The evolution of B2B marketing trends is inevitable. As businesses become digital and shift to a more remote approach, marketers have to constantly make an effort to stay relevant to fast-paced changes. Considering the effect that 2020 has had on companies, marketers are expected to be at the top of their game when it comes to providing a hassle-free online experience to their prospects. Since there isn’t one particular important component of B2B marketing that guarantees sales, Deck 7 has come up with a complete list of B2B marketing trends for 2021 that could come in handy.

Successful B2B Marketing Strategies for 2021

Given the changes that took place in 2020, here are some B2B marketing trends for 2021 that could help companies get back into the market.

Video marketing
Content marketing
Digital marketing
Email marketing
Mobile marketing
Social media marketing
Location-based marketing
Influencer marketing

Each of the B2B marketing objectives for 2021 explained below will help you create a successful marketing strategy for 2021.

B2B Video Marketing Trends

The following video marketing trends will enable you to nail your video marketing strategy.

Virtual Events

One of the first B2B marketing trends for 2021 that is highly relevant in the current times and is going to become popular in the coming times is virtual events. The trend of conducting events online will help you reach your audience in real-time from any part of the world.

Live Videos

Live videos are considered to be the most interesting format of marketing when it comes to B2B video marketing. With live streams, businesses can have two-way communication with their spectators, showcase their product or service range as well as interview industry leaders on various topics. This trend has always been applicable for B2C but now is increasingly becoming essential for B2B companies too.

Vlogs

The list of B2B marketing trends for 2021 will be incomplete without vlogs. Vlogs are nothing but video blogs. They are a collection of short videos combined to showcase information about a certain topic or event. Vlogs are a suitable option for businesses to display their work process and the day-to-day activities of putting their service and products together.

Testimonials

There is nothing more reliable for your prospects than witnessing the feedback of your current customers. Including testimonials in your video marketing strategy is a trend that businesses should consider.

B2B Content Marketing Trends

Content syndication is a strategy that most marketers use. Besides this, here are some of the top B2B content trends that would help you market your content in the best possible way.

Podcasts

Podcasts are the most convenient form of marketing your content. Not only is it easy for you to reach your audience with this trend but it also extremely suitable for them to consume since podcasts can be heard on the go. With a decent internet connection, your prospects can listen to you and also save them for future use if you permit them to.

AI-powered Copy

AI-powered copy and blogs perhaps might top the list when it comes to B2B content marketing trends for 2021. While the entire concept of this trend is a little scary, industry experts suggest that it’s also an extremely futuristic way of creating content. Businesses will be able to fetch, summarize, and publish content with the help of artificial intelligence or bots.

User-generated Content

Publishing user-generated content is an excellent way to show your prospects how much you value your customers. This trend lets you take a break from the continuous rut of creating fresh content and still helps you in putting out new content created by your customers. Using content created by your users is not a novel concept but it’s lately gaining importance.

Featured Snippets

There’s nothing better than creating content that appears at the top of your user’s search result. This information is called the Google snippet or featured snippet. One of the B2B marketing trends for 2021 that companies could explore is including content in their article or website that is worth appearing at the top of the search results.

B2B Digital Marketing Trends

The list for B2B online marketing trends is endless. Check out the topmost digital marketing trends that you can’t miss for the coming year.

Personalized Emails

Emails continue to remain a highly effective method of B2B communication. While this concept hasn’t gone out of style there are new ways of using email marketing to increase sales leads. One of these ways is sending out personalized emails. This way you get to strategically direct the conversation with the prospect and if things go right, converting them into a lead becomes much easier.

Voice Interaction

It’s 2020 and consumers are looking for search convenience over everything else. Considering this an excellent addition to the list of B2B marketing trends for 2021 is having a strong voice search strategy. Enabling voice interaction for your prospect to understand invest in your offering creates an optimized and long-lasting customer experience.

Omnichannel Marketing

The world of the internet is huge and wide. Hence creating an omnichannel marketing plan to market your product across platforms is a smart decision to make. With this strategy, you get to reach audiences from different mediums and create content that interests them.

Interactive Content

As per Outgrow, 93% of marketers consider interactive content to be highly effective for educating their prospects about their offering. When companies include interactive content in the list of B2B marketing trends for 2021 to be used they give their audience a chance to recall their brand due to the innovative ways used to market their product or service.

B2B Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing is a popular strategy of B2B marketing. Here are some interesting B2B marketing trends for 2021 related to email marketing.

A/B testing

No all the content that you put in your email copies works on your entire prospect list. This is where A/B testing, also known as split testing, comes into the picture. This trend involves tweaking different sections of your email copies and trying it out in various prospects lists. With this, you understand which list brings the maximum engagement and thus implement that particular strategy.

Automation

Automation is the key to ace marketing in 2021. Hence, one of the top B2B marketing trends for 2021 is automating your email marketing. As the life cycle of this process is long, it is time that marketers start automating responses and actions to hasten customer conversions. Automating this procedure will help sales and marketing teams too.

