Executive Summary
Marketing is undergoing a profound and lasting shift. Traditional marketing blueprints and best practices are no longer relevant. Industries are being transformed amid technological advancements and rising competition, while stakeholders and customers are always demanding for more, with routes to markets becoming increasingly complex. The pace of business has accelerated, yet growth has slowed.
According to Accenture's findings, "More than 75 percent of CMOs now admit that past formulas are no match against the new breed of disruptors that seems able to win, time and time again, by delivering more relevant customer experiences." Furthermore, "ninety percent of today's CEOs and CMOs believe that the function will change fundamentally over the next three years." Many of the traditional marketing best practices are no longer applicable in a hyper-connected customer-centric world.
The good news is that marketing teams are bucking the trend mentioned above by pivot and adapting to this new reality. These pioneers are rewriting the best practices by taking a more holistic approach and capitalizing on crucial transformational trends. Central to their success are two core themes - Operational Agility to continuously adapt and Customer Accuracy to ensure customer relevance and sustained growth.
Customer Accuracy defined as an organization's ability to dominate a market through precision and predictive customer insight. Insight-driven organizations integrated critical and active listening practices into their marketing culture. Furthermore, we define Operational Agility as an organization's ability to dominate a market through continuous innovation of internal processes and strategic thinking. Agile organizations react more quickly to evolving customer needs and changing market conditions.
Keeping pace with the latest trends is not optional. CMO's and marketers need to upgrade their skills over the coming years or find themselves obsolete. Capitalize on these trends and overturn conventional legacy thinking and processes.
Re-orientate and re-invigorate your organization around these key themes. Build agility into your organization to ensure foresight and flexibility, and ingrain customer-centric critical and active listening into the marketing culture.
Below are the top 10 B2B lead generation and revenue marketing trends for driving business growth.
Master Agile Content Publishing
B2B customer journeys are more complex than ever with touchpoints distributed across expanding and evolving channels, communities, platforms, and journey stages. Content consumers are now more sophisticated, and demand trusted, domain-specific content that conveys genuine expertise. B2B marketing teams need to reconfigure and retool for always-on agile capabilities that allow for dynamic, personalized narratives and continuous communication across many channels and formats.
Getting the content marketing flow right requires an editorial team and a content supply chain that continuously creates and delivers high-quality and relevant information, entertainment, or experience mapped to the customer journey. Content strategies need to identify touchpoints that are critical to creating a customer journey map and understanding the customer experience to optimize all the interactions and conversations that add up to a purchase event.
Agile content marketing models and systems should be architected from the ground up to align with their customer's journeys and experiences. Mastering agile content methods require an iterative operational model, a publishing mindset, editorial talent, and technology well-suited to the task of dynamically reconfiguring content assets.
Content distribution is dependent on many variables, including, but not limited to, budget, talent, target markets, buying cycle complexity, systems, data, and operational maturity. Experienced marketing teams look to data management platforms, analytics, and programmatic platforms for advanced content marketing distribution and optimization.
To ensure companies can deliver personalized experiences at every touchpoint and maximize moment-to-moment relevancy, organizations should look to AI, data sciences, and machine learning to rapidly combine data and behavioral patterns to gain predictive user insights. Ideally, CMO's should call upon outside expertise to help them manage technological complexity, operational models, best practices, and the rapid pace of innovation.
Ultimately content systems and processes need to be modular and flexible to personalize and reconfiguring the narratives to accommodate the target audience's context, i.e., channels, communities, behavior, and journey. The output is content to inform, entertain, and inspire action towards a purchase decision.
In 2020, marketers need to begin the process of rewiring existing processes and systems as they are transitioning to agile content publishing. Below are the "Fantastic Five" priorities for agile content publishing:
- Content supply chain ecosystems: there is no agile or supply chain without a content ecosystem. Ecosystems allow marketers to tap into deep domain expertise, borrow brand equity from influencers, and create an always-on content supply chain that can scale.
- Content publisher: evolve from conventional linear content creation practices to always-on agile content publishing, editorial expertise, and supply chain ecosystems.
- Customer journey narratives: story-centric is not marketing jargon. Best-in-class lead generation and conversion marketers look to buying cycle narratives as the backbone of their content programs. Mapping content "atoms" to customer journey touchpoints and stages is the next evolution of content marketing. This approach lends itself well to content marketing as context and state across the stages will dictate configuration, i.e., medium, message, channels, and data.
