Mind the Gap: 5 Topics B2B Marketers Should Pay Attention to in 2024
B2B marketers must stay ahead of the curve as we approach 2024. In this newsletter, we highlight five pivotal topics that demand your attention, providing insights and strategies to navigate the gaps. Join us as we unlock opportunities and guide you through the trends that will shape your success in the coming year.
1. Privacy and depreciation of 3rd party cookies
The landscape of digital marketing undergoes significant changes with the impending deprecation of 3rd party cookies and increasing focus on privacy issues. This means B2B marketers need to adapt their strategies for continued success. A key element to face these issues is embracing your 1st party data – Shift your focus towards collecting and utilizing your own 1st party data directly from your customers. Leverage your Marketing Automation stack alongside your CRM to transform them into a comprehensive data warehouse for contacts. Give precedence to tools that seamlessly integrate with your 1st party data, maximizing its potential for use across various campaigns and platforms.
2. Buying Group Marketing
Relying solely on ABM simply won’t cut it in 2024. While account-level data remains crucial, the ultimate engagement revolves around individuals. Identifying the buying group for each target account requires leveraging contact-level tools such as LinkedIn, Apollo, Zoominfo, etc. The second step is investing in one-to-one personalization strategies to engage each member of the buying group with custom-tailored messages, content and calls-to-action. This targeted approach is key to closing the loop and successfully converting the accounts into closed-wons.
3. Brand is Back
The economic recession had brought a decline in demand for the last 2 years. However, there’s a noticeable shift as the buying mindset is making a robust comeback. Allocate your resources towards brand development and thought leadership initiatives in the first half of the year, paving the way for a seamless transition into targeted lead capture strategies during the latter half. This strategic sequence ensures a holistic approach to building brand equity and generating valuable leads over the course of the year.
4. The Year of ROI
As companies delve into year-end budget deliberations, the tension between CMO objectives and CFO expectations becomes more evident. In the B2B realm, attributing marketing ROI poses a unique challenge, given the complex nature of B2B journeys with multiple anonymous stakeholders engaging across numerous channels. However, 2024 can be the year in which you make peace with your CFO. The key lies in speaking a common language with your CFO by evaluating the economic impact of marketing activities.
5. Dark Social
Navigating interactions on social media platforms, whether through their search engines or private messaging, poses a tracking and attribution challenge in B2B marketing. Consider a scenario where a prospect watches a video you posted on LinkedIn, only to visit your website and reach out months later. The difficulty lies in attributing the contribution of LinkedIn due to the prolonged B2B journey and engagement across various channels. The attribution challenge associated with B2B social media will only intensify in 2024, as the relevance of social platforms increases. You can address this gap by analyzing account-level insights (as opposed to fragmented individual journeys), explicitly asking leads how they discovered your brand, and investing in analytics tools that facilitate the understanding of complex B2B journeys across multiple sources.