Distinctive Call to Actions

One of the major mistakes to avoid while automating email marketing is not differentiating the call to action (CTA) from the email copy. When you place the CTA distinctively it becomes easier for the viewer to take any action without wasting much time. Placing and enhancing the CTA has shown better conversion rates for marketers.

Email Schedule

Even though you have a pre-decided list of prospects it is highly impossible that all of them read and respond to your emails at the same time. This is why including email scheduling should be one of the essential B2B marketing trends for 2021. Schedule all your emails well in advance and send them at a time when your prospects are most likely to respond.

B2B Mobile Marketing Trends

Mobile marketing as a concept too broad. Deck 7 divided it into different trends for easier understanding.

Mobile-first Indexing

Mobile-first indexing is one of the B2B marketing trends for 2021 that is progressively becoming popular. The indexing for mobiles involves crawling your mobile website before it crawls the web version. And for it to get indexed you need to make sure the mobile version of your website is user-friendly as well as not too heavy to load. When you design your website with mobile-first indexing in mind, there are high chances of your ranking on the search engine and thus reaching your audience at a much faster rate.

Gamification

Gamification is not a novel trend in the B2C industry but it sure is in the B2B sector. By including gamification as one of your B2B marketing trends for 2021 you plot to give your prospects a more fun and interactive way of communicating with your business. Presenting or networking with your audience in a gamified form is a little risky but if it works it proves to be one of the best strategies to implement.

B2B Social Media Marketing Trends

Social media marketing can never go out of trend. Deck 7 brings you some exciting B2B social media marketing trends for 2021 below.

Webinars

Webinars top the list for B2B marketing trends to consider. Since the entire world is stuck at home and most activities are done remotely, webinars are the best option for marketing your brand. These online seminars give you a chance to give out information about your offering to a live audience as well as receive feedback from them.

Meaningful Engagements

A social media marketing trend that is on the verge of creating buzz is keeping a track of meaningful engagements. This activity by the audience reflects their interest in your offering. In this digital world, the customer has become more aware of their content consumption. To stay relevant throughout, you need to ensure that you give out content that is informative and useful to have them as leads in the B2B marketing funnel. Online Polls

Online Polls

Conducting online polls is the quickest way to get customer feedback. So, it is imperative to consider this one of the top B2B marketing trends for 2021. With online polls, you also get a chance to understand your customer better and get the exact information about their interests and requirements.

B2B Location-based Marketing Trends

Location-based marketing trends allows you to create strategies based on your audience’s location. Some popular trends include:

Location Privacy

Prospects are very particular about their location privacy. By including this as one of the B2B marketing trends for 2021 in your plan your work is reverse engineered. This means you find a location suitable to market your business, gather the potential customers, and contact them at a time when they are available. This ensures the maximum turnaround of your marketing activities.

Hyperlocal Marketing

Hyperlocal marketing is all about targeting a specific location or area to market your offerings. This enables you to focus on studying one precise location at a time, understand their interests and needs, offer your product or service, and thus gain customers.

Mobile App LocalizationMobile app localization is one of the B2B marketing trends for 2021 that is going to regain its popularity. It’s the strategy where you test a certain feature of your app in one country and if works, you introduce it to other countries where you do business. While a lot of B2C brands have already implemented this trend, soon even B2B companies will join the race.

B2B Influencer Marketing Trends

Here are some influencer marketing trends that you should look out for:

Influencer Experience Management

A new addition to B2B marketing trends for 2021 is influencer experience management. The most common scenario in the B2B sector is the brand has a relationship with their brand influencers only to a transactional level. But now it’s time to change this. When you focus on influencer experience management and consider them, you end up creating strong advocates for your brand and thus it highly affects your business through the work influencers do for you.

Centralizing Influencer Operations

As a strong B2B company, you might have a pool of influencers working for you. To make things simpler for your business, it’s better to centralize all the necessary information of your influencers in a system to benefit from them and allot campaigns according to their proficiency as well as your offerings that suit their audience.

With this comprehensive list of B2B marketing trends for 2021, Deck 7 hopes you create a successful marketing plan for your business for the coming year. For any other marketing assistance, contact Deck 7 today!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the B2B online marketing trends for 2021?

Digital marketing trends have started showing results since most business largely depend on the online medium of marketing. Some of the trends that shouldn’t be missed in 2021 are:

Personalized emails
Voice interaction
Omnichannel marketing
Interactive content

What are the content marketing trends for 2021?

Top content marketing trends to look out for in 2021:

Podcasts
AI-powered copy
User-generated content
Featured snippets

What are the top marketing trends for the IT industry?

The IT industry is progressing at a much faster pace than other industries. To suit this pace, here are some marketing trends that could help your business in the IT domain:

AI-based automation
Strategic marketing transformation
Visualization
Personalization
Voice search
Featured snippets