2020 B2B Digital Marketing Trends From Digital Summit Chicago

Recently, members of our digital marketing team and I attended Digital Summit Chicago. During the comprehensive two-day event, four 2020 B2B digital marketing trends spoken about at several sessions stood out to me, as they are so ingrained in the work my team and I do every day. Here’s a recap with some insights and resources related to each that I’d like to share:

1. Digital Transformation — digital transformation continues to be significant to all B2B marketers. Organizations large and small are looking for ways to modify their processes, culture and customer experiences to meet the needs of their prospects in a changing marketplace. Here at The Mx Group, we are very familiar with digital transformation strategy, process and implementation, and we’re always thinking about new ways to help our clients engage with their audiences and stakeholders. A few examples include a highly adopted interactive sales tool for Tempur Sealy’s reps in the field and a mid-funnel ROI calculator for vAuto’s website to help their car-dealer prospects understand the potential wins for their business.
2. ROI and Spend Transparency at a Campaign / Marketing Initiative Level — both in-house marketing teams and agencies like ours should be held to a standard where campaign-level ROI and spend transparency are table stakes. This is a B2B marketing trend that has been in play for some time. Agile marketing requires ongoing optimization fed from these data points, and in order to meet these expectations, you must have both clear reporting on media spends and the right marketing measurement framework in place.
3. Email Channel Tactics — while batch-and-blast emails still have a place in a modern marketing plan, we’ve been counseling clients for some time that this tactic alone does not deliver results. Sending the same message to everyone on your mailing list is counter to the idea of targeting buyers by persona, which produces results, and can also damage your reputation with internet service providers, making future email delivery difficult. Instead, marketers should make every attempt to nurture their leads, interacting with a prospect when (and how) the prospect wants. This ties into our last trend.
4. Customer-Centric Marketing — in order to be successful now and in the future, marketers must stop relying on product marketing. Instead, they need to gain more insights about their buyers and implement content, tools and solutions that address buyers’ pain points. Customer-centric has been a major theme for Mx over the last year and will continue to be a big 2020 B2B digital marketing trend. If your organization is looking for new ways to put the customer at the center of your marketing efforts, check out our new customer-centric ebook and our webinars and worksheets designed to help B2B marketing teams implement customer-centric strategies.