If you want to build authority, credibility, and trust, making your B2B company the “go to,” you need to humanize your brand. Authenticity is the new black, and you will continue to hear about it from all angles, in the media cycles to corporate boardrooms and all across social media. The reality is that when businesses sell to other businesses, there are still humans who are creating those connections and making transactions happen.

When someone discovers your brand online, then interacts with a company representative, that human to human connection is what sets the tone for the business to business relationship. B2B companies must start to focus on formulating digital strategies that connect prospects not only with the company’s products and services, but also with the thought leaders behind the business.

If you want to create a successful B2B marketing strategy in 2020 and beyond, you must understand the importance of empowering your leaders to be more human, which makes them and your company more relatable.

Invest in supporting your team, direct reports, and leadership throughout your organization to build strong personal brands. When your employees start to share their expertise, insights, stories of failure, and lessons learned, they are helping to humanize your brand. Putting more “human” in your business to business is how you will begin to build the key relationships that ultimately creates trust with new clients, and builds loyalty with existing ones.

In my experience, videos and chatbots are two of the most important components of B2B marketing strategies this year.

Over time, videos have become powerful drivers of engagement and can help you grow your reach as well. With the rise of video-only social media platforms like TikTok, the importance of videos is only going to increase. Hence, you should try your best to incorporate them into your strategy.
Similarly, AI-powered chatbots can help you with a host of marketing operations. Not only can they help with customer retention by offering customer service, but they can also market your offerings to potential customers. And they can serve as a powerful lead generation tool and can collect your audience information with ease.

Currently, only a minority of B2B marketers measure content’s ROI — 43% according to Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 report. The rise of funnel-based analytics is the future. While most organizations won’t invest, the wonderful news is that for those who can measure and optimize direct, assisted, and email-led content conversions … the world will be theirs. Moreover, when analytics are coupled with funnel-based content — intentionally creating every piece around top, middle, or bottom goals — the true power of content is unleashed.

2020 is the year of personalization and meaningful content. Think QUALITY over QUANTITY. Also, people are tired of the negativity and they are craving authenticity and positivity. If you can leverage your brand and showcase the “real” side that leaves your audience feeling great and wanting more, you’re going to be light years ahead of your competition not just in 2020 but for years to come.

For 2020, I recommend working on cross platform presence with niched campaigns. It’s easy to put together funnels targeted to a specific persona and industry on your website, but the way to really get those funnels working is by running paid advertising to amplify the top of the funnel articles or offers you’ve already built for your website. This also speeds up your optimization process and gives you an opportunity to refine the top of your funnels, finding out what’s truly effective for initially bringing in your target persona.

LinkedIn is still a major opportunity for B2B organizations to connect with customers by consistently sharing educational and entertaining content. Organic reach is still high on the channel, but won’t be forever. Identify the challenges faced by your customers and how your organization can help then solve these issues with your offerings and expertise. I’d recommend producing video and written resources that live on your website and then uploading them natively to LinkedIn as well. When I say natively, I mean not sharing a link to a video or article published on your website, but uploading the video or article to LinkedIn directly as it’s more likely to earn visibility. LinkedIn and other social networks want to keep traffic on their website, thus provides greater viewership to content that keeps people on their platform. Aim to share more content natively to LinkedIn and occasionally post resources there that send people to your website as a mixed strategy is the best approach.

B2B marketers in 2020 need to focus on creating great content that gets found in search. With over 71% of all online traffic now coming from a search, this is critical.

In 2020, SEO will have ONE main rule: Focus on delivering the best possible content to your readers. The phrase “content is king” has been floating around the internet now for almost a quarter of a century. (Thanks, Bill Gates.) 24 years later, we’re still discovering exactly what it means. And 2020 may be the year that we (collectively) finally get it.

It’s no longer going to be about either optimizing for people or optimizing for search engines. By crafting exceptional content, you’re now doing both. If there’s to know in how you create content for a B2B audience in 2020, it’s these three points:

1. Topic-Focused Content Builds Authority. To establish authority in the search engines, you’ll need to prove to Google that you know something about a topic. That doesn’t mean posting one or two articles on the subject and calling it good. The average content pillar has been 2,000 and 10,000 words with 6-8 sub-topics (or pages) linked.

