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It’s almost the end of 2024. Besides their holiday breaks, marketers have one question on their minds: What’s next?
While we don’t have a crystal ball to tell for sure, we can guess what direction marketing will head based on current marketing strategies and expert insights. That’s why we teamed up with Scribewise and other partners to survey more than 110 companies about the B2B marketing trends they see in the future and how they’re adapting.
This survey is linked to our LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Analytics 4, and HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks for B2B Benchmark Group. Here, you can check B2B marketing performance from more than 4,500 companies.
Here’s what we found out using data from the survey and Benchmark Group:
The LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Analytics 4, and HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks for B2B Benchmark Group shows how B2B companies perform on LinkedIn, Google Analytics, and HubSpot Marketing. Let’s look at a few of its October 2024 metrics to see what current tactics and metrics look like.
Based on data from 1069 contributors, the Benchmark Group had a median of 2.09K unique impressions on LinkedIn Company Pages.
117 contributors published a median of three blog posts through HubSpot.
In Google Analytics, 4552 contributors had a median of 7.36K views.
More than 110 companies took our survey on trends in B2B marketing. We had these takeaways from the closed-ended part of it:
The companies that took our survey are mainly small businesses with their sights set on growth.
Most respondents have 50 employees or fewer.
48.60% of survey participants reported that their internal marketing teams grew over the last 12 months.
Looking towards the future, the companies that took our survey mainly have demand generation/brand building (41.12%) and lead generation (41.12%) as their main focus.
While the companies that took our survey have faith in time-tested tactics, they’re also optimistic about newer technologies.
Most companies agreed that content marketing and social media platforms became more effective over the past three years – especially LinkedIn.
We found no clear consensus among the companies on gated content – about an equal amount voted on each degree of importance.
When asked how they are using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, the largest group of respondents (36.45%) said they’re experimenting with it.
Around half of companies stated they expect to achieve more results with fewer resources compared to past years.
In the open-ended section of our survey, we asked respondents how they evolved their marketing strategy to adapt to recent shifts. AI was a hot topic that shaped many companies’ responses. To keep up with the marketing world as AI changes it, respondents counted on strategies such as:
Some respondents focused on increasing the interactivity of their marketing to improve its potential for social proof. By getting customers involved, you can get more recommendations from them and demonstrate how customers feel about your product.
This was the play at Spacelift. Kate Wojewoda-Celinska says, “We’ve noticed that today’s buyers increasingly look for social proof and peer validation. In response, we launched a ‘Customer Spotlight’ series on our website and social media channels. This series, written in collaboration with our clients, highlights their unique use cases and the successes they’ve achieved with our platform.”
Wojewoda-Celinska adds, “We also introduced webinars, in which customers share their experiences and use cases firsthand. These sessions offer an interactive format in which prospects can ask questions directly to our clients, gaining deeper insights and practical advice from real users.”
The results?
“Both of these initiatives have helped us move beyond traditional sales narratives, positioning our clients as advocates for our platform and creating credibility and trust that goes beyond anything we could achieve with standard marketing materials.”
Kate Wojewoda-Celinska
Content Manager at Spacelift
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AI’s new prominence in content has some companies going for a person-focused approach to stand out. By highlighting specific experts’ opinions and personalities, these companies aim to give their marketing a human touch.
“We have seen a growing demand for authenticity when it comes to marketing from customers. While this demand has always been there, the rise of AI-generated content has cluttered the web with large swathes of text that are basically lifeless, impersonal, and create no impact. In the B2B space, this becomes a bigger issue as business owners can easily identify boilerplate content that lacks depth and understanding of their specific industry challenges,” says Farhan Siraj from EmailBulkSender.
Siraj continues, “Keeping this into consideration, we have instructed our marketing teams to prioritize genuine human connection, storytelling, and engaging content. Beyond this, we have a clear AI use policy in our organization where we encourage our content team to use AI strategically and without compromising the brand voice and other factors that make us unique and human.”
Holden Advisors takes a multimedia approach to this strategy. After noticing that buyers gravitate more towards individuals than brands, the company applied that rule to its marketing. Tracy Dent says, “Our entire leadership team is publishing and doing speaking engagements. We strategize thought leadership opportunities for each of them as individuals rather than the umbrella of our corporate voice. Especially in professional services with C-level buyers, people want to see and know who they’re paying to solve their problems.”
Dent adds, “So we started a podcast, and we put everybody on camera. We show our raw, unscripted conversations and brainstorms about business problems and product launches. We open the curtain so you can get a genuine sense of our team and how we think. Often, by the time we get on a call with a prospect, they feel like they already know us. It goes a very long way in the relationship and in the trust we can build as partners.”
Even though respondents had mixed opinions on ungating content in the closed-ended section of the survey, companies that supported ungated content were especially vocal in the open-ended section.
At Heretto, Sarah Cuellar saw better performance after ungating content:
“One big shift that we’ve seen in B2B is the customer’s desire to self-nurture. We have prioritized this by ungating most of our content and being very selective about the pieces we choose to gate. This has been a significant shift in our marketing strategy, and we have seen an increase in content downloads because of it.”
