As digital marketing continues to shape the B2B marketing landscape, marketers must loosen their wallet strings to make more room for new trends. Here is an overview of some must-haves in your digital marketing budget. These trends will help you strengthen reporting, bridge the gap between marketing and sales, prove ROI, and bring personalized marketing to the forefront.
Video and Live stream
Consumers love watching videos – four times as many prefer to watch a video than read text. You need a clear plan and a solid strategy to achieve measurable KPIs if you want to succeed. As the live video trend moves from a novelty to a marketing mainstream, the sooner you put a strategy in place, the better. Technology allows the “voyeur consumer” model to thrive. Add to that the sense of urgency to watch now or miss out forever, and you have addicted consumers, even in the B2B space.
Content Marketing
While content marketing should always dominate your digital marketing budget, virtually every marketer is already creating content for their audience, and it’s becoming increasingly more work to stand out. Consumers are exposed to hundreds of ads daily, facing content fatigue. Content will need to slow down and get real, with more authenticity, personalization, and intention. Brands are looking for tools to create personalized experiences, with personalization no longer a buzzword but a fundamental element. Journey mapping is closely linked to personalization. Brands must work to understand the customer journey, including content consumption, social sharing, and purchasing behavior, and uncover patterns to suggest the right course of action for each unique consumer.
Creating Strategies
Producing content for the sole purpose of pushing a product toward sale is not a marketing strategy. A slew of poor content resulting from a lack of commitment to your digital marketing strategy will hurt your brand far more than not creating content. Personalized content is the way of the future. However, most B2B content marketers don’tneed a written strategy. Take a step back and consider why you’re creating, not just how. You want to create content to move people from “just browsing” to the point in the sales funnel where they become buying customers. To do this, you need a clear plan. It would help if you determined the audience you want to reach, your goals, when and where you can deliver the content, and why it’s essential. Spend time and resources developing a strategy and defining your key performance indicators.
The Internet of Things
Greetings from the connected consumer gadget era of Jetson. While smartphones and tablets remain essential in laying the foundation for the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, we have only scratched the surface of what lies ahead. Consider this:
Your car can alert your home’s thermostat when you’re 10 minutes away to raise or lower the temperature to your comfort level for maximum energy efficiency.
Your doctor can get information straight from wearable blood pressure monitors.
Your water heater can send diagnostic reports to a customer service representative to resolve issues before a breakdown occurs.
This super network of connectivity continues to offer more data that can be used for actionable strategies, enabling more granular insights into consumer habits and preferences and empowering marketers to target their audience more precisely.
Content Distribution
A common misconception in content marketing is that “if you build it, they will come”.
While good writing can be helpful, good content will only be noticed if its distribution is integral to your digital marketing efforts. To give your content a chance, you’ll need an engine to propel it and get the information to your most important contacts. As marketers look to decentralize content, many are turning to new channels to see what resonates with their audiences. Paid content may give you a slight boost, but 90% of clicks on social media go to organic content, and on Google, organic content makes up 80% of clicks. Before creating content, you must ask yourself who is interested in it, determine why, and then build a network to amplify your work.
Cross-device Marketing Strategies
The average consumer is connected through more than five digital devices, which means marketers have five times more work to ensure the content they’ve created is optimized for any platform on which their audience wants to digest. As new platforms, like wearables, become more commonplace, other platforms you may have yet to consider appear. Ensure you have enough room in your budget to invest in these platforms before falling behind.
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