Marketing Strategies For 2018

The new year is almost here. Wow, has time flown. Just like the previous years, marketers will have to continue to deal with tangible growth and ROI pressures in 2018 as well. Marketing strategies is always a roll of the dice for small business owners but here are four emerging marketing trends you need to integrate into your 2018 marketing plan.

1. Marketing automation.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate your everyday B2B marketing tasks to save time? With marketing automation, not only will you be able to automate repetitive tasks, you can also nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content along the push to purchase. Marketers are pushing themselves to move on the possibilities to deliver relevant and timely communications to prospective leads.

2. Content marketing.

For many years, content marketing has been a popular technique to nurture and acquire leads in the B2B industry. Content marketing is highly effective for B2B marketers to educate potential customers about best practices for their industry. Although nearly 90 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing as a core component of their online marketing strategy, only 37 percent of them have a documented content strategy, Set the goals you want to achieve through content marketing and measure them through KPIs. Although content marketing is cheaper, it’s not certainly free. To measure ROI, you need to calculate the cost of content production and editing. You’ll also need to measure various factors like traffic, brand awareness and customer engagement that you acquired through content marketing along with sales and revenue.

3. Content personalization.

While web personalization content is a well-established marketing tactic, B2B businesses are still slow to adopt it. That’s quite surprising because personalization of emails is a common tactic across all industries. With automation tools like Evergage, personalization becomes more affordable for small companies. It helps you to supercharge your account-based marketing initiatives and provide personalized experience based on various customer demographics including company name, industry and other data. It is a no-brainer that in order to make your content initiative enticing in 2018, you need to provide dynamic content on your website.

4. LinkedIn marketing.

Traditionally, social media was considered as a lead generation channel for B2C marketing, but more and more marketers have shifted their focus towards social media to inform and communicate with potential prospects. As in past studies, LinkedIn is expected to outperform other social channels for B2B businesses. After being acquired by Microsoft in 2016, LinkedIn has released tons of features that are geared towards making LinkedIn the most efficient and cost-effective platform for reaching B2B audience. B2B marketers are making more data driven decisions with LinkedIn than ever before, and the trend is expected to continue in 2018 as well. If you haven’t invested in LinkedIn marketing, you really need to take a look at it. LinkedIn is not just for resume builders anymore.
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If you haven’t incorporated new trends in your strategic planning for 2018, what are you waiting for? By getting well-prepared now and embracing changes early, your marketing plan will be ready to go!
-Roy