2. Results-Focused Copy Builds Relevance. Craft content with a purpose. People use search engines to find answers to problems, but only 21% of searches lead to more than one result getting clicked. If your copy isn’t laser-focused on achieving a specific result (like solving the problem that person searched for), you won’t make it to the top of the list.

3. Customer-Focused Marketing Builds Trust. In 2020, the primary means you’ll build trust with your readers is by delivering helpful, useful content. Such content indicates a willingness to be helpful, to give without expectation of monetary returns. Turns out it works. According to research by Conductor, customers are up to 131% more likely to purchase from brands that provide early-stage, educational content.

My original thoughts have naturally been adjusted since 2 to 3 weeks ago when the severity of the COVID-19 Pandemic raised its ugly head, and now while it’s considered a challenge to remain calm and resolved for many, it’s really important to stay the course regardless of what business you are in.

Relevance in the minds of your customers has always been a necessity based on all the noise that existed in the global market. Now add to that possibly one of the largest single disruptions of all time caused by this virus, and it has become paramount that we stop, think through everything we are doing, and prepare ourselves for when it’s over.

My advice is that even if it’s at a reduced rate, that your strategy should be one of showing your clients that you care, that you are forward-thinking, and build out a portfolio of content to share with your clients of ways and means of remaining stable, building on those relationships and communicating both publicly and intimately with those people who need you the most.

In 2020 and beyond I expect to see executives at B2B companies, especially CEOs, investing more in their personal brands. While there are a handful of executives who have become household names, it will become standard for the CEO to be active across social media platforms, publish a book, speak at events, and engage directly with the media in frank and open discussions. Authenticity will be the name of the game, and while executives may rely on teams to supplement their efforts, there will be no faking it–they’ll have to get their hands dirty in the content creation process. And when I say “dirty,” I mean instead of polished, professional, scripted videos of the CEO sitting in a studio being interviewed by a professional interviewer, we’re going to see more CEOs at major enterprises doing spontaneous livestreams on LinkedIn, writing their own social media posts and publishing them without oversight from the marketing or legal departments, and collaborating with other content producers.

My experience is with search marketing, so I will stick with that for this response.

Before you start putting pen to paper, make sure you know your audience, and know their common path through your website (Google Analytics or Hotjar are my favs here).

Also, know how your prospective customers search. Every query entered into Google is a need. Your goal is to be the best answer for that need. If you’re the best answer, you show up for not just the search that they clicked to reach your site, but the searches they didn’t click. This is a branding opportunity. The more prospective customers see you in search engines, the more they feel you have authority. It’s almost the social influence principle, but in this case, the influencer is an algorithm. But speak to your sales team, and look at keyword data. Survey your customers. Study your attribution. Don’t just “think” you know what the customer wants, instead “know” you know what the customers want.

When you have spent time on due diligence, you can then create a persona (or several). You might find that your persona doesn’t entirely match up to the angle your products/services are taking. If that’s the case, your whole business is less in sync with the customers than it should be. A well crafted strategy can now get your services/products in line with your marketing message, and in line with the wants of your prospective customers. Then the ship really starts sailing.

B2B marketing becomes more sophisticated. For B2B we need to make sure the experience is “WOW”. Go over your funnel, make sure you’ve got the right copy, not a too-tight messaging, the best UX and page speed. Businesses are judging your business, before they would buy your product, so just make sure you’re doing the right things in your niche and website.

Looking ahead, B2B marketing strategies will continue to hone in on the individual customer. Focusing on their needs and motivations to create more personal content.

We’ll deviate from highly-structured, formal sales funnels, and build more flexible strategies to adapt to various motivations. Customer personas will be top priority. Rather than entire businesses, personas will seek to understand single decision-makers.

Marketing tactics must include the entire customer experience. No more siloed strategies to affect one metric. We’ll consider how lead generation affects retention and how marketing content affects customer expectations. Every customer interaction will be accounted for with every strategy.

This year is going to be all about mixing high end and low end content. With LinkedIn becoming more and more popular for content distribution, and more types of photo and video being created – we must mix the high end and the low end to create more opportunities to connect. Not every photo needs to be shot by a marketing agency. And sometimes, there is room for great video shot on an iPhone. Brands and thought leaders who mix pro level content with DIY content effectively will stand out!

