B2B Marketing Trends in 2020

Customer centricity, automation, personalization and data protection — these are just some of the trends for B2B marketers in 2020. At the beginning of each year, it is important to define the roadmap of marketing activities for your company. To help you do this, here are seven B2B marketing trends for 2020.

Customer Intelligence

Our everyday life is becoming increasingly digital. This is accompanied by a new understanding that customers have developed of themselves — they are self-confident, demanding and well informed, but also a little fickle. After all, they are now used to receiving all information and solutions at the touch of a button. This is why companies are challenged to provide their customers with perfect experiences. However, this can only succeed if companies make meaningful use of the information available about their customers by linking the relevant source systems and carrying out comprehensive data analyses.

Collaboration of Marketing and Sales

The cooperation between marketing and sales is essential for successful customer relations. In order to obtain a 360-degree view of the customer and derive appropriate marketing measures, companies must break down existing data silos and consolidate relevant information. This is achieved by linking their existing customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems with each other on the one hand and by breaking down existing departmental boundaries on the other.

Customer Centricity

Success comes to those who inspire their customers — and do so continuously. To achieve this, a change in thinking is required: Away from advertising messages from the first-person perspective, towards an understanding of what the customer actually needs and what is useful for him.

This approach can also be applied to content marketing and email marketing. By collecting, consolidating and evaluating data about their customers in a legally compliant manner, B2B companies are gradually getting closer to their wishes and needs. A valuable tool on the way to customer centricity is a customer experience map.

Personalized Communication

Personalized recommendations — such as content or products — targeted communications based on an individual’s preferences and tactics like triggered emails can all provide a level of personalization that is effective for nurturing leads and keeping customers.

That is why it is advisable to rely on software-supported — and thus automated — email marketing. It allows personalized content to be delivered to finely segmented target groups, thus significantly increasing the success of mailings and newsletters.

Account-based Marketing

Second to personalization is account-based marketing (ABM), which can be a particularly effective tactic for B2B companies. ABM takes personalization one step further, coordinating marketing and sales efforts to create better engagement, which can nurture prospects, encourage sales and aid with retention.

Content Marketing

The changed information behaviour has long since also been reflected in B2B. Potential customers research the Internet, read product reviews and compare prices. This means that the buying process begins even before the first contact is made — long before a company even knows the prospective customer. This is exactly where content marketing comes in.

Companies can enter into a dialogue with potential customers via useful content that they offer at various touch points along the customer journey, thus gradually convincing them of themselves and their products and services — not only via textual content, but also via video.

Platform Strategy

To provide professional customer care, the sales department has been using CRM systems for many years. Today Marketing Automation Software joins them. However, both systems can only play out their strengths in new customer acquisition and existing customer care if they are not only integrated with each other, but also with other tools. A platform strategy is best suited for this purpose. Such a software ecosystem combines different specialized software solutions via bidirectional interfaces, including those of third parties, to form an individual overall system that optimally maps the existing processes of a B2B company.