One thing is for sure, the world of marketing is always evolving. With the addition of new marketing channels and changes in buyer behavior, it’s important to ensure your marketing efforts and dollars are being spent in the areas that will bring you the biggest ROI. So what marketing trends should you be incorporating into your marketing strategy for 2021? We’re sharing four marketing trends we are likely going to see more of in 2021 and how you can incorporate them into your marketing strategy for 2021.

Have Purpose

Nobody could have predicted how 2020 would have unfolded and it showed us that consumers care now more than ever about community and doing the right thing. When it comes to making a buying decision, consumers have plenty of options so it’s important to set yourself apart from the competition. While price and solution offerings can play into the buying decision, consumers are now incorporating a company’s purpose and mission when making a buying decision. It’s important to note that while over time technology and solution offerings will change, your purpose and mission should continue to stay the same.

One way to show your company’s mission and purpose is to share more content around your company culture and what your company stands for. Some of the most successful posts on LinkedIn have nothing to do with products or solutions, but instead focus on employee accomplishments, team bonding, and community outreach. Allowing consumers to see what your company stands for gives them the opportunity to understand your company culture and purpose on a deeper, more personal level.

Customer Retention

It should come as no surprise that companies are spending more time and money to keep their current customers happy. If you think about it, when you have a great service that a customer is happy with and a company culture that promotes a positive customer experience, the marketing almost takes care of itself. According to Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can produce more than a 25% increase in profit. That doesn’t even include the increase in qualified referrals from current customers.

While it’s important to think about the customer first when developing your marketing strategy, the customer experience should be at the forefront in every aspect of the business. Just one bad customer experience can deter a customer from referring business or even worse, choosing to work with a competitor. Ensure your company is providing a positive customer experience by sending out anonymous customer feedback surveys and regularly speak with customer facing teams to gain a better understanding of what customers might be dissatisfied with.

Create More Content

Even though content marketing has been around for a long time, companies are starting to see the compound return on their investments. In fact, content marketing produces 3x more leads than paid search because it builds over time, according to an eBook published by Oracle. A great example would be a company’s blog. The initial investment would be writing the blog posts (and ensuring it is optimized for search engines of course) but over time as the blog post continues to gain traffic, the post will continue to gain exposure and traffic to the website.

Another important aspect to take into account when creating content is to make sure it is quick. With the creation of social media and the increase of shorter attention spans, it’s important to make sure the content you’re creating is quick and easily digestible. Consumers are looking for articles and videos that they can quickly consume while they are in between meetings, in line at the store, or just trying to take a short break from work.

To make sure you are creating effective content, work with your sales and customer facing teams to understand what customers and prospects are looking for. Do they have specific questions on how a solution works? Are they interested in understanding how a solution integrates with other offerings they have? Do they want price comparisons for different solutions and vendors? Based on these responses, you can spend your time creating content that people are actually interested in.

Account Based Marketing

In the last several years, Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been on the rise and out of the companies that have incorporated it into their marketing strategy, 97% have reported higher ROI relative to traditional marketing activities according to Brafton. So what makes Account Based Marketing so successful? Rather than creating generic content for a wide audience, Account Based Marketing targets high value customers and prospects with personalized content and campaigns.

If you’re interested in incorporating Account Based Marketing into your B2B marketing strategy, start by focusing on high value strategic accounts or a group of high value accounts that fall within the same industry. Content and campaigns that are developed should be personalized and focused on the companies/industries specific pain points, solutions that alleviate those specific pain points and speak to all of the decision makers. It’s also important to mention that effective Account Based Marketing requires the alignment between both the sales and marketing departments.

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