Introduction
B2B marketing trends are evolving every fortnight and this is happening because the B2B market is getting more competitive every day and growing at a CAGR of 18.70% (2020-2026).
Most importantly, B2B buyers’ preferences have changed drastically in the last few years. As a result, marketers are finding new techniques and trends to bring the ideal results and reduce business cycles. Also, the B2B marketing trends fluctuate and marketers have to keep up with it to get ahead of the competition.
All this shows B2B buyers are different now. So, why are your B2B marketing strategies the same as the last?
It’s a new year, so you need a new and powerful B2B marketing plan to rule the market. To help you with that, we have entailed the top 15 B2B marketing trends to refresh your marketing campaigns in 2024.
Top 15 B2B Marketing Trends to Play Within 2024
Do you work in the B2B market space? Then, you must feel like a kid in the candy store because many new methods are available to promote your brand.
Just watch out for these top 15 B2B marketing trends to learn what new you can add to your marketing strategies in 2024:
Trend #1. Podcasts Marketing Will Evolve
Podcasts are the best way to connect with your potential audience and build your community.
Most B2B buyers prefer podcasts for content consumption. It helps busy executives to listen to your content while driving, traveling, or doing something else.
Moreover, as per Exploding Topics, listeners can choose from over 3 million podcasts with thousands of new episodes released every day.
The B2B podcasts are more on the information side than entertainment, unlike B2C. Therefore, your podcast must trigger your targeted audience’s pain points and present your brand as the solution.
But don’t make your podcast too plain or boring because you want to excite people, not make them fall asleep.
If you are planning to invest in podcast this year take a look at UnboundB2B’s Podcast “Real Talk Real Results”
Trend #2. TikTok Takes a Position on the C-suite Table
You might still need to see dancing videos of business executives, but TikTok is a big part of B2B marketing trends.
No matter how absurd it might sound, B2B TikTok marketing will be a big deal in 2024.
According to Hootsuite, TikTok is the sixth-largest social media network with a global reach. In addition, 84.6% of TikTok users are found on Facebook and 83.9% on Instagram.
That shows B2B brands can use TikTok to create a presence across social media channels. In addition, TikTok can aid in driving traffic and improve search engine rankings.
Moreover, the latest in-app purchase TikTok feature has enabled businesses to sell from their TikTok accounts.
Before incorporating TikTok B2B marketing trends into your content marketing kit, remember a few things:
Now, keeping the B2B seriousness in mind, it is hard to create TikTok content. However, Sage Accounting Software has made it possible by partnering with users to showcase their products and reach new audiences with user-generated content.
- Ensure your TikTok videos are authentic, polished, and personalized.
- Post frequently for better engagement, at least 1-3 times daily.
- Showcase your unique brand identity.
- Follow the trending sounds, videos, and hashtags.
Trend #3. Customer-Focused Content Marketing
An Adobe Business article states that 7 in 10 customers buy more brands they trust.
So, your B2B marketing must focus on earning customers’ trust in 2024. And for that, customer-centric content marketing is the best.
This marketing tactic helps you connect with your potential customers. You can show them how much you value them and are always available to serve them.
To create customer-oriented content, you must understand your customers. And that starts with building your buyer’s persona.
It is a fictional characterization of your potential buyers to know:
- What are their main problems?
- What are their age and spending limits?
- How can your products or services affect them? Etc.
At UnboundB2B, we also follow this B2B marketing trend. We built our ideal customer profile and found that B2B decision-makers need abundant information to decide.
Thus, using keyword trends, we compose blogs on topics our potential clients search for online.
Second, we added we added case studies to help our clients understand our lead-generation strategies and results.
This content marketing strategy helped us find new clients and rank on search results. So, it can help your brand in 2024.
Trend #4. GO Multichannel in your Go-To-Market Plan
Your go-to-market plan for 2023 will not work in 2024. Simply because your customer expectations and market conditions will be different this year.
But, anticipating these things in advance is only possible by using the latest marketing tools.
So, we suggest the best plan to go multichannel in your go-to-market strategies. It helps you understand which marketing strategies work best in 2024 for your business.
Generally, go-to-market plans stand on 5 pillars—product analysis, the sales proposition, product messaging, and sales and marketing strategy.
You can deploy multichannel marketing in all 5 go-to-market plan areas. It can help you drive relevant customer data and expand your brand reach.
Trend #5. Programmatic Ads are Here to Stay
There’s been a slight dip in digital ads last year. But things are shining for programmatic marketing in 2024.
According to a report by ET BrandEquity, the global ad market will grow to 5.1% in 2024.
So, you must level up paid ad marketing strategies in 2024 to stay on top.
Here are some quick B2B programmatic ads running tips in 2024:
- Find the high-intent keywords in your niche using tools like Semrush, Google Analytics, and others.
- Define your ad campaign objectives, such as brand awareness, traffic, leads, etc.
- Segment your targeted audience so your campaigns can reach the right people.
- Select the right ad style based on your objective. For example, text ads work best when you have a low budget and lack visual content.
- Run frequent A/B tests and constantly monitor your ad’s performance.
If you are looking to implement B2B advertising services in your business, learn how B2B advertising services can help you!
Trend #6. Dark Social is a Thing in 2024
Dark social media is a big buzzword lately. It is a B2B marketing trend that you will see a lot in the coming years.
The dark social media concept is pretty simple. It is called dark social when someone reads your blog post and shares it with their friends on instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
Since you have yet to learn who and how often your website link is shared, you are on the Dark Side of this social media aspect.
As of 2023, there are approximately 2.4 billion active WhatsApp users, and 2.1 billion Facebook Messenger users are available.
That means you can leverage this B2B marketing trend to expand your content reach. First, you must create content users want to share across different platforms.
Foremost, you must work on your content marketing and planning in 2024 to grow on dark social media. In addition, you must add an easy share option on your content to motivate readers to share your content on other platforms.
Trend #7. Social Media Marketing is on a Roll Like Always
Since we are on the topic of social media, we must discuss the impact of social media on B2B marketing.
According to a rough estimation, there are around a hundred million people on social media networks. Facebook is one of the leading social networks in the world right now.
Today, a business has no identity if it is not present on social media networks.
But, this is a familiar B2B marketing trend. Businesses have been working on social media marketing for ages now. But, what will change in 2024 is how businesses create content on social media networks.
The bland promotion content with a direct call to action will not work for businesses in 2024. Instead, businesses must also personalize and add emotional value to their social media content to build a user-friendly brand.
B2B businesses can take several innovative ways to promote their brand on different social media networks. For example, they can build employers’ brands by collaborating with their employees on social media handles.
Microsoft does this style of social media marketing. They share employee stories and collaborate with them on various occasions.
There are many other ways to leverage social media in 2024. For example, you can collaborate with influencers in your business industry, promote user-generated content, or go live for your audience.
However, you must target the right platforms to achieve results. Today, there is no limit to social media networks.
But, you can only consistently create content for some social media platforms; it is too expensive and humanly impossible.
Therefore, you must identify the social media platforms where your ideal customers are present. This way, you can target social media platforms to reach your targeted audience base.
Trend #8. B2B Newsletter is a Catch
There are many B2B marketing trends, but a newsletter is critical right now and will be in 2024. Newsletters in B2B have a wide range and have been gaining popularity now. It can be a touchpoint for a multi-channel approach, adding value to social media, content marketing, and other approaches. Moreover, newsletters can act as a catalyst to experiment with multiple forms of content along with topics and headlines.
If you want to be updated with marketing trends and knowledge, do not forget to subscribe to UnboundB2B’s Newsletter
The thing with newsletters is that they are flexible and you can create them on any topic possible. it is also commonly seen that people enjoy reading newsletters and engaging with them. This will increase brand awareness and credibility along with traffic. moreover, you can monetize your newsletter by adding paid subscriptions, ad placement, sponsorship, promotion, and affiliate marketing. So make sure you deliver quality content and avoid spamming.
Trend 9. GenAI will Provide Insights on Product Launch
This is one of the most pivotal B2B marketing trends for 2024. We are looking forward to product teams to adopt genAI to obtain the review of multiple factors like a wider variety of win/loss, competitive intelligence, and customer feedback sources.
This is due to GenAI’s ability to collect structured and unstructured data and make it resourceful to make product launches smoother.
To ensure that all of the efforts are successful, ask your teams to gather more meaningful data, bring buyer viewpoints directly into the development, and build out specifics collectively.
Trend #10. AI is Shining and Rising like Always
This B2B marketing trend has a lot of power. We wrote in 2020 that marketers must learn to work with AI rather than rely solely on it. In 2022, a plethora of tools are available that provide some level of artificial intelligence capability to assist B2Bs in curating, automating, optimizing, personalizing, and more.
In 2024, every company can use machine learning to streamline its marketing efforts, which could be as simple as automating email sequences or digitizing data to avoid potential manual errors.
AI will undoubtedly provide leaders with new insights and improve B2B marketing performance. But, as we previously stated, innovative technology requires more intelligent humans.
At UnboundB2B, we often use artificial intelligence-based software to improve our database and drive analytical information on marketing campaigns. However, the intelligence of our marketing experts to AI information helps to generate marketing and sales-qualified leads for our clients.
Trend #11. Micro-Influencer Marketing in B2B
Influencer marketing is a popular B2C trend that has successfully made its way into B2B. Customers place a greater emphasis on a brand’s reputation and values. This trend had increased prior to the pandemic but has accelerated in the last two years.
Creators no longer require millions of followers to be effective influencers.
According to Marketing Chart research, micro-influencers (creators with fewer than 15K followers) have the highest engagement rate across platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
SAP’s video marketing efforts to promote its Sapphire Conference are a prime example. The brand collaborated with several influential figures to promote the event via live videos. As a result, the attendees of the event were over 20,000.
Trend #12. Email Marketing is Still Solid
Email marketing never fades. B2B brands have been using emails for years to sell their solutions. And that will still work in 2024.
But you have to jazz up your email marketing efforts. Start with segmenting your email subscribers list and remove all the subscribers that haven’t interacted with your brand in over 6 months.
After that, create personalized email copy for your segmented groups. Here, don’t bore your subscribers with promotional content. Instead, use your creativity to draft unique email copy that can keep your subscribers interested in your brand.
You can take inspiration from Canva. They frequently create challenges to motivate users to use their premium services and share their brand hashtags on social media platforms.
Trend #13. Go Beyond Google ads
The pandemic has changed how B2B marketers use Google for advertising. Cost-per-click (CPC) on Google Search has been out of control since 2020, with no signs of recovery.
As a result, many B2B marketers who promote services and high-end solutions avoid Google because it is difficult to see a good ROI.
Meanwhile, B2B marketers are turning to other advertising networks, such as:
- Microsoft Advertising (formerly known as Bing Ad)
- StackAdapt
- Choozle
LinkedIn is useful for B2B marketers because of its job-title-specific targeting. Furthermore, it enables you to create audiences that are not available anywhere else.
In addition, purchasing audience data on LinkedIn is expensive (average $40 CPC). But the average CTR on sponsored posts is 0.44% on LinkedIn, which is higher than any other platforms at the moment.
Trend #14. Leverage Visual Search
Thanks to Google Lens and Pinterest Lens, visual search is now an exciting B2B marketing trend. While visual search is not new, technological advancements have increased its usability and accuracy.
People can now use their smartphones to take a photo of something, such as a piece of clothing, and use Google Lens or Pinterest Lens to find out what it is and where they can buy it.
These apps can also be used to find new places by using landmarks.
For example, if a user adds a photo of the Eiffel Tower, Google Lens can identify the landmark and use that information to determine the location of the photograph (Paris, France)
It is an excellent strategy for local B2B brands to gain exposure.
Trend #15. Use Gated Content
Gated content can take time to develop but can pay off in the long run. This content can be an eBook, course, video, or tool to assist or educate the consumer.
Typically, gated content can only be accessed by providing contact information such as the website visitor’s full name and email address. You can then add these emails to your CRM or email marketing software and follow up with them.
You should link your gated content to your website so that people who sign up for it are interested in your company’s offerings.
Backlinko follows this B2B marketing trend to build its email list.
Let’s Follow the Top B2B Marketing Trends Now!
Now that you know how the B2B marketing landscape will look in 2024, it’s time to revamp your marketing strategies. You should add some new components or remove some old strategies to prepare your business for this new digital age.
All the B2B marketing trends are crucial for all businesses working in the industry.
So, if you need help incorporating new B2B marketing trends into your sales pipeline in 2024, contact us anytime. Our professional marketing team will examine your existing marketing strategies and revamp them with new trends in no time.
Gaurav Roy
23 January 2023
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