If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s the need to be adaptive and resilient to succeed with any change that comes our way. This couldn’t be more true for B2B marketing leaders currently activating campaigns. At a time marked by new technologies, continued economic unpredictability, and changing buying behaviors, success depends on staying ahead of the curve by identifying and leveraging trends that can propel your strategies to new heights.
As we enter the back half of the year, we wanted to take a moment to revisit our 2024 B2B marketing predictions and reflect on how they’ve shaped current industry trends. Read on to see how they’ve evolved over the last seven months, and how they can impact B2B account-based marketing (ABM) strategies for the remainder of the year.
AI Is Here to Stay
Generative AI (GenAI) has completely changed the game for marketers. McKinsey research finds that marketing and sales reported adoption of GenAI has more than doubled in 2024, and GenAI chat bot company Botco reported that 73% of marketing departments they surveyed use GenAI in some capacity. Marketing budgets are also making room for GenAI adoption, with Gartner finding that only 5% of CMOs say that AI is not a priority investment this year. Gartner also states that AI in ABM will drive smarter ABM, using it to drive insights from the vast amount of data to guide campaign strategies.
While it’s true that GenAI offers B2B marketers opportunities to enhance their strategies and streamline time-intensive tasks such as campaign design, audience or competitor research, and content ideation, it’s important to be vigilant of its use. Content taken “straight out of the box” from GenAI tools is scrutinized by customers and negatively impacts SEO efforts. Google is actively taking steps to reduce spam by identifying poor AI content with changes it’s making to its ranking algorithms. According to Pandu Nayak, VP of Search at Google, the company’s measurements show a reduction in “unhelpful content” by up to 40 percent. Forrester also notes that 73% of its ConsumerVoices Market Research Online community will use Google to verify suspect responses from ChatGPT and other AI systems.
Bias is another concern impacting the use of AI in marketing as the technology struggles with the lack of transparency around the data training the models. Some of the data sets are not optimized to oust cultural bias and stereotypes, for example, causing some marketers to question their reliance on AI to build effective content and messaging. AI video generator company Synthesia found an upward trend that 60% of marketing experts who have used generative AI content are worried that the content could harm a company’s brand because of biases, plagiarism, and a misalignment of values.
Both these concerns verify our prediction that as AI use grows, brands must continue to use human insight to get the most out of it. Marketing is as much an art as it is a science, and while AI has proven helpful in streamlining and automating good portions of your day, it will never replace you. Effective content and messaging still need that human element to create that emotional bond that connects buyers to a service or solution.
Brand-to-Demand Leads to Stronger Campaign Messaging
We predicted that B2B marketers would stop thinking of brand and demand as two separate efforts and instead think of them as a cohesive strategy called “brand-to-demand.” Instead of “and,” approach your brand awareness efforts as moving toward demand generation, which provides seamlessly personalized and consistent messaging throughout the buying journey.
Marketers are often pulled in one direction with demand efforts winning out most of the time. 2024 CMO Spend Survey Data Snapshots report finds that demand generation spending makes up about 10% of the overall department budget, with brand awareness not even cracking the top five programs in terms of spend. And despite slashed budgets across marketing departments, leaders increased their paid media allocation from 27.6% to 28.6%, with the top three paid channels being search, social, and display advertising.
Still, 58% of leaders say that their sales cycles are even longer in 2024. While specific industries may vary, DemandGen Report states that the average B2B deal cycle lasts 6 months. With Forrester finding that most companies report and evaluate marketing effectiveness quarterly and yearly, a 6-month-long sales cycle hurts your numbers due to having pressure to make up customer acquisition costs (CAC) quickly.
Thinking about your brand and demand efforts as a unified brand-to-demand strategy helps you focus on your messaging so that you can stand out in the market from the start, which will ideally lead to faster sales cycles. You need to consider your go-to-market strength, which you assess by diving deep into your messaging and scores around brand awareness, market share, customer loyalty, and reputation. Knowing your position against competitors strengthens any campaign, as you can distinctly focus on delivering higher quality messaging around your offerings. Building that message from the start will most likely lend itself to you landing on buyers’ Day 1 lists when they are ready to consider different solutions or become aware of a problem—a problem that you clearly communicate that you can solve.
