The year 2022 has led to the advancement of many B2B Marketing trends. Nowadays, many businesses capitalize on the digital space to execute strategies that will market and sell their products. Below, you will be learning about some of the B2B marketing trends suitable for your company to explore.
What are B2B Marketing trends?
B2B marketing trends are strategies that business applies to market their products or services to other businesses effectively. Basically, these marketing strategies help to boost sales of their products or services. Most times businesses execute these trends digitally to push and promote their products to their target audience.
When businesses take advantage of these trends, it leads to lead generation and conversion. Leads generation and conversion is simply converting your prospective customers into loyal customers.
Top 7 B2B Marketing Trends 2022
This year offers so many top-marketing trends suitable for your organization to explore. Here is a list of the top 7 B2B Marketing trends 2022:
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating, editing, publishing, and distributing unique content. Content marketers direct this content to a specific targeted audience online.
This type of marketing is already a leading trend this 2022. To join and win in this trend, you just need to stay committed to it. Basically, to stay committed you to need to actively create suitable content for your target audience. Read more on Online Positioning and Branding For Small Businesses.
Other ways your brand can win in the content marketing trend this year includes:
a. Be consistent in publishing keyword-focused content
One great way to keep your audience glued is by being consistent with what you do. Publish quality content regularly. Basically, this ensures that you keep the same pace as your competitors. Additionally, you need to ensure that your content is based on keyword research. Keyword research gives you an idea of what engages your audience the most. This increases conversions and helps you build an active audience base.
Always use trending keywords to improve the SEO value of your content. Using them boosts your content to the top page of the search engine. If your content is on the first page, it will attract more users to visit your site.
b. Create a mixed content
Basically, creating mixed content means that you need a blend of both long and short-form content. Short-form content is typically written with less than 1000 words. On the other hand, a long term contains 1,000 – 7,500 words.
c. Write Your Content Targeted Towards A Specific Audience.
Writing specifically for your target audience is a B2B marketing trend that will never go out of style. Basically, tailoring your content helps to gain and maintain your user’s attention. Before diving fully into any B2B marketing trend in 2022, your company must first identify its target audience.
After you have done this successfully, it is important to gather useful market research about your audience. This will give you an idea of what content to create that will mirror how they behave. Additionally, you can offer products or services that they will find most interesting.
d. Prioritize User Experience
After you have successfully pinpointed your target audience, it is important to consider how they approach your content. How do you prefer your business to be seen by your target audience? What value does your content offer your audience? Basically, answering these questions will help you empathize with your users.
There are three types of user intent to think about when developing your content. They include:
i. Navigational: When a user or visitor inputs certain keywords into a search engine to find information about a product or service.
ii. Informational: Content that focuses on delivering information about industry-specific services or products.
iii. Transactional: This is when a user or visitor intends to purchase, download or register something.
When you are creating content, ensure that you consider its intent and what value it will bring to your audience.
2. Retention marketing
Retention marketing, also called Loyalty marketing is a type of marketing that involves keeping customers happy, and engaged. It involves you delivering relevant content to your audience to keep them hooked long term. This eventually leads to a higher marketing ROI via continuous sales at a lower cost for each sale
This type of marketing is still very much viable in 2022. Experts from Marketing Metrics have stated that the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. On the other hand, the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5 – 20%.
Basically, the result of these statistics already tells you the importance of retention marketing. There is a higher chance of selling successfully to your existing customers than new ones. Hence, you need to ensure that your existing customers remain loyal to your brand.
According to a Harvard Business study, a 5% increase in your customer retention can lead to up to a 95% increase in your profits. Essentially, the bottom line here is that you need to prioritize making existing customers loyal over acquiring new customers. Some customer retention tips include:
a. Customer Training
b. Onboarding and Education
c. Ongoing customer support
d. Constant Communication
e. Customer appreciation
f. Survey and Testimonials
3. Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the popular b2b marketing trends 2022. This marketing trend is a popular way companies use to instantly communicate with their customers. The Chatbot feature, which has advanced over the years, is now an essential part of a standard web design and will continue to be important even after 2022. Read more on the Best B2B Web Designs for your business in 2022.