As B2B content writers, we’re more often involved in delivering tactics than strategy. But one thing I will say is that aiming for a smaller, more specific audience is never a bad thing in B2B. However counter-intuitive it might feel, being really clear about who your customer is (and who they’re not) lets you create marketing that speaks to their real needs in a direct and compelling way. Better still, it enables you to send marketing content out into the world that is machine-tooled to attract your ideal customers.

A good place to start is to look at your existing customer base, and identify those great clients who you’d clone if you could. It might be their business sector, size or location—or it might be something less tangible, like their attitude or the work problem they were trying to solve when they called you. Find those customers, and start creating content for them—maybe even involve them in the process. That way you can publish stuff that resonates with other people in a similar position, who face similar challenges. It’s like lookalike advertising, but with your content, and it works a treat.

My best strategy for B2B marketing heading into 2020 is to SHOW UP.

There are dozens and dozens of techniques and strategies we can use as businesses to attract more followers and potential customers, and to broaden our reach. However, if we’re not showing up to meet those new followers and potential customers, then they aren’t going to stick around.

So do things that don’t scale. Be there for the one-on-one phone call, or show up at the networking event and actually have real conversations. It’s not about automating and scaling everything in your business – you have to show up in order to create the trust and relationships that will lead to your best customers.

My biggest ask for B2B marketers is: INVEST MORE IN YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY! The absolute no-no I’m still seeing is response times. Brands are still majorly behind when it comes to responding in a timely manner to customer mentions, questions, or complaints (if they bother to respond at all). This is BAD. REALLY BAD! Newsflash: only 6% of customers don’t expect a response from brands when they reach out, while the majority of people expect a response in under 30 minutes.

Responding to mentions is the absolute basic measure of a solid social media strategy – if you can’t do that, don’t bother investing time and money on social.

My second ask would be to remember that your B2B buyer is still a person, even if they’re buying on behalf of a company or brand. I often see B2B marketers say they’re scared to get personal. But I think that’s all wrong. It’s not enough to think about what motivates consumers to buy our products; we need to know what their interests are personally as well. Emotional marketing tactics are important to B2B marketing. Make sure you’re approaching your marketing campaigns with feelings front and center, especially on social media.

I hope 2020 is the year that marketers cut the gimmicks and the hacks, and instead focus on fundamentals. As I explain in my book, See You on the Internet: Building Your Business with Digital Marketing (https://www.seeyouontheinternet.com), every marketing effort needs to tie back to your business goals. If you can’t clearly connect what you’re doing to where you hope to go, how will you get there?

I also hope that in 2020, marketers will strive to understand their customers and clients, talk to them, and really listen to their answers. Don’t use surveys – they’re often lazy and unreliable. Actually talk to your customers and clients! Also, do some work to understand your positioning in the marketplace. Even if you think you know the answer, it often changes so quickly. It’s worth revisiting regularly. The fundamentals aren’t always fun or sexy, but they’re fundamentals for a reason. They work.

1) Go for the Slow Burn: Nurture and Converse, don’t Blast
Develop a series of messages that tells a story, builds trust, and nurtures conversation with prospects over the long haul, especially if you’re using email. Whether you’re building your own list, already have one, or advertising in paid media (email, social or display), such series are intentionally designed and sequenced to recognize the purchase consideration process and key inflection points on the buyer’s journey. They mirror a conversation vs. broadcast. Whether messaging for lead generation or customer retention, great B2B marketing goes for the slow burn and strives for continual, steady connection.
2) Content is King
Because of longer sales cycles requiring the nurturing of prospects into eventual customers (conversion), content marketing is critical in B2B. Content-rich messages designed to sell by way of serving vs. demanding become an integral part of the mix. Content like customer success stories, white papers, webinars, worksheets, comparison grids, feature lists, and use cases make easy, intriguing ways to keep prospects engaged over a long conversion path and make great credibility-builders. Plus, interaction with online content can be scored to identify hot vs. warm vs. cold leads and segment them for unique and appropriate automated follow-up via email, text, phone or mail.

