Has Your Marketing Plan Been Given A Checkup Lately?
As consumer behavior and technology advancements continue to evolve, business-to-business marketers have seen a significant impact on how they plan and execute their marketing tactics. While the rules of successful marketing continue to change, keeping a pulse on the current trends will help you improve your marketing efforts in the coming years. When it comes to updating your company’s marketing plan, here are five trends to watch in 2018.
Content Marketing
The cornerstone of B2B marketing efforts will be content marketing this year. Content marketing is a strategic strategy that is focused on distributing valuable, consistent, and relevant content to attract and retain the right target audience. In fact, 80 percent of B2B firms are focused on building a content marketing strategy. But what kind of content is the most effective? According to the experts at Ascend2, fact based content like research reports are at the top of the list.
Video Content
Over the last several years, the use of video in B2B marketing has become extremely popular. YouTube, the most popular site for sharing video content, has over a billion users, which is almost one-third of the total Internet users in the world, according to WordStream. Video content engagement levels are much higher than standard text content. When integrating video content into your overall marketing strategy, you have to remember it must be clear, concise and relevant for it to be successful.
SEO Targeting
Search engine optimization (SEO) will continue to be a critical aspect to your marketing success. Managing title tags, meta descriptions, and headers will continue to be important for ranking high on search engines. In fact, according to HubSpot, 61 percent of marketers say that improving their SEO to grow their organic presence on the web is their top marketing priority for 2018. Web searches drive the most traffic to your online content, making higher SEO rankings necessary for getting more traffic to your website, and more customer conversions.
Integrated Marketing Communications
More and more marketers are embracing integrated marketing communications, (IMC) as a way to coordinate their marketing efforts across multiple channels. While this isn’t a new concept, it has new relevancy as more online channels start to emerge. IMC is designed to harness advertising, public relations, direct marketing, digital marketing, sales promotion, content marketing, and other strategies to work together as a unified force. An IMC approach enables the reliable delivery of consistent brand positioning through all online media.
Big Data and IoT
Big data provides you with actionable insight and predictive analytics. While the Internet of things, (IoT) is a network of wearables, physical devices, and other devices that contain software, electronics, actuators, and sensors. These objects can exchange data with network connectivity. This interconnectivity can provide marketers with the opportunity to listen to their clients and respond efficiently to their needs. Leveraging big data and IoT will allow you to focus more on buyer personas, which will result in increased engagement.
The above marketing tactics will increase your company’s return on investment (ROI). When you factor your marketing strategies into your overall ROI tracking, it can help guide your marketing strategies and improve the overall results of your efforts.