According to Userlike, 80% of users have interacted with a website’s chatbot at some point. These statistics show how effective this feature is. In 2022, many clients expect 24/7 customer service and quick responses to any question they have. This task may be difficult to manage without the assistance of chatbots, which are programmed to offer similar services.
Also, many industries use this feature to help clients navigate through their websites and answer important questions. The chatbots tool leads to an increase in client satisfaction, customer engagements as well as business connections. Some advantages of using this trend include:
a. Website Navigation Help
The more complex an industry is, the more complex the website will be. Hence, many users will need help to navigate the site. With Chatbots, the complexity of a website is not a problem. They can help to direct visitors to where they will find what they need.
b. Quick Payment Responses
Chatbots now have a payment processing option. When a user places a request to buy a company’s products or services, the chatbot will automatically issue an API request and send them a payment link. This facilitates easy payment for the user and allows the company to receive payments easily.
c. Instant Gratification
The Chatbot feature provides instant gratification to customers by giving them whatever answer they need immediately.
4. Interactive Content
Interactive content marketing trend involves you encouraging your followers to share your post on social media. Also, you can create interesting quizzes, Implement infographics, and film videos to make your content suitable for interaction. This aims to improve the overall customer interaction and engagement.
Additionally, it helps to increase your client’s attention span by subtly encouraging them to engage with your content or marketing material. As clients’ tastes shift towards interactive content, storytelling becomes an important future for the success of a business.
It is not surprising that this is one of the leading b2b marketing trends 2022 because most customers prefer interactive content.
5. Voice Marketing
Voice marketing is a set of marketing tactics designed for audiences who use voice-enabled devices. Basically, the idea behind this new trend is to adopt marketing strategies that aim to take advantage of the growing need of people who use voice-controlled devices regularly.
Without a doubt, Voice search and digital assistance utilization will increase in 2022. When voice-controlled devices were first created, people used them to compile grocery lists and notes. However, these days many people now use voice searches to ask questions, get direction, play songs, and many other things. This is where marketing comes in.
Many marketers now take advantage of this opportunity of this to sell their brand. You can also take advantage of voice marketing just like others. However, you must ensure that your company is well prepared for it. Your organization needs to have all the necessary tools to compete successfully with other marketers in the game.
6. Nostalgia Marketing
Nostalgia Marketing is all about associating your brand with positive ideas and concepts from the past. Basically, it entails you utilizing old, familiar concepts that are known for developing fond memories and happy connotations to build your customer’s in your brand.
This type of marketing can help b2b marketers to relate their services and products to the world easily. Your company can join this marketing trend by being authentic and capitalizing on popular cultural trends. Also, your company can reintroduce a service or product that was discontinued to surprise customers.
In 2022, Nostalgia Marketing has become a more valuable tool. This is because it is familiar, comforting, and safe. These three components are exactly what the world needs in 2022.
7. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the popular B2B marketing trends 2022. It entails effectively marketing your brand on social media. You may be thinking that all you need to do is to create a social media profile. However, creating a profile does mean you will automatically gain attention from users, convert and retain them as customers.
There are numerous social media marketing trends your company can take advantage of in 2022. Based on the social media platform, these trends include:
a. Facebook
Facebook is a leading social platform because its number of users outnumbers other platforms. Hence, it is more difficult to grow the number of your followers organically since many other brands are in this competition. To ensure that your target audience sees your content, your brand needs to use targeted Facebook ads.
Basically, running ads on Facebook is important because the platform has a high-earning user base. Using Facebook ads to promote your brand allows it to position important posts in front of people who are interested in your product or service.
b. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is another social media platform that can help B2B businesses generate leads. Basically, this platform allows you to be industry-specific with the kind of content you share. This feature is not readily available on other platforms, which gives LinkedIn an edge over the rest.
