Top B2B Marketing Trends – 2016

We are halfway through 2015 and the year saw many B2B marketing trends such as personalization, predictive modelling, and smarketing (sales and marketing alignment). Here are the top 5 trends for B2B marketers to redefine their marketing strategies for 2016:

1. Focus on Responsive Website Design: A recent change in Google’s algorithm favoured websites that are mobile optimized, as 60% of traffic now comes from mobile devices. After the latest Google update, making your website responsive has become a necessity to provide a superlative user experience across all devices.

2. Better Customer Experience: According to a research conducted by Gartner, “89% of the companies’ surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience in 2016”. It doesn’t come as a surprise as the top marketing technology investment in 2014 was customer experience. An effective customer service strategy including new innovations such as live agent support, online communities, more responsive help portals, effective SLAs, etc. can improve your customer service experience resulting in increased CSAT and reduced support costs.

3. Emphasis on - Events and Tradeshows: Some old techniques are making a comeback (for most companies they never got old). In any relationship-driven business, in-person interactions act as the best marketing technique since there is no substitute to it, and a research by PR Newswire has proved it – “Trade shows and events, and content creation are rated the most successful marketing tactics.” As per 2014 B2B Marketing Trends, In-person events, tradeshows and expos remain the most appropriate choice over webinars, online presentations, white papers, videos and case studies in order to better collaborate.

4. Rising Importance of Social Media: Having an effective social media strategy is a key necessity in a marketing budget today. Social media helps in engaging users, improving search ranking and increasing site traffic. According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers agreed that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2014. As the popularity of social media platforms grow, B2B marketers will and should prefer investing more time and resources into them.

5. Marketing Automation: As per Scoop-it, “Use of marketing automation will double in 2017 in B2B organizations.” Marketing automation is bound to experience radical changes in the coming years. More focus will be on predictive modelling based on customers’ actions through behavioral data. Mobile optimization and use of predictive analytics will allow the marketers to identify better leads and target potential customers.

After analysing the above trends, it is safe to say that the continued investment in a Marketing Automation Platform, enhances customer experience and focuses on responsive web-design - will maximize brand presence and conversions.