The State of B2B Marketing from Salesforce.com
The latest B2B marketing trends in mobile, email, content and more!
My ‘plane reading’ for this week was the 2016 State of Marketing Report published by Salesforce.com. It takes a unique approach to segmenting the survey respondents: High-Performers are described as those who were “extremely satisfied” with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company’s marketing investments. That begs the question – can you be a High-performer simply because you’re happy with your results, but yet still be a laggard in marketing best practices?
Apparently not. In fact, the study found that High-Performers are 8.8x more likely than Under-performers to strongly agree that they’ve adopted a customer journey strategy. Further, 53% of high performers qualify as heavy technology adopters, compared to only 7% of the Under-performers. I find this to be an amazingly accurate corollary. While the study didn’t share a lot of details about what types of technologies are being used, suffice to say that once you have data on what your customers are interested in, what channels they’re engaging in, and what’s driving prospect conversions into customers, customer journey mapping becomes incredibly easier……and richer.
If you’re going to get ahead of the trends and keep pace with the High-performers cited in the study, here are our top recommendations for what you should be doing in 2016:
Mobile marketing – figure out what your customers are doing with mobile so far, especially if you’re in the B2B space where adoption of mobile tactics has been happening at a slower pace. Once you know, at least experiment with a few mobile campaigns yet this year.
Email personalization – if you aren’t already doing email marketing, then start. Skip mass email altogether and fast forward directly into personalization.
Identify at least 1 truly unique angle for content for your company. Do you have a subject-matter-expert with a unique perspective on a trend or segment? Perhaps a patented new product or service? Unique insights from a segment of your customer base?If you don’t have something, that’s okay – instead, leverage what your customers have to say about you and trends happening in the arenas in which you do business together.
Segment based on behavior – Start thinking about your audience in terms of what behaviors they’ve exhibited, and use the traditional methods of demographic or firmographic segmentation secondarily.
To read the full Salesforce.com 2016 State of Marketing report and learn more about the study’s respondents, visit: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/03/state-of-marketing-2016.html