Since this platform is more targeted, it is very easy to connect and interact with like-minded professionals. This way, you will be able to promote your services and products to people who already understand the industry.
Users on LinkedIn engage in the social media platform because they like learning about various trends in the industry. Hence, you need to post content that is more of a leadership piece. Posting sales-centered content may turn your potential customers away before you get a chance to talk to them. Ensure that any content you share is either educational or informational to keep your audience glued.
c. Twitter
Twitter is a unique social media that does not allow you to promote lengthy, thought-provoking content. The character count on a post maxes out at 280, therefore, you need to draft out short and relevant content. Your content has to be able to capture your audience’s attention immediately. Some helpful twitter marketing tips include:
· Always add an image to your content. This leads to 89% more engagement.
· Make use of hashtags. Tweets with hashtags get twice as much engagement as tweets without any hashtags.
· Tweets more during weekends. Tweets sent during weekends have more engagement rates,
Ensure that you keep these useful tips in mind whenever you are creating content for your Twitter profile. Additionally, make sure that you respond to tweet replies. If a user replies to your post with a question, ensure that you respond appropriately. This supports customer retention and increases user experience.
d. Instagram
Instagram is another social media platform that can help B2B businesses to generate leads. To get leads from this platform, you need to post eye-catching content. This can be in form of a short collateral video that appeals to both the emotions and senses of viewers.
e. Tik Tok
Although Tik Tok is not an ideal social media platform for generating leads and revenue, you can also use it to your advantage. You can use it to spread your brand’s awareness and get more people to become aware of your company. However, it may take a while before you get tangible results for your efforts. You just need to exercise a lot of patience and engage your viewers on a personal level to benefit from Tik Tok.
Since the platform is heavily saturated with young users, you must ensure that you create mind-blowing contents to engage them actively.
Basically, these 7 trends above are what saturates B2B Marketing in 2022.
How can I use B2B Marketing trends 2022 to boost sales?
Basically, B2B marketing trends are important because it helps a brand to boost sales. Here are 3 ways you can use B2B marketing trends 2022 to boost your sales:
1. Make use of downloadable links on your website
Prospective customers tend to review the website if any brand they want to patronize to learn more about the brand. This is why it is paramount for you to prioritize their user experience. Basically, you can provide maximum user experience by sharing a downloadable link to various marketing collateral pieces. Some of these pieces include selling sheets, brochures as well as pitch decks to provide transparency to your prospects. This will build their trust in your brand.
A good example of this is the free website evaluation feature we added for users on our website:
2. Integrate Marketing Collateral Pieces into your Email Marketing Campaigns
Marketing collateral pieces are any media pieces used to promote a brand’s product or services. You can integrate these pieces into your newsletter email marketing campaigns. Instead of inputting any unnecessary copy, just make your marketing collateral pieces interactive or visually appealing and use them.
Also, you can send these pieces from your email account directly to your prospective customer’s email address. This allows you to follow up with a prospect and gives you an avenue to contact them again for future lead generation efforts.
3. Bring It to Every Appointment Set by Sales Development Representatives (SDRs)
Bringing marketing collateral pieces to every appointment set by SDRs improves the overall appointment experience for your company and prospects. Basically, these allow your prospects to check the products and services you have to offer.
The three ways above will help you to utilize marketing trends to boost your sales. This in turn will lead to the rapid growth of your company.
Bottom Line
B2B Marketing trends 2022 are trends that help B2B businesses to boost the attraction, conversion, and retention of customers. The popular marketing trends include content marketing, retention marketing, social media marketing, interactive content, chatbots, Nostalgia Marketing, and Video Marketing. Basically, combining all of these marketing strategies will generate more leads and boost your company’s sales.