- Build user-generated content (UGC) engines: customers and search engines crave UGC. Reviews, datasets, and case studies generate the highest ROI of any content type. Look to social or community platforms and programs to jumpstart the engine. Pick a single segment and subject matter.
- Master the Data sciences: all of the above, content creation, targeting, orchestration, distribution, optimization, and publishing best practices are tightly-coupled to the organization's data and analytics capabilities. CMO's should call upon outside expertise to help them manage technological complexity, operational models, best practices, and the rapid pace of innovation.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around for some time, often used in enterprise or "big-ticket' targeting strategies that justified the higher cost per contact. Traditional a one-to-one direct and database marketing practice. Today, ABM is quickly becoming a preferred B2B lead and revenue marketing practice due to the advancements in marketing technology, automation, and analytics.
ABM is a focused B2B marketing and sales approach to target a company's most profitable accounts. ABM helps align sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns. ABM relies heavily on data management platforms and data sciences to provides innovative and predictive insights into customer behavior across channels and the buying cycle through the application of a unique collaborative approach aimed at identifying and securing profitable customers, keeping them longer, and growing their lifetime value.
According to ITSMA research, "97% of marketers said ABM had a somewhat higher or much higher ROI than other initiatives, and 84% said ABM provided significant benefits to retaining and expanding client relationships."
ABM is not for every B2B organization. Product complexity, price, average deal size, target market, capacity, coverage, sales productivity, sales cycle, go-to-market model, route-to-market model, and sales channels are some of the variables factored into the assessment.
According to recent research, sales and marketing teams experience 24% faster three-year revenue growth. Assuming ABM is an excellent match to your go-to-market, then 2020 is the time to compliment conventional lead generation and inbound marketing with account-based marketing (ABM).
TIP 1: kickstart an ABM pilot campaign by collaborating with sales to select a highly-targetable segment. Identify a critical channel, create an offer, and personalize the landing pages. Include a retargeting component to the campaign to drive conversions. Ideally, create at least two executions for A/B testing and measurement. TIP 2: focus initial B2B ABM efforts on cross-sell or upsell programs where the objective and offer are more natural to map to a somewhat straight forward sales process. Also, existing customers have the added advantage of data that can be extracted from CRM systems to create a more personalized experience. Moreover, strategy sessions with sales are much more useful than top-down prospecting. TIP 3: no two ABM requirements are the same, especially as the B2B sales cycle is often complicated or consultative. Therefore, start with a single account, existing customer, or segment enrichment exercise. Master targeting and data enrichment before expanding to be more sophisticated multi-channel and touch campaigns.Agile Marketing Analytics Platform
Marketers are unlocking new revenue generation sources and maximizing conversions by unifying creativity and analytics to provide innovative and predictive customer insights aimed at identifying and securing profitable customers, keeping them longer, and growing their lifetime value. An organization's ability to dominate a market relies on precision and predictive customer insights to drive the continuous innovation of processes and growth initiatives.
Insight-driven organizations ingrain critical and active listening into the marketing culture to continuously and rigorously mine customer insights to improving customer experience and operational agility. On average, insight-driven organizations use four or more types of ideas and analytic techniques than convention organizations.
Conventional linear marketing methods often lead to generic marketing that does little for lead generation or conversion. Market leaders combine various data sources and analytical techniques to mine for conversion action-biased trends and conversations. These techniques are also agile applicable for customer-driven experience rapid prototyping, design, and development. According to recent research findings, advanced personalization analytics can boost revenues from 5 to 15 percent and drive down acquisition costs.
Unifying creativity and analytics provides marketers to tap into unchartered lead generation and digital marketing capabilities. For example, the automation of the bidding process and targeting of advertising via programmatic buying using analytics data, as opposed to conventional techniques.
Programmatic buying, social listening, content publishing, and account-based marketing are just a few of the marketing practices harnessing the power of Data Management Platforms (DMPs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Business Intelligence (BI) technologies.
Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are a largely untapped and underutilized B2B lead generation practice. DMPs deliver the deep demographic, psychographic, and behavioral insights that enable marketers to identify and act on customers' behaviors, decisions, and patterns.
ABM, one-to-one, and social marketing best practices are architected on some form of DMP and intelligence or AI solution. These solutions offer highly-personalized configurable experiences that prospects and search engines love.
Properly applied, these insight solutions can be a competitive advantage and growth catalyst.
- Data-driven go-to-market planning ensures a predictable and repeatable business outcome.
- Boost lead and maximize conversions with precision customer insights.
- Customer journey analytics through micro-segmentation.
