Well, 2021 was a whirlwind year filled with highs and lows, wasn’t it?
Unsurprisingly, marketers have felt added pressure to deliver new and engaging ways to entice their audience both in the B2B and B2C space. There’s also no doubt that 2021 has been the year of branding, with emphasis on personal brands as well as building a credible company brand, a move that has left some businesses scrambling.
The shift to digital marketing accelerated for many companies in 2021, due in part to the pandemic, but also a realisation that the way people buy technology is changing. As consumers, we’re all used to getting recommendations and offers specific to our needs and behaviours. B2B buyers also want a personalised approach and to understand how a solution will meet their specific needs.
In 2022 trends within B2B and B2C are becoming more aligned than ever.
“The way that we buy things, the way that we consume things, the way that we as consumers make decisions, and the way that B2B buyers behave and act has been evolving. And marketers must respond.”
Virginia Bray, Co-founder Marketing Fusion.
We were curious to find out what trends senior marketing professionals believe will be impossible to ignore in 2022.
So, eager to find out what the industry’s take is on all of this, we shared a short survey with our network. We also sat down and spoke with our co-founder, Virginia Bray to get her views on the year ahead.
We first asked which of these marketing strategies should B2B marketing be embracing:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Personalisation and Buyer Journeys topped our survey. Let’s dive a little deeper and find out how these strategies are set to transform B2B marketing.
57% of our survey respondents felt that ABM was a top 3 priority for their business in 2022.
ABM is not a new trend. In fact, it’s been around for over a decade. In recent times however momentum has increased and there are now sufficient proof points and success stories, especially amongst enterprise tech vendors, for the strategy to have become mainstream.
A rash of new platform vendors supporting different aspects of ABM, have also driven greater awareness and uptake, making ABM approaches more accessible.
That’s not to say that ABM is universally accepted. In a recent LinkedIn poll, the majority of respondents felt that they were at the ‘toe dipping’ stage. And ABM is also evolving to become, rather inevitably, ABX which stands for Account Based Experience (or Everything).
In 2022, ABM will continue to evolve to the point where ABM and (good) B2B marketing become synonymous. Our rather safe prediction is that mid-sized and smaller organisations will start to adopt this as part of their go to market strategy, not just the big players.
Personalisation was a top 3 trend for half our respondents. B2B has been notoriously poor at providing personalised experiences, but things are starting to shift.
As one of our survey respondents said, marketers should be “listening to our customers and target audience to identify their needs/worries etc. Then making sure messages are targeted to them, therefore avoiding the one size fits all campaign.”
In 2022, the trend towards highly personalised communications and content will step up a gear – driven by changing buyer expectations, the focus on deeper levels of insight and the drive towards building long term relationships.
But personalisation goes beyond simply popping a customer logo on an ad or inserting tokens in to email copy. And as always, personalisation needs to be done with care and caution. A poorly personalised or irrelevant message can work against you and put buyers off. Veer too far into familiarity and you risk coming across as creepy. So stringent sanity, data quality and process checks are needed to make it work effectively.
In 2020/21 brand purpose and values have taken even greater significance, and this trend is set to accelerate.
Being authentic and human really resonated during a time when human connections were limited. As one of our respondents commented “be more personal - with so many people working from home making sure people feel like an individual not part of a mass is important.”
Buyers’ behaviour suggests a more humanised approach is what resonates now. Virginia confirmed this too, “people buy from people and brands that they know, like and trust”. They want to understand the story of the people behind the brand, as well as the features and functions of the product.
Again – as purpose-driven consumer brands like Patagonia have come to the fore, B2B brands are also connecting with audiences and supporters by communicating their brand values and purpose. As one responder put it, “... we all want to be inspired by the brands we interact with.”
Increasingly buyers just don’t want to be sold to – they want to self-educate and feel in control of the buying process, with 44% of millennials preferring no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting.
The rise of product-led growth (PLG) especially amongst Silicon Valley scale ups, is in response to this behaviour trend. The premise is that getting the product into the hands of the buyer as early as possible allows the buyer to experience the benefits for themselves and share their experiences.
In essence this trend is about switching from helping sellers to sell solutions, to helping buyers to buy.
Watch out for those ‘Book a demo’ buttons as brands look to get their product into buyers’ hands as early as possible. Keep in mind that vendors run the risk of buyers losing focus, poor experiences going unreported and buying decisions drifting out.
The trend towards self-service is one of the biggest trends and is set to continue amongst some key buying groups.
Aligned to the drive towards self-service is the trend for B2B brands to provide more interactive, engaging and video-based content. With buyer attention spans shrinking, interactive tools that help buyers to benchmark themselves and get customised insights help vendors set themselves apart by delivering real value to buyers.
And new techniques are becoming more accessible all the time. A trend in which our survey supported; “Visual storytelling - people like to learn from other people”.
Video content is already massive and is fast becoming the primary method of consuming content. Virginia agrees, “I think visual storytelling, including video and animation will dominate in 2022 and beyond. And there are new AI driven technologies, including hyper-real animation like the MetaHumans stuff that's emerging, that are going to accelerate that."
Exploring new technologies and the evolution of social platforms will lead to some interesting ventures for B2B brands. Many will start exploring new technologies and opportunities to engage with new audiences.
How those initiatives will take shape and how mainstream they will become in 2022 is unknown but one thing is for sure: B2B marketing will continue to evolve in response to buyer behaviour. But as always, we must be careful to not to lose the human touch that our audiences crave.
2022 is going to be the year of personalised buyer journeys, and you don’t want to be left behind. We wanted to write something meaningful to wrap up, but this survey response beautifully encapsulates everything we’ve discussed here. “[We need to be] listening and asking. We need to reconnect with our audience. The world has changed, fundamentally changed, and everything we used to know has gone out of the window. We need to check our previously held assumptions.”
So, what’s next for Marketing Fusion? We will be supporting our clients to create content that’s focused and personalised. Virginia concludes, “we want to continue to create great relevant content that hits the mark and has a story with a clear message and that solves a problem”.
At its core, we believe this is essentially about good marketing, based on customer needs, backed by a sound strategy.
Interested to read more content from us? Sign up now for our insight eBook which will be released in January 2022: Creating personalised B2B buyer journeys at scale.
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