One strategy is to focus on generating interest with quick videos followed by longer form blog posts. This pulls audiences in while giving them the option to fully engrain themselves in the topic. It’s also ideal for search engines, since both video and longer form content reap multiple SEO benefits.

Our favorite B2B marketing trend is utilizing Chatbots to automate and streamline the lead gen process. Facebook Messenger bots, for example, can be cleverly uses to book demos, address pain points or weed out customers to locate ones who are qualified and ready to convert.

Recent studies predict that businesses will invest $400 million in chatbots in 2021, while a Business Insider report shares that 80% of businesses will use personalized chatbots by 2020, saving them up to $38 billion in marketing expenses.

Chatbots sometimes get a bad rep for being a bit robotic; however, if you do your research and understand your audience and target demographic, you can create some bot-to-consumer behavior that is pretty darn humanlike!

Optimize your page for search
A great company profile will only get you so far. What’s the good in having one if people find it hard to find?

This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in use. Insert keywords into your company profile. The keywords you choose must be relevant and descriptive of your business and what you provide.

Unsure about which keywords to use? Start by asking yourself which words or phrases a prospect would type into Google when looking for your product or service.

The automation of paid media is everywhere. ie; Facebook, Instagram, Influencers & Programmatic. For most B2B marketers selling their services, LinkedIn is the go-to choice. Market saturation and overdone social content sharing means us marketers need to be smarter about how we standout. Here’s my two cents on exactly how to do that.

1) Host events, wherever & whenever possible. Invite your most articulate colleagues to participate. Fireside chats, workshops and mixers are great places to establish authority while developing authentic connections. Make sure to film, share & connect with as many attendees as possible.

2) Dinner meetups and keep the circle tight. Invite 8 leaders and/or peers to participate. The goal of the dinner is to produce B2B introductions for each invitee. Be conscious of you ask to participate.

3) Host a podcast and invite a target prospect for an interview. People love to be recognized as thought leaders. If you have the gift of gab, doing a podcast is a great way to develop meaningful connections. More importantly, building content helps establish your personal brands social proof.

4) GIVE then GET. Sounds much easier than it is. What happens when a conversion channel gets saturated? Bingo, your client acquisition cost goes up. My LinkedIn inbox is overwhelmed with cold messages from people I’ve never met nor would I care to. However, when I meet someone new, and really connect…. the likelihood of establishing a business relationship increases 100x.

Our world is overwhelmed with messages, emails, likes and shares. For this reason, really connecting is more important than ever. Of course, having a “great product” should be the cornerstone of any B2B offering. But why should prospects consider your amazing product amongst all the noise? The answer Is NOT work harder, call more prospects, or email more targets. We must all apply our inner James Bond if we truly want stand out.

Jeremy Barnett is the current CEO/Founder Rad Intelligence. Former CEO & co-founder of Trendy Butler and lifelong supporter of Orphaned Starfish Foundation.

2020 is the time to really look at who your marketing strategies target. Gen Z is starting to enter the workforce and communicates, discovers, researches, and transacts so much differently than Millennials just a few years older. This generation outpaces Millennials by 3M and represents over 40% of American consumers today. Your marketing strategies need to shift for this new wave of consumers. Check out InstaBrain (on Amazon) for more info on marketing to Gen Z.

One of the most important factors in raising awareness of your brand, business and you is to connect with influential figures that work for the company that you want to approach. Here are the steps I recommend you pursue. Once you have identified the company that you want to approach, research their LinkedIn and Twitter. Pay attention to folks from their company who are active on these platforms. Build your rapport with them by following them and genuinely commenting on their postings and retweeting their messages. After a bit of time, you can reach out to them with context and request their help. You will be surprised how well this works. Of course, none of this will work if you are not genuinely interested in them, their company and being authentic in helping them.

Advice for marketing strategy for B2B in 2020 – Relationship building, trust, and listening should be part of your B2B strategy. This goes hand-in-hand with being personalized in communications, targeted in Social, creating relevant content, using email (segmented, personalized and target) while being partners and not vendors. Understand what problem you are looking to solve for the other business before trying to sell anything.

My B2B Marketing Strategy is to treat your business as a brand, invest in your social media presence just as you would your service and employees. Additionally, it’s important to invest in your business, you and your employees’ future retirement, and a long-term growth plan for your business.

