Ensuring success in 2022 and beyond with B2B marketing

The essence of any marketing is about knowing what your customers want.

The Omicron and the Ukraine war may have dampened the recovery of business for the B2B industry so far this year, but going by the media reports things are probably on a recovery path. The fact is that many SMEs have not recovered ever since the demonetisation fiasco in 201t6. And the GST complications are still at large for many.

Will 2022 be better for B2B marketers? How have the changing customer preferences and attitudes influenced marketing action? Should you look at what has been done prior to 2020 and adapt slightly? Or should you create history with innovative plans? My discussions with a cross-section of B2B clients threw up several challenges and possibilities for this year and beyond.

Serving existing customers well and retaining them seem to be the biggest issue for B2B marketers this year. Losing them to lower-priced competitors seems to be the biggest nightmare for most SME promoters. The fallout of this on bottom line is the next big concern. This means the B2B marketer has a huge task of building the brand and reputation for keeping the prices stable and yet retaining customers.

Given the proliferation of media across multi-channels, getting the brand message across to prospects and customers is becoming increasingly difficult. Social media seems to be the chosen path given its misleading low-cost, high impact persona. But this is hardly the case unless your team has a millennial who knows how to do it right. Given the already-reduced marketing budgets for the year, we will see a higher proportion of the funds getting committed to social media than in traditional media.

The advent of augmented reality and virtual reality that were prominent in the gaming industry into the marketing space will see remarkable changes in the way marketing and sales will shape up in 2022. A Bangalore-based startup, WoWExp Technologies, has made some amazing AR/VR technology and accompanying glasses that would make product demo much more entertaining and almost real without having anyone leave their offices. They also have created a Metaverse city that could be the future place for meetings and trade. The question of affordable tech in this area was the biggest issue so far but now that is getting eliminated in comparison to the selling process and other marketing costs.

Digital marketing will continue to thrive for increasing the leads into the sales funnel. More and more marketers will abandon the traditional media just as their customers are doing in the past two years. The veracity of contents that are carried by the traditional media will only attract the right viewers or readers. More than 90 percent of SMEs will embrace digital media this year and those who still hesitate will be at a disadvantage.

SMEs will find a number of new free agents and smaller divisions of big ad agencies pitching for their digital media business this year. Many creative folks will moonlight to help with content marketing at lower costs than establishments. You will also see smaller tech companies offering tools for quick content changes and placement in social media along with metrics. When you are spoilt for choices, it will be a task to find the right digital marketing partner.

With the reduction in hard copy mails, it may be a good idea to bring back the traditional direct mailers for ensuring a better chance of attention. The challenge will be in making it more attractive in every sense, given the boringly predictable creative designs of B2B mailers. An associated issue is about the right content for the right media. Technology can be helpful but marketers will need to study the analytics closely to rotate and improve content every now and then.

With e-commerce, marketers can plan to close some of the smaller and recurring sales directly in the coming years. However, ensuring alignment with training process, skills and objectives will be critical for both sales and marketing to work together and drive profitable growth.

More troublesome for SME marketers in B2B will be the measurement of success with each digital media. The ROI and conversion ratios are not similar across any industry or medial. In 2022, it is expected that more meaningful metrics will emerge that can help optimise spending. Marketers will have ROI for everything in the next two years, not because they love it but because the promoters will demand it. SAAS-based marketing tech will come in handy and more marketers will try to access these even if in a small way.

Building new and lasting relationships is difficult solely with digital media, as we have seen in the last two years. In B2B relationships, there are multiple touchpoints and many of them work on chemistry and not just rational equations. Branding and brand connections at different points require different skills. Big data analytics will be high in every B2B marketers list and use of technology will see a jump this year. Sensing this, companies from Salesforce to SAP and Microsoft to Oracle are targeting SMEs. We may see some business model shifts in the coming years.

Integrating traditional marketing with virtual media will be key to the success of B2B marketing in the years to come. Any branding or promotional campaign must be customised as much as possible and must be consistent with the data analytics. Coordinating your website content customised for various devices will be essential and the messaging should derive from it for different media. Having a good content writer in your marketing team is a bonus.

All these challenges are coming from the changing environment that you operate in and the essence of any marketing is about knowing what your customers want. The action plan can only be successful once the insights are clear.