The new year is coming fast, and the best way to prepare — and stay ahead of your competitors — is to anticipate upcoming trends in B2B marketing. Just like the previous years, marketers will have to continue to deal with tangible growth and ROI pressures in 2018 as well.
Here are four emerging marketing trends you need to integrate into your 2018 marketing plan.
1. Marketing automation.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate your everyday B2B marketing tasks to save time? With marketing automation, not only will you be able to automate repetitive tasks, you can also nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content along the journey to purchase.
Although the technology is in its early stage of maturity, marketers are pushing themselves to exploit the possibilities to deliver relevant and timely communications to prospects to nurture leads.
Marketing automation is more about nurturing your prospects than selling to them. It helps you streamline your inbound marketing strategy and enhance the communication by delivering content at the exact time your prospects need it.
2. Content marketing.
For many years, content marketing has been a popular technique to nurture and acquire leads in the B2B industry. As the customer journey becomes longer, businesses will need to deploy plenty of research on different stages of the customer lifecycle. Content marketing is highly effective for B2B marketers to educate potential customers about best practices for their industry.
Although nearly 90 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing as a core component of their online marketing strategy, only 37 percent of them have a documented content strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 benchmarks. According to those same benchmarks, lack of strategy is the primary…
