The Most Critical Trends In B2B Marketing

From augmented reality to video marketing to personalization: the trends in B2B marketing are increasingly reacting to digital change. We outline the most important developments here.

B2B Marketing Trends: You Should Know These 7 Developments

Personalization

Personalized marketing is playing an increasingly important role in B2B online marketing. Testing the website, segmenting B2B buyers, and offering an individual experience to each customer have become essential parts of marketing strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) makes a vital contribution in individual incentives, product recommendations, or fast and intelligent interaction with chatbots.

Community Building

Social media is becoming more and more important for community building in B2B companies. The Liebherr Group, for example, asked fans all over the world to post their favorite pictures of cranes via an app in a specially set up community. The English-language Facebook page of Lufthansa Cargo also shows that the dialogue with customers in the B2B area works: it is already followed by 170,000 fans.

Also Read: How To Develop Your Social Media Strategy

Video Marketing

Live video streaming on Facebook, Google Hangouts, Instagram, YouTube, and Periscope from Twitter is rising in many B2B companies. Mobile video consumption is increasing worldwide and occupying an ever-larger place in B2B marketing strategies.

Programmatic Advertising

In 2019, programmatic advertising was particularly in demand as a form of B2B marketing. Based on the available data, advertising banners or commercials tailored to the user are displayed. The advertising banners are individualized via an auction process: After checking the user relevance for the advertiser’s campaign, the highest bidder receives the bid and is allowed to control the advertising banners.

Augmented Reality

For example, many customers ask for more than orders from traditional online shops – they want to see the actual dimensions. IKEA and Amazon lead the B2C sector: unique apps enable customers to view the products in the desired design before buying them and placing them virtually in the actual premises. But also in the B2B sector, there is now the possibility of using software-controlled augmented reality to make both vast and complex machine systems accessible – even from the inside. Gone are the days when such monsters had to be set up at trade fairs or in the showroom.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is picking up speed – also in B2B marketing. It helps marketing professionals deeply understand customers and their interests, personalities and online habits, and other factors. Machine learning collects and analyzes user data and creates optimal conditions for hyper-targeting and personalized marketing; targeting potential customers is no longer a guessing game. However, the potential of machine learning and AI extends far beyond what we can currently grasp.

Voice Search

Voice search remains a hot trend. There are more than 50,000 language services, the so-called skills, for Amazon’s language assistant Alexa. Voice search is fundamentally changing the way B2B buyers ask search engines. And it is likely to gain massively in importance: Google assumes that by 2020 more than 50 percent of all search queries will be made as voice queries.

Trends In B2B Online Marketing: The Customer In Focus

A lot is happening in online marketing; companies are pushing ahead with their activities in a targeted manner with numerous new approaches. In B2B, marketing, in particular, advertising for customers is more personal and intensive than in many other areas.

In all measures, it is important that the focus is on the customer with his questions and needs – and not the company product and its functions. 

Also Read: B2B Marketing – Tactics And Trends For The Perfect Strategy!