8 Tricky B2B Marketing Predictions for 2012
This year saw social media as the new giant in marketing, turning from a must-have into a must-use-correctly platform. Online marketing got a huge chunk of the budget. B2B telemarketers have become more informed, armed with web visit data, landing page form fills, etc. But what can we marketers expect in 2012? The following list of eight predictions may be pretty palpable and somewhat obvious, but the tricky part is in how you make subtle adjustments to strategy based on their implication. Without further ado...
#1 B2B companies will embrace content marketing more than ever before.
Their overall strategy and processes will increasingly include the adoption of blogging and social media. More companies in general will be applying content marketing principles and have dedicated teams or internal resources to manage the process. Companies that have not already dabbled with outsourcing content creation to freelancers will start taking advantage of external resources.
#2 As a result of massive amounts of content made available daily, users will become increasingly more discerning.
As marketers, we can spot an SEO-driven, keyword-rich, content-shallow, anchor-text-link-heavy blog article a mile away. Users are becoming equally savvy. Before you go ribboning your content with keywords and links, beware the discerning reader.
#3 Companies will become famous for their killer content, not just their great products.
This has already begun and the trend will continue. You can all tell me about the Old Spice campaign of a couple years ago, but who can name even one of their fragrances? It’s a double-edged sword that more companies will be hopping on the content marketing bandwagon. On the one hand, it validates the technique as a whole; on the other hand, so much more content will be competing for the same, finite audience. The cream of the crop will rise to the top. Brand personality will become the magic sauce.
#4 Mobile marketing will explode in 2012 with the dramatic growth of smart phones and tablets.
Seamless sharing of content and mobile-optimized websites and content should come to the forefront. But it will still only be the tip of the iceberg by the end of 2012. According to Frost & Sullivan, the open rate for text messages is 98% compared to 22% for email marketing.
#5 B2B email marketing may not be going anywhere, but email opens and click throughs will decline with more and more email marketers competing for the same audience.
More emails will be sent than ever before in 2012. You ready for a staggering number? 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide in 2010. If the exponential growth of all things digital continues in the same fashion, email marketers are in for a rough ride.
#6 Respect for privacy will be a focus-point of consumers.
With the growing popularity of cookie-dropping and marketing based on the behavioral targeting, the end-user is becoming aware of the fact that marketers know where they’ve been and what they do on the internet. We all know the scrutiny that Facebook is under because of the huge amounts of personal data shared its site, and that trend will continue. In terms of email marketing, perhaps the biggest impact on privacy and deliverability in 2011 came from changes to laws relating to consumer permission and protection. In 2012, you'll need to demonstrate to your prospect base that you're trustworthy.
#7 E-mail campaigns will be increasingly more mobile-friendly.
An increasing amount of people read their emails on a mobile device, and smartphone prices are continuing to drop. Readers will demand that all messages are “digitally legible” on their mobile devices. Therefore, email has to be mobile-optimized. Ensuring that your email and website landing pages render properly is of paramount importance. One note for 2013 predictions though, as smartphones become smarter and more capable of rendering HTML cleanly, there will likely be less prerequisite for such specialized mobile rendering.
#8 Video marketing will take a stronger foothold than ever before.
Internet video is now 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic, and will reach 62 percent by the end of 2015. It often seems that consumers trust video more than the written word. Perhaps it goes to authenticity – seeing is believing and seeing people rather than words is more compelling. Most consumers are looking for an authority who can convey impactful ideas, and video is increasingly the channel to deliver these ideas to them. Developing a video marketing strategy for 2012 needs to be in your marketing plan.