- Data-driven pricing optimization boosts profitability.
In 2020, leverage these analytical tools and platforms to drive granular customer insights to take your lead generation and revenue marketing to the next level.
TIP 3: start with account and contact profile enrichment for ABM, lead qualification, or territory planning. Once mastered, expand to deeper personalization, or programmatic buying. TIP 3: start simple with tools like Google Analytics, social media monitoring tools, or PPC/SEO tracking software to track website visits, conversions, sales, and leads from all marketing efforts. Establish cadence and identify analytics gaps. TIP 3: another first step in unifying creativity and analytics is A/B split testing. Adopt A/B testing for emails, websites, and PPC ads. Create two versions of every piece of content or advertisement to determine which version converts more users.Adopt a Bot
Look to conversational AI chatbots as your 24x7 virtual sales force in an always-connected world. Today's AI-powered bots are much more powerful and are increasingly becoming a marketer's favorite tool to have one-to-one personalized conversations with their customers. The innovation of voice-related and AI technologies is, in part, responsible for driving the mass adoption of conversational bots. These bots help automate, manage, and boost productivity, but their real value is customer engagement. Bots are a proven, low-cost approach to maximizing and accelerating conversions. They are unparalleled in maintain conversational state across complex buying cycles.
Bots have evolved to become intelligent assistants that offer a voice to customer experiences. These assistants can engage in meaningful conversations that move the customer towards a mutually successful outcome. These solutions hare still predominantly discovery and search-related but are quickly evolving to include a broad spectrum of front-office capabilities, such as processing payments, customer support, and complex inquiries.
According to recent research, "by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions with enterprises involve no human whatsoever, so chatbots have plenty of upside in both the near and long term." Companies save time and costs during the lead process because chatbots can help automate the lead qualification process.
Bots promise a 24x7 virtual sales and support force in an always-connected world. They allow you to connect consistently with your customers, providing timely information based on their interaction and where they are in the buyer's journey. As a salesperson, chatbots can educate, inform, and inspire your target audience to take action toward a buying decision.
In 2020 companies should be implemented or optimizing their chatbot experiences to ensure they are connecting with customers in a way that's enjoyable and easy is the best way to build trust and keep them happy and loyal."
Maximize Pipeline Yield with CRO
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) stops funnel "leaks," decreases cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and maximizes conversions. CRO is a data-driven approach to auditing, testing, and optimizing websites and customer experiences across several variables, including, but not limited to, usability, aesthetics, marketing channel, audience personas, and stages of the buying cycle. CRO defines the optimal experience to inspire the target audiences to take action towards a buying decision.
More than two in five companies (41%) claim that customer experience optimization is critical, i.e., a high priority for the organization. A further 55% describe the practice of optimizing customer experiences somewhat relevant, with other initiatives taking priority.
CRO is an obvious choice for minimizing Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and a relatively simple solution to maximizing pipeline yield. CRO audits are the natural first step as they analyze user behavior, patterns to understand the optimal conversion path across channels and experiences.
When building a CRO plan, it is critical to understanding success metrics across the buying cycle and channels. A CRO audit and strategy allows you to test hypothesis out and learn from the process to come out with new ones.
CRO is not necessarily about creating more, but getting the maximum yield of existing websites, pipeline, traffic, and leads. Therefore it should be a top priority for 2020. Done right, CRO boosts ROI, increases revenue, streamlines checkout flow, reduces cart abandonment, and, most importantly, maximizes your pipeline yield.
TIP: start by conducting a CRO audit on a web page or experience chain. CRO audits deliver a comprehensive evaluation of an experience performance across user engagements to conversions. The result is an actionable report to begin boosting conversions.Exceed Expectations with Extraordinary Experiences
Lead Generation strategies in 2020 demand that marketers not only understand the behavior of their target audience but that they know, for each segment, the customer journey, i.e., the series of interactions from initial consideration, to purchase and implementation, and then to subsequent purchases. Combining these segments and customer journeys creates hundreds if not thousands of "micro-segments," which form the basis of 1:1 personalization.
The fact is, B2B buyers do not make a single decision when buying sophisticated technology. Most companies fail, however, to connect those individual marketing activities into a sequential chain-of-events that systematically move organizations—and not just individuals—through the decision process. As a result, B2B companies tend to generate lots and lots of "leads" but a much smaller volume of sales. This lead volume, in turn, creates considerable conflict with sales channels that use more stringent criteria in defining leads. The go-to-market process also frustrates end-user organizations who bear far too much of the burden of figuring out how technology companies work.
