MarTech

As B2B businesses aggressively embrace the digital-first approach, marketing is taking precedence as a vital cog in the growth engine. Led by an unpredictable and increasingly evolving B2B buyer journey, the challenge for B2B marketers is to support what is now essentially a self-guided journey involving extended buying teams with multiple personas.

The digital landscape is shifting and the need for investing in technology solutions to automate and augment marketing is gaining prominence.

Marketers are increasingly trying to tear down the silos between engagement marketing and lead generation which have traditionally been seen as separate entities.

Personalized, omnichannel experience will be critical in gaining brand visibility and capturing customers’ mindshare. As attention shifts to sales enablement, B2B organizations will deploy innovative marketing tools to optimize the value chain from brand awareness and advertising to portfolio management.

Redefining the B2B landscape  

MarTech will assume an aggressive role in the strategic priorities and investments of chief marketing officers in the future. Marketing technology will play a crucial role in enabling businesses to build customer knowledge, automate repetitive processes, and increase the share of wallet. It will become a priority when the budgets are thin, and business becomes stagnant.

Currently, there is a deluge of online content ranging from webinars to podcasts and whitepapers to easy-to-ready blogs. It will be extremely important for the B2B demand generation teams to ensure that the content shared is sharp, tailored, and bite-sized.

When it comes to lead generation, the goal is to scale conversions on existing opportunities. MarTech will lead the charter for improved BI analytics, predictive analytics capabilities, and pipeline forecasting.

Leading B2B organizations are already enabling client engagement experience through phygital marketing models. From leveraging social listening tools to deploying chatbots and data analytics tools to filter out bad sales leads, B2B demand generation teams will have to optimize their process flow for better results.

Personalized CX to fuel MarTech penetration

In the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic, digital marketing has pivoted away from a customer engagement tool to a key source of online lead generation, customer acquisition, and retention. Apart from delivering convenience, technology has been instrumental in tracking and understanding customer behaviour with clarity and precision.

Marketers can efficiently personalize customer outreach communication through digital automation tools and automate content distribution and customer service processes.

Trends such as the integration of voice support and chatbots, gamified marketing communication, etc. will create immersive brand experiences for customers and deliver hyper-personalization.

Technologies that support the customers in their product discovery stage and move them forward in the sales cycle without any friction will hold the key to marketing success.

Marketing automation has already helped organizations to optimize their media planning and buying. Automated bidding strategies coupled with programmatic advertisements have made it easier to target the right personas at improved cost per click and ROAS.

Conclusion 

Marketing technology will only grow smarter and stronger with AI applications. With the capability to dissect customer data, marketers will deliver more customized content through the right channels.

B2B organizations need to transform their marketing agenda and embrace technologies that allow their marketing team to better collect data and act upon it.

However, it will also be important to continuously keep A/B testing the tech stack and measuring its performance. Technology will also have to be equally complemented by manual expertise to get the best results from the MarTech stack.