What I have found in marketing this year is not that there is a cutting edge strategy, but rather most people in B2B marketing are letting go the fundamentals in exchange for automation. Yes, there are parts of marketing that can be automated and SHOULD be, however, at the end of the day, you cannot replace an authentic relationship. Currently, for my own business, I employ many ‘old’ techniques. Yes, that means I am not leveraging things like social media marketing, or email list but we are still able to get new business consistently. A lot of marketing comes down to having a conversation with another person and apparently we are bypassing this in exchange for new shiny strategies in 2020.

Moving into the next decade of the digital age, we are seeing our B2B clients embrace the online User Journey to new levels and an eagerness to explore channels that would be more common on B2C initiatives. Our paid traffic sources are including platforms that reach B2B targets while on “leisure time” and drive down lengthy marketing funnels to showcase various formats of valuable content in path to a longer sales cycle conversion. The team and I are excited about new data sources that are emerging and always on the lookout for the next new opportunities to test – as more and more B2C vendors are extending options for B2B activations.

Increasing even formerly non-digital industries such as freight forwarding and logistics, in not very digitized markets such as emerging Asia, rely on digital platforms not limited to social media in order to achieve their sales and marketing goals.
The majority of CEOs have a ‘digital litmus test’ which they use to assess potential suppliers and partners (linkedin, twitter and Facebook or the local equivalent, plus website and general digital presence).

Given that budgets are going to be tightening and focus is being pulled toward figuring out how to message around/through COVID-19, from a content marketing perspective, I highly recommend focusing on **doing a few things well rather than trying to do a lot of different things in an attempt to fill gaps in demand.** Make sure all of your marketing functions are aligned around promoting assets and/or big pillar campaigns. Trying to publish a ton of stuff without focusing hard on SEO, paid distribution, etc. will undercut your efforts (and you may not have freelance budget to get more content done). Tighten up on optimizing landing pages, demo flows, etc. to make sure you’re moving everyone you’ve attracted at the top of the funnel to the next steps. The basic will be important now as every lead capture counts toward generating opportunities and–eventually–revenue.

The **only thing** I’d consider experimenting with is your marketing messaging. You’ll need to figure out if anything should reference the current challenges the world is facing around layoffs, remote work, etc. **This does not mean being opportunistic or making light of COVID-19 (because that’s icky).** But to ignore it or not reference it at all would be a bit tone deaf. This should probably be the only thing that’s more up in the air and unplanned in the coming quarter. Leaving your team some extra time to think through these messaging challenges will be a necessity. Finding a balance between regular campaign execution and dealing with the uncertainty of the world right now will be the biggest challenge marketers face in their roles.

If you’re not using AI in your marketing strategy you might as well be winking in the dark. THAT will be the fundamental difference between the big dogs and the little dogs from here on in. Caution, however: AI automation is by no means enough. Why? Because, while there are hundreds of marketing software companies, they all fall into two camps: marketing management and marketing analytics. But no amount of management or analytics can polish a turd :-(. The content – the writing itself – is what matters most. But why guess when you can have artificial intelligence LEARN what works – a.k.a. what messaging your customers will actually respond to? Think of it like this: when Netflix came to town, they learned what we all wanted to watch. Then they used that data to feed us relevant content. THEN they used that data to create original content that’s now the MOST WATCHED ON ITS PLATFORM. Because it’s not just automation… It’s AI. This is what Lately is doing.

At the Expert DOJO accelerator we are constantly focused on growth for our cohort companies. Although we pursue all the usual channels such as facebook and google paid advertising we always start in the place that gives us the highest growth and that personality partnerships. We know that venture backed companies grow much faster when they already have a following and that celebrity following can be infectious. It’s important to point out that we do not look for paid posts by personalities, we look for partnerships with personalities to create a long term growth of our products. We are currently having a lot of success with multiple companies who are partnering with celebrities. For a startup to raise their influence level and domain expertise they need this extended influence reach. Finding an influencer is the first option and if that proves impossible then the second option is to become a personality in your industry. Then just build that user base.

Anyone who wants to apply to raise money should contact the Expert DOJO accelerator by contacting brian@expertdojo.com or applying directly on our website – https://expertdojo.com/