We recommend the following approach to boost lead generation and conversions:
- Quantify what matters to your customers. Look to analytics and segmentation techniques to identify your most profitable market, industry, and account segments. Start simple with a single account segment using value-based segmentation techniques. Look at the experience, differentiation, and value proposition through their eyes.
- Identify and understand the customer's journey. Map a customer's journey through all stages of the buying lifecycle from the customer perceptive. A customer journey map captures the customer's needs, pathways, and perceptions throughout their relationship with a brand, message, content, or experience. It allows you to visualize their experience, touchpoints, triggers, and stages. These will help with lead scoring and workflow.
- Define clear customer-experience outcomes. Start small, establish measurable KPIs for a single critical customer journey. Map the customer experience to the buying cycle. This approach allows marketers to map resources and assets to the vital touchpoints, the needs of each buying influence, in every market segment, for every product, and creates offers to move them along the buying cycle.
- Reinvent customer journeys and experiences using digital marketing and technologies. Successful customer experiences should communicate information clearly and efficiently to users to gain actionable insights to make informed decisions. Customer-centric experiences that deliver the best revenue marketing results overcome the complexity of data to produce cohesive, predictable, and desirable outcomes. They are intelligent, creative, and elegant experiences that transcend the complexity technologies, organization workflows and buying cycle sale complexities.
In 2020, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and extended ecosystems of partners make it possible for companies to build iconic experiences that unlock new revenue and lead sources.
Look to Revenue Attribution for ROI
Anticipating the next move in a customer's journey to conversion, and measuring every interaction across channels, communities, and stages of the buying cycles is a complex challenge. The explosion of channels, devices, communities, and platforms will continue to haunt CMOs for some time to come. Attribution is a challenge and often results in a large amount of effort for what seems like guesswork. However, the tenure challenge of the average CMO and the stakeholder's expectation for measurable ROI will continue to see resources shirt towards measuring attribution and ROI.
According to Salesforce research, "over the past 18 months, 64% of marketing leaders say their company has become more focused on providing a consistent experience across every channel as a result of changing customer expectations. Sixty-seven percent of marketing leaders say creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is critical to the success of their overall marketing strategy. A staggering 91% of high performers agree that a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels positively impacts customer loyalty. Another 89% say the same for the impact on revenue growth."
Driven by customers' expectations to be consistently recognized and remembered across every interaction, top marketers pay special attention to how they're coordinating marketing across channels, not just how many channels they touch. High performers are 12.8x more likely than underperformers to coordinate their marketing efforts across these channels heavily. Channels included in the survey were email, website, mobile, social media marketing, display/banner ads, advertising on social platforms, organic search, paid search, video advertising, and native advertising/sponsored content. The best practice for customer journey mapping is that each subsequent message builds on the customer's actions to evolve communications in an authentic 1-to-1 experience.
Depending on the organization's maturity, multi-channel attribution will expand beyond reactive marketing mix measurement to proactive customer insights to predict behavior and ignite engagement. Data granularity, micro-segmentation, and new analytics techniques will accelerate attribution adoption to deliver hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.
In 2020, expect to see a boost in investment and effort in data-driven multi-touch attribution models. Like with Conversion rate optimization, attribution optimizes existing spend strategies to ensure a better yield from every current dollar spends. Depending on the organization's maturity, multi-channel attribution will expand beyond reactive marketing mix measurement to proactive customer insights, to predict behavior and ignite engagement.
Make it Personalization to Win
According to Gartner, "personalization engines apply context about individual users and their circumstances to select, tailor and deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions through digital channels in support of three use cases – marketing, digital commerce, and customer experience."
Personalization technology includes all interactions, such as marketing, shopping, and service experiences. Personalization, to some degree, is already ingrained in most marketing practices, plans, and technologies, e.g., automation, search, digital advertising, DMP, and social media. Whether it's a name on a coffee cup, custom-designed hair products, running shoes, people love knowing that their favorite brands recognize them and care about their experiences.
Although Personalization is here to stay there are privacy and regulations issues that plague the promise of "segmentation of one," including, the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union has helped in establishing transparent data policies, encouraging honest communication between audiences and brands.
In 2020 AI technologies move marketers away from simplistic data segmentation tactics toward a more granular approach to data splicing in the name of hyper-personalization. B2B companies harness big data to analyze customer behaviors and create personalized content and offer to increase conversion rates. According to research from Salesforce, 65% of B2B buyers say they'd switch brands if a company didn't personalize their communications. Even more (75%) buyers noted that by the year 2020, they expect companies to anticipate their needs and serve relevant suggestions.
