven through LinkedIn, thus increasing brand awareness quite significantly.

The key to LinkedIn marketing is quality, 2018 has seen an increase of quantity but also quality of content being posted on LinkedIn. Be it a ‘how to’ post, or an interesting news article, everything posted on your companies LinkedIn is a form of indirect marketing, the goal is to drive traffic and increase your company’s credibility. This theme is set to continue into the near future, as the subtle and detailed content is becoming more favourable for consumers.

5. Accounts Based Marketing (ABM) as a strategy

For B2B companies, ABM is not one of the newest marketing trends. Recently, however, it has come under the limelight in the sense that, it is increasingly being used to target specific accounts with more personalised content. One way, to define Accounts Based Marketing is using the fishing analogy that I have been exposed to many times: normal marketing is like fishing with a net, you catch everything that you can. Accounts Based Marketing, is like fishing with a spear but on mass, you target specific detailed accounts, in the hope to get fewer, but more successful leads that will, in turn, become conversions.

Furthermore, it is predicted that an increase in the use of ABM as a strategy, will cause greater affinities to form between marketing and sales teams. Using ABM will allow the marketing team to provide sales with information like geographical location and vital behavioural patterns of key targets, resulting in better efficiency.