B2B Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore 2019

Some digital marketing trends we saw the very beginning of in 2018 are scaling up in 2019. And while some traditional digital marketing strategies B2B businesses have employed over the last decade are still valid, new technologies and search engines are requiring new marketing techniques from businesses. One reason is that traditional internet search on Google and other online search engines are being saturated. And a second reason is that there are now new channels to search for answers. Here are changes that will affect B2B digital marketing in 2019.

Changes in SEO

Traditional SEO is still important. In fact, any content you add to your website should be optimized for general and local SEO. However, new channels for search are scaling quickly. Therefore, your business needs to stay abreast of these new channels to continue to be competitive. One of those channels is Voice Search. According to comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. New devices are being sold that have a Voice Search option added. Within the next few years, all mobile devices will have Voice Search capabilities as well as devices that only use Voice Search such as Amazon’s Alexa. These trends were primarily introduced in the B2C market, but they will affect the B2B market more and more going forward.

One Channel Marketing is Out

It’s no longer enough to market to only one channel to influence your target persona. People are being invited to a long list of marketing channels and there is no way they can follow all of them. Therefore, it is still crucial to market strategically to the most likely channels your customers use, but marketing will have to broaden to new channels. Some of those may be channels that are familiar such as social media sites that you’ve neglected in the past. But others will require new types of content that you may not be producing right now. One of the biggest is YouTube. This site is owned by Google, so adding relevant video content can offer a bonus. You can add content that is found on YouTube, and also may be found on Google search. Remember, that your existing content may also come up in search results for Voice Search if you add Voice Search-friendly SEO. You have similar results with videos by uploading them on YouTube with links to your existing content, and by embedding them in your existing content. The bottom line is that a multi-faceted approach will be more effective.

Blogging is Losing Effectiveness

Blogging was one of the first channels for adding content for search. And while that channel still offers some benefits, by itself it no longer will provide the results to sustain or build a business. The reason is that as mentioned earlier, standard search engines are becoming saturated. Some industries will see the results of over-saturated channels sooner than others. Niche sites and blogs will remain competitive longer. However, to combat this issue, the answer is adding content that will answer queries in several channels as well cross-channel marketing. You can reconfigure your SEO on existing content by adding structured data, videos and longer-tail keywords. Structured data will offer better signals to Google for search on all Google channels. You can test your existing content for structured data with this tool. We already discussed adding videos to existing content earlier. And longer-tail keywords will improve your search results in Voice Search because queries are more conversational. Think casual language that people use when speaking.

Cross-channel marketing isn’t new. In fact, it is likely your marketing team is already using cross-channel marketing methods. The idea is to marketing to followers in one channel to lead them to another one by offering an incentive. So, asking YouTube followers to sign up for your email list for a small reward. Or market a content you’re running on Facebook to your email list. This type of marketing will mean you’ll reach customers on a variety of channels which will increase their engagement.