Phil Brown, Director at The Channel Partnership, a B2B marketing agency and winner of the ‘best use of content marketing’ award at the B2B marketing awards 2012, shares his predictions on what to expect in the world of B2B technology marketing in 2013.
For more information on The Channel Partnership visit: www.thechannelpartnership.com
In the spirit of Christmas, Phil Brown has even thrown in an extra prediction for good measure.
Sophisticated data management and analytics will increasingly be regarded as a fundamental skill within B2B marketing departments, used to underpin a range of activities from market segmentation, to lead nurturing, retention programmes and cross-selling initiatives.
- Social media will cease to be regarded as a magical black art, which requires separate departments and separate agencies to manage it. It will be recognised one of a range of valuable communications media available to marketers, which need to be managed in an integrated way to be effective.
- B2B organisations will recognise that their go-to-market activities need to be managed as a single process to maximise ROI. As a result marketing and sales departments will increasingly be managed through a consolidated reporting line, with a senior executive responsible for both functions.
- Insight-based, content-driven marketing will continue to increase in importance as suppliers realise that buyers will listen to people that have something interesting and thought-provoking to say, rather than those that just want to bang on about how great their product is
- Sophisticated personalisation of communications, based on micro-segmentation, will become the norm within B2B marketing, as marketers start to work out how to actually use the powerful marketing automation tools they’ve invested in over recent years.
- Technology vendors will get far more sophisticated about channel enablement, realising that it needs to consist of more than providing partners with a stack of collateral and getting their salespeople to sit through a 30 minute training webinar. Resellers will align themselves with vendors that offer full go-to-market support as they struggle to make headway in a depressed economy.
- Direct mail will make a reappearance, as email marketing continues to suffer from diminishing returns. Direct mail 2.0 will take advantage of advances in data and production techniques, to deliver highly personalised, rich content relevant to the decision maker
- Trade shows and conferences will continue to be important as people welcome opportunities to escape from their virtual worlds and meet real-life people. Attendees will continue to have little interest in the products being exhibited or the presentations being delivered.
- A picture tells a 1000 words, a video a million. Video-based content will move from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to an essential tool in the sales and marketing armoury, used in a variety of contexts (e.g. websites, e-mail, sales presentations) to communicate complex B2B messages in a more engaging and impactful way.
- Spend on SEO agencies will decline as B2B marketers realise that a) Google’s algorithms can’t be outsmarted for long, and b) if you haven’t got compelling and engaging content that’s highly relevant to the user, then driving increased traffic to your site achieves nothing.
- The term ‘cloud’ will become so ubiquitous, as a prefix applied to every known technology product or service, that entering the search term ‘cloud *’ into Google will cause it to spontaneously combust
For more information on The Channel Partnership visit: www.thechannelpartnership.com