Well, 2021 was a wild ride. COVID-19 was still a thing and was nice enough to give us Omicron as a lovely holiday gift slash New Year’s Eve present. The biggest news coming out of the Olympics was about mental health. Tall buildings were just falling down in the United States (what?!). Oh, and Captain Kirk (aka William Shatner) went to space.
Soooo, needless to say, we’re glad 2022 is finally here and like you, we are excited for a fresh new start! In that spirit, here are our top 5 predictions to set your B2B Marketing and Marketing Operations teams up for success in the new year.
1. Brand awareness metrics will become a primary KPI
Brand awareness has always been critical to marketing strategy. Historically, it has been difficult to get budget approval from the CEO and CFO for pure brand awareness campaigns because it is a significant time and financial investment and hard to measure the impact. But with the emergence of new technology like blueocean.ai, it’s easier than ever to monitor always-on brand strategy and the impact of dedicated brand investment campaigns on overall brand awareness. Expect brand to take a front seat in marketing metrics and CMO dashboards everywhere.
2. Digital Advertising and ABM to sit with Marketing Operations
This is a shift that actually started years ago, but with more and more B2B organizations adopting ABM as part of their Marketing strategy, those same organizations are realizing that many of the best practices around ABM (or "ABX" - Account Based Everything) such as sales alignment, territory planning and account prioritization, targeting, predictive/AI to peer into intent and the “dark funnel”, personalization, and an advanced tech stack, fit nicely within the Marketing Ops or Revenue Operations team.
Similarly, with so much of paid media and digital advertising execution and strategy relying on landing page and conversion rate optimization, A/B testing, and analytics, expect organizations to combine digital operations with Marketing Operations to streamline processes and leverage core competencies.
3. Marketing ops will be a priority hire for the CMO
Historically, marketing operations has been a reactionary hire. Organizations have often hired marketing ops in an effort to bring order to chaotic processes, clean data, and provide additional execution support as marketing automation has become the norm. But as more senior marketing leaders place a greater importance on analytics and optimization, they are seeing technology stack optimization and data integration as critical. These are tasks that typically sit with Marketing Operations. Marketing teams that bring in operations early are able to take advantage of strategic technology investment decisions, streamlined processes, closer alignment to sales, and better insight into performance.
4. Content is still king, but video is the crown jewel
Content marketing has been a major trend within B2B marketing for the last 10 years, especially as more and more of the customer buying journey takes place prior to form submissions. Prospects expect to self-educate on their road to purchase and that means lots of content. But according to a recent report by Cisco, video will become the primary medium for internet traffic in 2022.
That means B2B marketers can expect to shift more away from the staples of long and short form text content like e-books, whitepapers, and blog posts, and invest heavily in video production in their content strategy as well as video platforms like Vidyard and Wistia to not only deliver individual content, but measure and optimize performance of video as an overall channel.
5. Complexity in the buying journey
You knew this one was coming. B2B marketing has always been complicated due to complicated and multi-touch buying journeys, offline sales processes requiring attribution logic, demand funnel processes that span across teams and push Salesforce.com to its limits, and new channels emerging all the time.
But with the constant evolution of new features on platforms like LinkedIn, emergence of a hybrid events model due to COVID-19, and growth in new Marketing Technology around AI, intent, personalization, conversational bots, and much more, it will be even more challenging to optimize the technology stack, streamline the funnel process, and aggregate data across systems into one view to make data-driven decisions and remain competitive.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR B2B MARKETING AND Marketing Ops TRENDS IN 2022
Technology investment strategy and tech stack optimization as well as data and analytics will continue to be key themes in 2022 as they power strategic marketing pivots around brand awareness, video, and paid media channels and end-to-end visibility of the complex customer journey. The B2B Marketing teams who will be successful in tackling these 2022 trends, will be those that prioritize Marketing Operations in their hiring and personnel plans.
For those teams that need immediate support and don’t have internal operations resources, Optimax is here to partner with you as an extended member of your team! Our A.L.I.G.N. Revenue Engine™ helps B2B marketers maximize ROI without additional campaign or people investment by optimizing the funnel process, tech stack, and reporting.
Reach out to us today to get started!
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