If there’s any constant in B2B digital marketing, it’s a paradoxical one: B2B is always changing. How many digital marketing B2B trends can you reliably count on in 2024 — and beyond?
Here are our picks for this year’s most prominent and lasting digital marketing B2B trends (#2 might surprise you!)
Minimalist design, authentic images
Visual content is only becoming more important for digital marketing: a recent study showed that when a relevant image is paired with information, people retained 65% of the information three days later, compared with just 10% when there is no image.
Research has shown some very specific design trends (2024) to embrace in your visual content creation.
These trends include an emphasis on minimalism, with bright pops of colors, and a shift away from stiff-looking stock photos to more authentic-seeming images that look as if they’ve been taken with someone’s phone. This underlines the emphasis on the personal and authentic.
Embrace voice search in SEO
When sifting through types of digital marketing strategies for your team to implement, SEO (search engine optimization) is a key step in any marketing plan.
SEO helps improve organic or unpaid search results for your website so that more users will find your website when searching for keywords relevant to your business.
With the advent of voice tools like Siri and Alexa, your SEO specialists should also start including voice search in their research.
Expected to grow within the next five years, this process involves supplementing keywords with conversational content similar to how people talk, but also formatted in ways machines can understand.
B2B digital vertical marketing trends, by necessity, will feature SEO content specific to each niche, examples are Power Consulting’s SMB Cybersecurity and Airfixture’s UFAD Guide, but voice search appears to be a trend that will influence digital marketing across many sectors.
AI marketing becomes a given
If you’re researching B2B digital marketing trends in 2024, chances are you have heard of a little thing called AI.
In 2024 and beyond, AI is predicted to lose prominence in marketing discussions, but not because it will lose importance, but because it is becoming a given.
From targeted ads to chatbots as well as woven indispensably through the marketing process and in everyday life, AI literacy in marketing will be just as essential as having a smartphone or using a car.
B2B Personalization
You’ve seen how well Wendy’s Twitter does: all of a sudden it’s like a grumpy young person is at the helm, and customers love it.
In our era of increasing digital noise and automated everything, there is a growing customer expectation for personalization — and to have real, attentive people involved in every B2B marketing funnel stage.
SEO experts in a B2B Digital Marketing Company will be able to provide you with highly personalized information about each lead. Going the extra mile to make and keep a human connection with each prospect will only become more and more important.
Whether it’s through visual aesthetics, like an intimate-feeling video of a company’s CEO talking about their excitement for a new product, or through speaking with a sales representative who knows your needs inside out, B2B digital marketing trends in 2024 involve an exciting and delicate balance.
Aim to balance exciting new digital trends like intent data, which will reveal more than ever about the market and your prospects, while also emphasizing authenticity and a personal touch.
Content Marketing
As they say, ‘content is king.’ And it’s definitely not going out of vogue anytime soon.
With over 60% of online marketers committing to content marketing, it’s clear that this tactic is a proven strategy when it comes to winning users’ trust and making them passionate advocates for brands.
Plus, compared to traditional marketing, content marketing costs 62% less and generates approximately three times the number of leads.
Content marketing works because you’re not engaging in a spray-and-pray approach that’s a hallmark of television, print, and radio advertising. It strives to attract relevant traffic — users that are actually interested in purchasing something. Plus, since it’s not inherently promotional in nature and is geared towards solving queries and problems, it’s very useful in engendering brand loyalty.
Content marketing is a mainstay of the inbound marketing approach — where customers come to you as opposed to the other way around. And content marketing is going to be an even more crucial digital marketing trend moving forward as millennials permeate across most of society.
This is a generation that literally grew up on the internet and they’re accustomed to resorting to Google for the simplest of search queries. Unless we shift to an entirely different model of consuming information — highly unlikely in the medium term — it’s a very safe bet that our reliance on web-based models is going to stay.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Attracting all that traffic to your site ought to count for something, right? That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.
CRO refers to the practice of getting your visitors to engage in a specified outcome. You might want them to download an e-book or whitepaper in exchange for an email address. Or you want them to click on your affiliate marketing link. Very rarely do companies just want to get traffic to their site and nothing else – that’s a waste of resources.
As we mentioned earlier, content marketing is a valuable way to get traffic. But the traffic ought to be, at the very least, marketing qualified. That’s why CRO is so important and will go hand-in-hand with content marketing.
Especially in the case of B2B, where deals or sales aren’t completed online, it’s important more than ever to optimize for conversion. This process could entail several things such as:
- Tweaking ad sales copy
- Improving call-to-action buttons
- Optimizing your site’s visual elements, as well as page load speeds
- Adding pop-up windows and lead magnets
- Including a live chat and customer assistance widget
At the end of the day, B2B marketers want customers to hand over some information and move down the funnel. Personal details such as a work email address or phone number can assist in closing a sales deal later. Your website must make this process frictionless.
Conclusion
The Top B2B digital marketing trends mentioned in this article reflect our analysis of where the digital marketing industry is headed towards as well as traditional tactics that will continue to work well into the future. Apply these for an improvement on your firm’s current digital marketing approach!
Brianna Pyne is a thought leader in the Digital Marketing Industry, one of Brianna’s passions is writing & speaking at conferences. She is currently working with JumpFactor and helps produce content related to content marketing & SEO for B2B businesses.