Success in 2020 and beyond requires a deep understanding of the customers' preferences, patterns, and behaviors to deliver a highly-personalized and relevant user experience and offers that match the customer buying cycle stages.
TIP 1: start simple with exclusive one-to-one offers, only available to an individual customer. Personalize a simple feature with a single segment or even a single prospect. TIP 2: another simple starting point is to personalize the customer experience across one or two buying stages. Retargeting is excellent for this approach, and with tools like Visitor Queue, you can track which companies and record that information for follow-up. TIP 3: assuming Personalization is not a reality given resource constraints, then look to "persona-ization." Identify a single community persona and apply some degree of Personalization to that persona. For example, a landing page from a LinkedIn campaign targeting digital marketer persona in Utah might headline, --- "Digital Marketers in Utah love us because …"B2B Video Marketing
B2B marketers are increasingly turning to interactive, visual, and video content to engage their target audience better. A study from Demand Gen Report found that 91% of B2B buyers say they prefer interactive and visual content to static content.
Video is ideal for B2B marketing, where companies are required to explain complex products, processes, or concepts. Furthermore, it is unique in being able to maintain context state across multiple touchpoints, channels, stages, and stages. As a result, there is an increasing reliance on motion graphics, animation, narratives, and data visualization techniques.
According to recent research, 59% of decision-makers in a company say that they prefer watching a video over reading an article or blog post. Video outperforms most other content types when it comes to B2B marketing. According to recent research, when comparing dynamic video retargeting campaigns to traditional retargeting campaigns, click-through rates (CTR) are measured at 74%, while the return on investment (ROI) increased by 49%.
Also, with recent visual search innovation and product announcements from Google, Bing, and Pinterest is going to be forcing factor for further adoption of video, especially for eCommerce players.
Any social media marketing plan should be architected with video at its center. Stories, vertical video formats, and mobile-friendly portrait videos derive value from authenticity, direct follower interactivity, and product showcasing are now available on all major social channels.
These and other trends will boost video popularity amongst B2B marketers in 2020, opening new avenues of B2B marketing.
TIP 1: Borrow brand equity from influencers and domain experts. Use live streaming events as an alternative to webinars. TIP 2: Focus on the short question and answer formats with the idea length around 3 - 5 minutes each. Include customer testimonials and case studies. TIP 3: Don't forget SEO - Add transcriptions, captions, and metadata to each video and ensure you embrace YouTube. TIP 4: Increase usage of micro-interactions, data visualization, infographics, and other forms of interactive content on the B2B website.Social CRM & Intelligence
Social CRM powered by AI and machine learning can rapidly combine social data and behavioral patterns to gain deep, actionable customer insights. The level of sophistication ranges from profile enrichment to customer experience orchestration and optimize across channels and stages of the buying cycle.
New powerful online tools powered by AI and machine learning can rapidly combine data and behavioral patterns to gain predictive user insights. Social listening offers marketers' ability to orchestrate and optimize touchpoints across all channels and stages of the customer journey to ensure with moment-to-moment relevancy. They also help create the right cadence and synchronization and even matched to the customer lifecycle. Identifying touchpoints is critical to creating a customer journey map and understanding the customer experience to optimize all the interactions and conversations that add up to it.
While using social listening for these two causes is expected to become even more prominent, the real trend of 2020 is going to be using social media listening for lead generation and social selling. So far, only a tiny number of brands do this. Yet, that number is gradually rising as marketers discover that they can find people looking for the exact services they offer on social media.
The unique blend of peer engagement, trust, and compelling visuals that have made social commerce dominant in Asia is, finally, poised to change the eCommerce landscape across the globe. 2020 is the year for retailers to experiment with the growing array of social shopping technologies.
TIP: kickoff a small social data intelligence initiative to create an account profile for ABM, lead qualification, or territory planning. We would suggest focussing on a single channel, topic, or stage of the buying cycle for measurement or attribution purpose. Also, include social communities' insights to drive SEO and content optimization.Conclusion
Innovation and developments in technology such as AI and automation, changing buying behavior, emerging marketing trends present new challenges and opportunities for B2B, lead generation, and revenue marketing. Innovation will increase complexities, but also offers a chance to capitalize on these areas. Getting ahead of the curve will have a significant impact on your sales and revenue in 2020 and beyond.