Brand-to-demand also impacts your customer expansion and retention efforts. Your marketing mix channel strategy for expansion campaigns most likely includes bringing awareness to other products, whether they’re new systems or advanced offerings, and how customers can meet their growth goals through expanding or adopting other products. You want to provide content that continues to affirm that they can grow with your company.
Brand-to-Demand in Action: Endava
Endava is a leading technology services company that recognized that a full-funnel, multi-channel ABM approach would help them build on that people-centric reputation.
They started focusing on brand-to-demand with ABM Display Advertising to build brand awareness and retargeting to stay top-of-mind with their target accounts (both new logos and current customers) and ran ABM Content Syndication campaigns to generate high-intent leads for their pipeline. With ML Insights data informing target account lists, Endava accomplished a 30x return on investment (ROI) on influenced pipeline and 40% of top-of-funnel contacts making it into the final buying stages with Endava on the short-list.
Endava’s brand-to-demand strategy shows how quickly you can move the needle with your target accounts with strong brand awareness that feeds into demand. Your brand-to-demand strategy keeps your buyer’s concerns in mind before they realize there’s a problem—and your campaigns are already running so they’ll be quick to find you, and quicker in deciding that you offer the solution they need.
Marketers Still Need to Adopt a Cookie-less Data Approach
With Google’s plans to depreciate cookies, 2024 was earmarked as a transformative year in the digital marketing space. Our initial prediction urged marketers to accept this move by strengthening their use of first-party data and partnering with strong third-party providers. And while deprecation plans have since changed, this prediction remains true.
Google announced in June 2024 that they are not depreciating cookies by removing them entirely. Instead, Google will introduce a user-choice prompt in their Chrome browser, which will allow users to choose whether to retain third-party cookies.
Considering that Adobe found that 75% of marketers rely on third-party cookies, this can be seen as a small victory. Regardless, our suggestion to embrace cookie-less marketing remains.
Partnering with trusted, reliable third-party data providers and strengthening your first-party data protection is recommended for marketers to preserve strong personalization practices while adhering to customer privacy guidelines and expectations set by organizations like the General Data Production Regulation (GDPR). Ensuring that your organization and your data providers follow global privacy regulations is the key first step to protecting customer privacy and quality data. From there, you must ensure your website and any forms where prospects or customers provide information clearly communicate how any data collected will be used across the organization. When you design the buyer’s journey with capturing more consent of buyer information, you can deliver better personalized experiences.
Of course, you must prepare for opt-outs. You can still find opportunities to personalize your content and ABM approach through partnering with data providers and looking deeper into your first-party data and historical data to determine nurture paths that fulfill for a specific persona you’re targeting.
Lean into Niche Influencers for B2B Influencer Marketing
B2B influencer marketing continues to take center stage in 2024 as we predicted. 2023 research by Ogilvy found that 75% of B2B marketers actively used B2B influencer marketing, and 93% of those who haven’t implemented a strategy planned to use it in 2024.
While it would be a dream to use influencers in B2B efforts like B2C brands do, multiple influencers can be costly, hard to manage, and not specific enough to the industry. To reduce the costs and ensure there’s more connection with your specific audience and industry, you can turn to niche influencers or request thought leadership from their staff.
As with B2C audiences, B2B audiences learn to trust specific experts in their industry as they demonstrate how deeply they understand the industry and deeper pain points. Their credibility and relevance transfers to your brand if you partner with these influencers to create articles, social posts, and survey or research opportunities.
If you’re unsure or not ready to activate an outside influencer, LinkedIn’s Thought Leader Ads are an option to still run B2B influencer marketing strategies. Use it to promote your internal thought leader’s posts, which allows you to showcase the heart of your company culture from multiple viewpoints. LinkedIn finds that these Thought Leader Ads have an average 1.7X engagement rate for engagement-driven campaigns than single image ads, and a 1.5x higher engagement rate for awareness-building campaign objectives.
