One of the most strategic moves you can make as a marketer is to staff your team with the right people and invest in them. People are critical to long-term success. As the saying goes, talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

A recent study from Demandbase, Salesforce Pardot and Demand Metric reveals that 84% of B2B marketers expect to see value from their AI implementations within a year. Furthermore, 40% of marketers surveyed agree that AI is one of the most important investments to achieve better sales and marketing performance.

Building a multi-dimensional, in-depth understanding of B2B customer relationships is imperative for fiscal accountability. Companies are “leaking” as much as 1-5% of EBITDA, losing up to tens of millions of dollars a year because they are unable to reach the right customers at the right time.

For lead generation, some B2B marketers may view trade shows as outdated compared to digital strategies, but trade shows are critical for securing face-to-face time with prospects and buyers. Business.com lists the following as just a few of the reasons trade shows are essential:

If you haven’t been giving thought to CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), now is the time to start. SEO may help your organization succeed in Google search rankings, but CRO is what fills the funnel. It is the art of cultivating a high-converting, customer-focused B2B experience through engaging imagery and videos, asking for and incorporating customer feedback, and consistent, strong CTAs.

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See the full article at Forbes.com.

When Business 2 Community  asked hundreds of marketers about social trends for 2019, they received the same six themes over and over:

“Audiences don’t respond to traditional ads like they used to. But they respond to great stories,” says Native Advertising Institute's Jesper Laursen.

 Voice technology is the fastest growing technology to-date and for the healthcare industry, it has the potential to completely revolutionize the patient experience. There’s just one roadblock: voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa or Google Home, aren’t HIPAA-compliant. Yet.

In a broad and diverse list of B2B marketing predictions, number-one on the list is that B2B marketing will become more human. Because the field has long been focused on selling to entities — not necessarily directly to humans — it’s tended to only stick to the facts.  But the time is now to approach B2B in a more human way, speaking to business buyers and evoking responses such as confidence, optimism and accomplishment. While many may have caught on to this already, the approach will now become more mainstream.   The article notes, “…It’s time to be more human. To talk to the buyers as individuals, in a language that moves them.” Recent research by Forrester predicts that making our interactions more human will be a key element for CMOs to drive new strategies and innovation moving into the future. 

B2B marketing has long been deemed the poor cousin of B2C. But B2B brands can no longer afford to lag behind consumer brands when it comes to customer experience. Brands are measured by the same standard, whether it’s a business or personal purchase.