Susan Tyson, Director of Brand Marketing
Design. Development. Execution. These are the tenets of success for every brand and marketing campaign. Here is a glimpse into what marketers can expect in 2020:
As a B2B marketer, you need a strong integrated marketing team that covers the disciplines of digital marketing – marketing and brand strategy, demand generation, content generation, website, social, sale support, research and analytics. And you have to have tools for CRM, content management, marketing automation, predictive analytics, web analytics and social listening.Having a deep understanding of your buyer personas and the decisions they make during the purchasing journey is essential to timely and proper customer engagement. If you engage too early you will cause a prospect to exit the conversation. If you engage too late, well, the result is lost sales. Some strategies miss this opportunity because of the investment in time it takes to develop a deep understanding of their buyers and sometimes the costs associated with building the personas. The interviews can take a long time, and the customers don’t always feel comfortable revealing all the information needed to build the deep analysis.
The most essential characteristics driving today’s marketing strategies start with a successful alignment between sales and marketing with shared priorities: agree to communication frequency, pipeline measurement, lead quality over quantity and data enrichment to drive successful prospecting. A clean database is a must. You must also adopt common measurements and definitions, and learn from the data. Use win/loss analysis to drive changes in positioning statements as buyer’s personas needs shift. Conduct periodic reviews of processes like lead scoring or routing.
In the years ahead, content will remain the focus of successful marketing strategies. Buyers will continue to get savvier and demand that marketers meet them on their terms. It’s important for marketers to continue to produce relevant and timely content.
Just how successful is content marketing in today’s marketing landscape? Turns out the numbers are very good indeed. According to the newly released “B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America” study, 62 percent of B2B marketers in North America say their organization’s overall approach to content marketing has been much more or somewhat more successful than a year ago. The report surveyed 2,562 marketers from varying industries around the world.
Here’s some of the numbers from the report: