Top 15 B2B Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore In 2023

B2B marketing is evolving every fortnight. That’s 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, the Demand Gen B2B Buyer Behavior study 2022 has revealed much interesting information, such as:

• The B2B purchase cycle length has increased, according to 55% of respondents.
• Around one-quarter of B2B decision-making committees have 7 or more people.
• 88% of B2B buyers continue relying on web searches to make decisions.

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. And to help you with that, we have entailed the top 15 B2B marketing trends to refresh your marketing campaigns in 2023.

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 2023:

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, the SEJ news report states that 54% of podcast listeners like to buy from brands they hear.

So, to be heard in 2023, you must focus on B2B podcast marketing.

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 want to invest fully in podcast marketing this year, take inspiration from Salesforce.

They have created a series of podcasts to talk about various aspects of their services, like:

You might still need to see dancing videos of business executives, but TikTok is a big part of B2B marketing.

No matter how absurd it might sound, B2B TikTok marketing will be a big deal in 2023.

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. But Sage Accounting Software has made it possible by partnering with users to showcase their products and reach new audiences with user-generated content.

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 2023. 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 limit?
• 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 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 2023.

Trend #4. GO multichannel in your GOTO market plan

There’s been a slight dip in digital ads last year. But things are shining for B2B ad marketing in 2023.

According to a report, the global ad market will grow to 5.4% in 2023 and 5.1% in 2024.

So, you must level up paid ad marketing strategies in 2023 to stay on top.

Here are some quick B2B ad running tips in 2023:

• 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.
• Use Google Ad extensions to add buttons, collect leads, and more.
• Run frequent A/B tests and constantly monitor your ad’s performance.

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 2022, there are approximately 2 million active WhatsApp users, and 988 million Facebook messenger users are available.

That means you can leverage this 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 2023 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.

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 2023 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 2023. 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 2023. 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.

For example, if your targeted audience is women, Pinterest is the best social media network, as 76.7% of women used Pinterest in 2022.

There are many types of B2B marketing, but public relations is one that is critical right now and will be in 2023.

B2B PR can range from a New York Times feature to a Product Hunt campaign in 2023. It could be similar to IBM’s Every Second Counts campaign, which encourages IT, leaders to address data breaches and cybersecurity.

Public relations campaigns aim to establish a solid, authentic reputation. Your brand, your PR team or B2B PR agency, and your short-term goals determine how you do so.

The growing importance of public relations stems from customer trust. The most important thing your prospective customers want is trust. They are more likely to buy from a brand they don’t like but trust than from one they like but don’t trust.

A strategic public relations campaign is one of the most effective ways to build trust. It assists customers in becoming acquainted with your product or service and connecting with top leadership. It also helps them to understand how your brand is unique from other similar brands available in the market.

During the pandemic, webinars were the best opportunity for businesses to connect with customers and attract potential leads. But this trend is going to continue for a while.

Webinars have allowed businesses to collaborate with global customers and grow their business beyond limits. It provides face-to-face touch to virtual communication.

Companies can better demonstrate their products and services through webinars. It also allows them to build personal relationships with customers and resolve their queries on the spot.

Webinars are a perfect B2B marketing strategy for software brands to showcase their products to live audiences.

According to a report, 73% of business executives find webinars useful for generating leads.

You can try something like Cisco and create a dedicated webinar page on your website. You can host special webinars to explain your products or allow customers to revisit your webinars.

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 2023, 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. But, the intelligence of our marketing experts to AI information helps to generate marketing and sales-qualified leads for our clients.

Influencer marketing is the 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 is 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.

Email marketing never fades. B2B brands have been using emails for years to sell their solutions. And that will still work in 2023.

But you got 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.

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

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.

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.

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 their email list.

Now that you know how the B2B marketing landscape will look in 2023, 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 2023, contact us any time. Our professional marketing team will examine your existing marketing strategies and revamp them with new trends in no time.