The world of B2B digital marketing has been advancing at a neck-breaking speed. In 2023, we witnessed the wide-scale adoption of GenAI that skyrocketed productivity in content creation and fueled decision-making with AI-powered analytical insights.
Now that the agitation has somewhat subsided, it’s time to think: “What’s to come next for growth marketing and its main counterpart, digital marketing?”
How can we adapt approaches and strategies to cutting-edge innovations? What upcoming B2B digital marketing trends and practices will complement marketing automation perfectly and yield greater outcomes?
What Was Key for B2B Digital Marketing in 2023? A Year in Overview
#1. Strategic Multi-Channel Marketing
As we know, B2B digital marketing is about speaking to the right people at the right time. Building a robust multi-channel strategy ensures the target audience sees your messages and engages with your content.
Here are the main points to map your multi-channel marketing strategy:
- Integrity of Customer Experience. You should ensure superb customer experience throughout the buyer journey so potential buyers receive specific value with every interaction with your brand.
- Unified Customer Data. This is another aspect that underlies the consistency of UX and efficient ad campaign management across multiple platforms. Ensure that your martech stack allows you to collect signals from different channels. Examine them to find out whether you can reach your Facebook audience via Google Ads, by email, or better yet – both.
- Address Specific Pain Points. In B2B digital marketing, you must map customer pains for every use case covered by your product or service. Whereas newcomers are satisfied with an entry-level subscription plan, you still need advanced ones that will meet the demands of experienced users.
#2. Production of AI-generated Marketing Content at Scale
We can finally admit that natural language, image, voiceover, and other generative tools shined like never before in 2023. According to industry researchers:
- Âľ of digital marketers leveraged GenAI writing assistants to compose ad copy for social media channels or other basic pieces of content.Â
- 62% of consumers are good with AI-generated marketing content as long as it doesn’t mislead them about the quality of products or services.
GenAI chatbots work great whether you use them to generate blog ideas and article outlines or ask them to write entire text. Nonetheless, you must fact-check and tweak the tone of voice in AI-generated copy before publishing. Make a QA checklist to assess and improve generated content. You can follow the same guidelines that we do. Combine content marketing automation with our guidelines on how to create excellent SEO-friendly content, and your returns from organic SEO will multiply.
#3. Automated Campaign Monitoring and Analytical Tools
With more precise AI-powered analytics tools, you’ll manage to shorten the feedback loop of your PPC and lead gen campaigns. But don’t rush on early insights – examine case studies to find out how soon you can get solid data to act upon.
The smart bidding for PPC campaigns aid ad spending and ROI maximization. B2B marketers commonly use Optimyzr, BrightBid, and similar smart bidding products when they aim to make the most out of their PPC budgets. Let’s not forget about the smart bidding that optimizes ad placement depending on manually set bid size and campaign goals.
B2B digital marketing copilots assist decision-makers through data-driven insights. Those can reveal various areas for improvements to work on:
- Customer sentiment based on behavioral signals and brand mentions
- Poor conversions and funnel drop-offs
- Identification of untapped target audiences and missed opportunities
Moreover, AI copilots enable you to fine-tune ongoing campaigns in a couple of clicks, automate A/B tests, and get more detailed, to-the-point reports explaining what worked and what didn’t.
What’s Next? Problems B2B Marketers Will Need to Solve in 2024
What are the market conditions and business goals driving B2B digital marketing in 2024? Regardless of the global recession and massive layoffs we witnessed in 2023, B2B SaaS businesses can still thrive in economic uncertainty. The thing is that their subscription model is fairly resilient and flexible. The thoughtful pricing policy combined with a renewed and holistic vision of the B2B digital marketing strategy can supercharge your business growth – granted, you tackle the key challenges that the current market poses.
#1. Shrinked Marketing Budgets Due to the RecessionÂ
Insider’s Intelligence report showed that ad spending grew by only 10.5% YoY for B2B digital marketing. The growth rate will likely stay nearly the same in the next few years. The global recession nudges B2B stakeholders to go cost-conscious, and marketers must maximize the outcome even within thin budgets.
Marketing agencies already work around these budget limitations by adopting:
- Marketing Automation. According to Nucleus Research, marketing automation in B2B pays off with $5.44 per dollar invested. Marketing teams benefit from a wide range of martech integrations, but the email automation tools top their lists – about 65% of B2B marketers use them.
- Planning and Forecasting Based on Solid Data. Untapping the potential of B2B data can guide your strategic planning. B2B marketers already analyze search trends and use AI-powered sentiment analysis to foresee customer behavior shifts. Such a proactive approach helps businesses avoid lagging behind their competitors and maximize revenue by meeting new demands immediately.
- Cost Management Based on Valuable Metrics. Insightful analysis of marketing KPIs will help you identify the growth levers and determine what channels and practices yield consistently high ROI. Those valuable metrics are different for each stage of the buyer journey. Check the most essential ones we’ve categorized in our article about building a successful digital marketing funnel.Â
- Automated Content Generation. GenAI tools multiply B2B digital marketing productivity manifold, allowing users to generate ad copy and ad creatives at scale. Moreover, marketers can integrate GenAI tools with email automation platforms to deliver personalized emails. Thus, you’ll ensure higher email open and response rates and improve ROI.
#2. Increased Cost of Paid Ad Campaigns
Not only do we have to operate on lower budgets, but we also must invest in campaigns wisely so that every dollar spent brings results. Outbidding your CPC competitors also challenges the efficiency of B2B digital marketing. However, it can be offset by deriving actionable insights from proactive campaign monitoring. Additionally, marketers can and must leverage:
- Smart Bidding. For instance – Google Smart Bidding feature. It optimizes ad performance depending on the business goals you’re after. Such might be reaching the target CPA, increasing the conversion rate, or maximizing the conversion value.
- A/B Ad Set Testing. This approach is used to hone your ad targeting. In particular, you can check whether native ad network targeting can bring in enough qualified leads. If not, consider choosing other targeting options or feed ad networks with the custom targeted list.
#3. The General Exhaustion of B2B Audiences
These days, B2B customers prefer researching purchase options independently. So, marketers' top priority is to generate opportunities through relevance without nagging the prospects with non-stoping advertising.
Pay attention to these 4 B2B digital marketing practices to avoid ad fatigue or ad exhaustion:
- Address new audience segments. Empower yourself with more precise intent data, and try reaching new audiences that might be interested in your offers.
- Deliver personalized content. Personalization is a great way to stand out from the crowd. Modern martech tools allow you to do so. They collect data at every step of the buyer journey and pull it together into detailed customer profiles.
- Stay vigilant for engagement metrics. The abrupt drop in engagement will indicate that the audience got tired of you, and you should minimize exposure.
- Allocate budget to channels with consistently high returns. But again, monitor the fatigue indicators and shift to other alternative channels gradually if you spot any.
