Just
before the turn of the year, Uri Bar-Joseph, director of marketing at
Optify, published an
article on
marketingprofs.com that listed 10 trends for B2B marketing in 2013. Now that
we’ve entered the 2nd Quarter, it seemed a good time to revisit these and
see if they’re unfolding as expected:
- Digital marketing will continue to grow
- Digital marketing services will surge
- Content creation services and software will proliferate
- Integrated marketing will gain popularity
- Direct mail will make a return
- Big Data applications will emerge
- The immeasurable will become measureable
- Pay per click (PPC) will decline as budgets move to other
paid solutions
- Marketing spend on software will increase
- Sales responsibilities will move to Marketing
From my perspective, he’s batting about
.800. Based on interactions with my clients, the only trends we’re not seeing
strongly are the return of direct mail and the decline of PPC. The digital
impetus remains a barrier to the direct mail business, though the author tied
the return to the use of online connections. That of itself says something
about the dominance of digital in the B2B sector. As to the decline of PPC, I
continue to see strong use of those tools, such as Google’s Adwords.
We would hasten to add another trend we're
seeing: the leveraging of existing content into ebooks. The rapid
proliferation of digital readers and tablets such as Apple’s iPad are making this
a logical move for many B2B marketers.
I've taken part in that myself, and if
you have any interest on how this works and how to do it, I'd love discuss the subject with you.