12 B2B Marketing Trends with Actionable Takeaways to Improve Your Marketing

Written in partnership with my wonderful colleague Erica Pyatt.

From some of the smartest marketing minds at LinkedIn-- Jon Lombardo & Peter Weinberg, Global Brand Strategy-- here is the 2018 installment of our B2B Marketing Trends with actionable takeaways to improve your marketing:

1.    Start with the WHO

Most marketing is not consumer centric and only 3% of buyers say advertising is relevant to them. Actual consumer-centric marketing is radically individualistic (think about your Netflix experience – for example “Top picks for [insert your name here]”).

While most marketers don’t have access to this level of data or sophistication of their tools, the first step begins with data-driven persona development. Hint: use free LinkedIn website demographics and trending content insights to understand your target audience. 

2.  Be First to Mind, Not First to Market

Think about your relationship between market share and awareness. It’s far more important to be first to mind than first to market – and if you can’t be first to mind, invent a new category.

The goal should be to get to the Strong Awareness box in the matrix below, with strong engagement and strong reach. Ask yourself, where do you currently sit?

3. The Originality Delusion

Marketers are obsessed with newness and always on the search for what’s “never been done.” But new isn’t what sells! Only 1 in 5 new ad campaigns outperform old campaigns. What resonates (and sells) is relevance + familiarity. In B2B content speak, that means investing in a content franchise – think annual research or trend reporting (like this).

4.  You Are Where You Advertise

What does the inventory you buy say about your brand? Are your ads reassuringly expensive or worryingly cheap? In the current environment, trust is key.

5. Media Value Investing

Follow the investing advice of the Oracle of Omaha and look for the undervalued assets. One key UNDERVALUED audience: Individual Contributors. Everyone wants to reach the c-suite and reaching them is expensive! Broaden your horizon and invest in the audiences that influence decisions today and the people who will be making the decisions tomorrow.

6.  The War on Brand

Brand marketers are losing the budget battle. While direct response wins in the short-run, brand wins in the long run. The war between brand and direct response isn’t worth fighting – instead negotiate a truce and synchronize brand and demand to drive exceptional performance.

Strong branding is also multi-dimensional and creates value for across the organization:

• Talent is attracted to strong brands and strong brands get the right person and hire faster for a fraction of the cost.
• Shareholders invest in strong brands. Brand is worth 20-40% of company value.
• Buyers pay higher prices to strong brands and are willing to pay premium prices (think Apple).

7. The Lifetime Value of Content

Real-time marketing might be the worst idea in our industry. The smartest companies invest in “all-time” content. Start measuring time as a metric and consider the lifetime value of content.

8. The Power of Networks

The most successful people build networks, and the most successful companies build networks too. Give employees and advocates great content to expand and enhance their networks. Stronger networks drive stronger penetration of and revenue from key accounts. Hint: LinkedIn’s Elevate product makes sharing easy with one click to share to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

9. Bionic Marketing

The most effective marketers test millions of ads at a time. Taking a page from politics, the Trump Campaign ran 5.9 million versions of ads and the Clinton campaign 66,000 ads during the 2016 election cycle. Conversely, most B2B marketers today struggle to run one ad at a time. More ad creative testing will massively improve your performance and even slight iterations can have tremendous impact on performance.

10. The Death of the eBook

Have you ever seen a seller present an eBook to a client at a meeting? No, they bring PowerPoints, not eBooks. Yet, B2B marketers are cranking out eBooks…and perhaps we’ve all been eBooked to death. Create content like you would create PowerPoint slides.

11.  Measure, Fast and Slow

Allocating budget based CTR or CPC is really easy and really wrong. Allocating budget on cost-per-lead is easy, but still wrong. Allocating budget based on revenue-per-lead is hard, but right. 

12.   True Value of Thought Leadership

The B2B buying process is especially emotional because buyers’ professional success and reputation is on the line. B2B buyers spend time with thought leadership, use thought leadership to vet an organization, respect thought leaders, and pay a premium to work with thought leaders.