As with any influencer campaign, marketers must be wary of the reputational risk of an influencer saying the “wrong” thing or writing for a competitor that could affect the company’s brand image and credibility. Before embarking on any external B2B influencer campaign, give yourself some time to make sure the fit is right (60 days) is recommended), and develop a comprehensive influencer agreement that details the partnership with discussion around exclusivity, content approval and ownership, and employment term.
As you consider new contracts with your influencers, be aware of the recent Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) newest non-compete ruling. Starting August 21, 2024, employers can no longer enforce or create non-compete clauses in employment contracts outside of the contract term. This means that employees can look for other positions with competitors after the termination of their contract with no consequences.
What does this mean for influencers? The FTC ruled that influencers are considered workers and any non-compete clauses and exclusivity clauses in their contracts are valid, but brands cannot prevent influencers from working with other brands after their contract term has ended. This change means that influencers can secure more partnerships, and brands will likely extend partnerships to keep them happy. When you’re exploring your influencer options, explore your long-term and short-term goals and how this new relationship will fall into them. We expect that this change will extend more influencer relationships and existing contacts as B2B organizations seek to derive the most value out of these relationships.
Marketing Leaders Must Champion Data-Driven Cultures
We predicted that data would play a key role in marketing campaign measurement and optimization because tighter budgets would force marketers to be more strategic with their resources. Dubbed the “era of less” by Gartner, 2024 proves to be a turbulent time, with an average of 15% of marketing budgets collapsed for today’s CMOs, up from 7.7% in 2023. With the expectation to “do more with less,” marketers can turn to real-time data to guide their targeting, campaign activation, and measurement for proactive optimization and the potential to capture leads faster.
Data-driven ABM helps leaders use more of their resources effectively by creating more personalized journeys for prospects based on collected account and customer data. Working with zero-, second-, and third-party data providers to lend a hand to your first-party insights gives you a clear picture of your customers and how to quickly personalize their experience.
Budget in Action: T-Mobile for Business
T-Mobile for Business converted to a data-driven ABM strategy to enhance their hyper-relevant targeting of key accounts and buyer personas. With a multi-channel approach, they were able to engage buyers at every stage of the buying journey with relevant content.
Since teaming up with Madison Logic, T-Mobile for Business reports continuous improvements across their primary key performance indicators. One of their key metrics is appointment rates, so making sure leads have a higher likelihood to set an appointment is a priority. T-Mobile for Business achieved 3x and 5x increases in appointment rates for two of their key segments.
They credit ML Insights with providing a holistic view of account activity and lead information that allows salespeople to build customized outreach to reconnect with leads in a meaningful way.
T-Mobile for Business’s success story highlights the importance of data-driven strategies and how powerful data sources seen together can be but The Harvard Business Review states that only 31% of organizations successfully capture a holistic view of their customer data. Additionally, departmental data silos between marketing, sales, and customer success teams prevent a data-driven culture. Forbes finds that to overcome these barriers, marketing leaders must become “Data Champions” and insist on using all available data to discover deeper targeting, segmentation, market penetration, and measurement opportunities. Instead of having to invest in more, departments can easily do more through diving deeper into their data. With their findings, marketers can then collaborate with sales and customer success teams to dive deeper into historical data across their customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAPs) to create campaigns and nurture paths that truly speak to accounts’ interests.
It’s Never Too Late to Experiment
Trends come and go, but in B2B marketing, these predictions are seemingly here to stay and make an impact on your future marketing efforts. Leading the pack and staying ahead, with proactive attention to trends, can also help your organization stay competitive in your industry with truly innovative campaigns. If you’re ready to act, download the 2024 Full-Funnel ABM Playbook for your complete guide into ABM. It takes you through a step-by-step process to identify your target accounts, activate compelling campaigns, and measure your efforts so you can proactively optimize your campaigns to reflect market conditions, simply reinvigorate them for a new audience segment, or chase those dream accounts and turn them into clients.
We’re also here to help you make the most of your ABM strategies—contact us to discuss your campaign strategies and goals and how our complete portfolio of solutions can lend a hand.
