The first trend we predict for 2021 B2B marketing is a larger focus on content marketing. What exactly is content marketing? Essentially, it's any consumable material made by a company that provides information to the target market. For B2B, this includes things like social media posts, blogs, white papers, articles, and presentations. Content marketing will answer questions your target audience has in an engaging way that helps to build trust in your brand. While you can put money behind content to expand its reach, true content marketing is organic. For B2B companies, content should be informative, engaging, and showcase your brand's knowledge of the subject. As with all B2B marketing efforts, you must remember that you are targeting other professionals. You should develop content that will appeal to that demographic. If you think it's appropriate, you can get away with using more statistics and industry jargon, under the assumption that other professionals will understand what you're telling them. Social media posts should showcase products and services without being too salesy. Rather than talk about the product at a base level, you should base your content around how your brand can help your target audience's businesses. You want your content to be on relevant topics, particularly for longer written pieces like blogs and white papers. With more businesses heading online than ever before, we've already been seeing a stark uptick in the popularity of content marketing, and we don't see it ending any time soon.

B2B is a very dog-eat-dog world. The market is always very saturated, and each prospect will get offers from dozens of companies just like yours. How can you possibly stand out when prospects are being bombarded with information, flashy statistics, and more? The easiest way to get noticed is to offer something unique that the prospect will remember. Many B2B marketing agencies are helping their clients build out interactive creative and content. Every company posts images on Instagram, but they won't all have an interactive website! We aren't just talking about videos to play, buttons to click, and things to swipe. When we say interactive, we mean really interactive! Images that can be clicked on to open up a pop up filled with information. A timeline that you can truly navigate through with the tap of a finger. A gallery of before and afters that you can slide to unveil. Anything outside of the box that you won't find on your run-of-the-mill website. To keep up with this growing B2B marketing trend, digital marketing agencies are doubling down on web development. Teams are learning custom code and developing personalized widgets to meet the client's needs. By upgrading your website, you encourage people to click through to see what else it can do. As they peruse, they'll take in the information. The longer someone stays on your site the better, and the more unique your content the more likely a business owner will be to remember you specifically when looking for B2B services. You can also make things like interactive checklists or packages to provide a guesstimate price. Really, anything that offers prospects something unusal (and relevant) to do will be highly beneficial to your B2B marketing efforts.

Lastly, we want to mention that conversational marketing is here to stay. The trend got really popular over the past few years, even more so in 2020. The premise behind it is that any and all online conversation should still feel personal, relaxed, and conversational. This is simple to do when you're actually sitting down to type out a message, but what about automated messages, email campaigns, and drip marketing? Thanks to more advanced technology (particularly AI), chat bots and other automated message services are able to be programmed to sound more conversational. AI learns how a prospect is talking to it, and will respond with similar tones and formality. This is popping up on websites everywhere, making clients feel that they are talking to a real team member rather than an automated robot. The personal touch can help build trust and encourage people to continue the conversation. In terms of email campaigns and outreach marketing, there are software and sites that let you plan out the entire campaign in advance. You should make sure to include variables such as the prospect's name to make the message seem more warm, and your follow-ups should be focused on building trust before making sales. Some digital marketing agencies are even making their own software that integrates AI to achieve similar results to the newest chatbots. Yes, you are trying to sell something, but your best bet is to build trust and show that you are a human looking to make a genuine connection with your prospects. Conversational marketing is a wonderful way to accomplish this, and it's going to be everywhere in 2021, especially for B2B marketing!