Sarah Cuellar
Content Marketing Manager at Heretto
Hannah Lydford reports a similar strategy at Headley Media. Lydford says, “As a marketing department, we have put a much bigger emphasis on ungated content to generate demand and raise our brand awareness, recognizing the importance of distributing our content as far and wide as we can. However, the need to generate a continual stream of new leads continues to remain important to our strategy, particularly when reporting our department’s success to the rest of the business.”
One concern that can come up when talking about ungating content is how to track its performance and attribute it. Check out our Content Snack on the subject to learn how to analyze ungated content in Databox.
AI also influenced many answers when we asked respondents what trends they predict for B2B in the next five years. These companies believe it will shape our technology, habits, and marketing collateral through trends like:
Look out, product-led growth: Brands are becoming an avenue for growth as well. In this part of the survey, companies brought up the importance of building a brand in future progress.
“In the next five years, B2B marketing is going to embrace brand-led growth (BLG) like never before.”
Stephanie Bowker
Chief Marketing Officer at Defacto
Let Stephanie Bowker from Defacto explain. “With the rise of AI churning out generic content faster than you can say ‘clickbait,’ originality and authenticity are what will truly cut through the noise. Community-building will also take center stage. Let’s be real: people trust recommendations from those they know and respect far more than from some algorithm,” Bowker says
Bowker continues, “As AI makes it harder to trust information, I predict a surge in private, invite-only channels. These exclusive spaces will be the breeding grounds for authentic word-of-mouth marketing, allowing brands to forge deeper connections and drive genuine engagement. In a world dominated by automation, the human touch will be the ultimate game-changer.”
SingleOps’ Cat Urbanski says, “In the next five years, I feel like marketing to B2B companies will be a lot more complex because people don’t just buy your product anymore or your software – they buy the brand. Even for B2C marketing. Obviously, that’s a big stand out, but it’s becoming even more important for businesses as well as businesses who are buying other businesses and their reputation.”
“Having a great product just isn’t enough anymore. You have to have morals and values and stand for something that people can relate to. I think due to AI being more prominent, it’ll actually push people to look for more human, natural interactions. That’s a trend that we will see. People will be able to spot AI quite quickly and we’re going to need to counteract that with emotive marketing, which people trust,” Urbanski concludes.
Going back to current practices of interactive and person-focused marketing we explored earlier, one company sees them continuing in the future through micro-influencers. Your existing customers can help you get new customers by influencing their peers, friends, and family.
Kurt Uhlir from ez Home Search says, “The importance of long-tail, micro-influencers continues to increase. While we see a large interest from potential customers from our content marketing and lead gen, our best source of new customers increasingly is our existing customers. We’re using a variety of tools to source case studies and the stories of our customers, highlighting them as the superheroes of their own stories.”
Funnily enough, we saw B2B companies invest more in influencers and sponsorships over ads in 2023. Now, companies like ez Home Search are turning to their own customers to have a smaller, but incredibly impactful, boost to their marketing.
With the rise of AI-generated content, companies are looking for ways to stand out. Two tactics respondents brought up for achieving this goal are to lean on a niche or opinion that only people can tap into.
Brett McGrath of Stacking Slabs LLC says, “I believe there will continue to be a greater emphasis on content differentiation and content distribution. The most effective teams will understand that it’s not about the quantity of people that you reach with your content, but quality. The idea of niching down and focusing will be scary to most, but those who incorporate niching down right now will understand how to grow in the future.”
“In the coming years, B2B marketers will focus on developing their company’s point of view,” Beam Content’s Samantha Hembree says. “They’ll do that through actually listening to and talking to their audience and creating content that makes their audience the stars of the show. With a better understanding of their audience, they’ll build their brand accordingly.
Hembree adds, “Brand is becoming more valuable than everything else with the rise of content creators, evangelists, and partners. Your brand has to have a solid foundation—something authentic that people can get behind. We’ll see a dramatic shift from cookie-cutter content to research-driven, expert-led content.”
Related reading: Content Ideation: Best Practices and Tools for Content Marketing Success
One more way to keep up with trends in B2B marketing is to see what and how other businesses are doing. Databox’s Benchmark Groups do just that by giving you a look at the performance of companies like yours. Submit your Databox metrics anonymously, and in exchange, you’ll get insights into groupwide performance.
We recommend keeping an eye on the LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Analytics 4, and HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks for B2B Benchmark Group this year to see where companies like yours find success. Add your most important metrics from LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Analytics 4, and HubSpot Marketing and compare them across the group. It’s anonymous and free with a Databox account.
Interested? Sign up for a free Databox account if you haven’t already, then join the group.
Are you maximizing your business potential? Stop guessing and start comparing with companies like yours.
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Melissa King is a freelance writer who helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. Outside of the content marketing world, she writes about video games. Check out her work at melissakingfreelance.com.
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