Five Marketing Trends to Help Close the Deal with B2B Marketers

B2B marketers love data. Whether they’re using data to understand their customer’s journey, gauge their intent/qualification, or build catered content maps.

After interviewing marketing leaders in several industries and digging into what marketing trends are directing their buying, it became clear that capturing data with the right technology was consistently top of mind. 

Technology and Data Trends in Marketing

How You Should Sell if You Sell to Marketing

The following sections cover the five trends influencing what marketers are preparing for and buying in 2022. These will be a game-changer for your sales strategy because we’re not only talking about the why behind these trends but how you should think about selling the solution.

• • Stack Consolidation for Sales and Marketing Alignment
  • Is Intent Data Living Up to the Hype?
  • Injecting Account-Based Strategies into Marketing’s Day-to-Day
  • The First-Party Data Revolution: Tracking Clicks, Scrolls, and Views
  • Hybrid Events

Stack Consolidation for Sales and Marketing Alignment

The martech industry is booming. With more than 7,000 marketing software companies in the field, there’s no shortage of competition. But, while the pool of choices for cutting-edge tools continues to grow, marketers are struggling to nail down a strategy for proactively optimizing their stack. According to Demandbase, 32% of CMOs don’t have a strategy for managing their tech stack. 

If you look at Chiefmartec’s Martech5000 list, it’s absolute chaos.

That’s why martech companies and marketers alike are trying to consolidate solutions. One of the strategies for doing that is finding products that both align sales and marketing and deliver the results each team needs (in their own activities and shared ones). If you’re selling into marketing, that’s the angle that closes deals.

The selling point:

Sellers should focus on the strategy for aligning sales and marketing stacks and how their product can bring unison between funnel stages. Once you ignite that conversation around how they’re thinking about tech and what they’re trying to solve, you can start helping them find a spot for your tool.

Is Intent Data Living Up to the Hype?

One of the tools making its way into marketing teams — or at least into the conversation — is intent data platforms. The hype around intent data is almost unmatched. But, marketers and sellers alike have their reservations. For most, whether or not intent data lives up to the stadium-level attention it’s gathered is yet to be decided. 

In a recent LinkedIn poll, Jake Dunlap asked if third-party intent signals were moving the needle for anyone. Here are the results:

A lot of the problem stems from a few different issues in both how marketers use intent signals and the signals they use. Starting with the latter, “intent signals” is an umbrella term for several different types of data, and not all of them provide the same value. Search intent (keywords/queries), browsing (cookies), and engagement (interaction and download) signals are just a few. And, once you have those, you play those against firmographic data (geographic area, industry, revenue, number of clients, number of employees, and market).

Marketing and sales teams need to align on these and execute a strategy that allows them to see a comprehensive picture. When marketers take in multiple data points, work with sales on their account information and resources, that’s when they can actualize intent data’s value. That is, marketers can really point to what leads are interested in and then hand off more qualified leads to sales.

The selling point:

So, if you’re selling an intent data tool, your pitch is in that outcome. Forget the technical components and focus on the outcomes that intent can produce for marketing. 

Injecting Account-Based Strategies into Marketing’s Day-to-Day

The ABM process isn’t a revolutionary approach when considering how B2B sellers have always approached enterprise deals. When you’re selling to a company, you reach out to different people at different levels. However, for marketing, that strategy has never really been possible outside of field marketing.

Today, the tech has caught up, and marketers love it. Terminus reports that 86% of marketers report improved win rates with ABM, and Demand Meric found that 60% of companies report at least a 10% increase in revenue in the first year.

ABM tools enable marketing teams to create scalable programs to target people in critical accounts, track engagement at the account level, and then trigger activities based on an account instead of leads. ABM is also breaking down the long-standing silos between sales and marketing because without collaboration on both fronts, it’s not very effective.

The selling point:

Sales and marketing alignment brings up the selling point: an ABM tool offers a medium for sales and marketing to actively pursue leads with corresponding actions and goals. Organizing the sale around alignment and ROI to spark better conversations with buyers in marketing.

Related Content: 8 ABM Best Practices You Know and 2 You Don't

The First-Party Data Revolution: Tracking Clicks, Scrolls, and Views

The data behind interactive content conversions is influencing many marketing teams to drop the download and prioritize new, more workable forms of content. 

Marketers have seen up to a 70% conversion rate for interactive content by forgoing the typical ebook or download. That’s seven out of every ten converting to a qualified lead for your team. 

The conversion rate is just one reason interactive content is taking over content strategies. Through videos, quizzes, dynamic infographics, and more, interactive content allows marketers to track actual engagement that shows a level of interest way beyond the typical “this person downloaded your whitepaper.” 

The selling point:

In a way, interactive content is an enriched intent signal. Marketers can see what their audience is accessing, what pieces of the content they’re interacting with, where their interests lie, and create a better picture of what those leads are looking for under the guise of their product. Sellers can then leverage all of that information as well to tell a better story.

Hybrid Events

How many virtual events have we been to in the last two years? A lot. From webinars and virtual conferences to digital happy hours and even job interviews, the age of Zoom has come (and it’s here to stay). 

But the topic of hybrid events is emerging as in-person events begin to reappear. According to Bizzabo, nearly 60% of event marketers have their eyes on hybrid event solutions, and that hybrid is a keystone of their event strategy in 2021 and 2022. But the question becomes, “Are hybrid events the future of event marketing?” 

There’s demand for them, that’s for sure. While many people feel safe returning to in-person conferences, others are perfectly comfortable enjoying the festivities from their living room. While satisfying both groups is a win for hybrid event platforms, the resources needed to execute a hybrid event effectively may not be on most marketers’ budgets moving forward.

The selling point:

The focus is finding the right balance between maximizing attendance for both audiences. If you’re a seller for a hybrid event platform, your best move is to try and find that balance for your client. What are the must-haves, and what can they do without? 

Can you provide a way for them to prioritize onsite broadband while securing sales for virtual exhibits simultaneously? Target the balance they need to satisfy their audience, and you’ll be providing value that your competitors might not be offering.

Selling the Outcome (and Letting Data do the Rest)

Data-backed decision-making is the finite commonality between each of these marketing trends. As a compass for how marketers run campaigns against different audiences and collaborate with sales, marketing teams from SMB to enterprise are opting for a data strategy in everything they do.

Conversely, no matter how important the data is, sellers in the marketing industry shouldn’t focus on the data; they should focus on its outcome. The technology specs, the various data points, the integrations, and capacities — none of those are as important as the outcomes they produce. By understanding what results each client needs, you can frame your product unencumbered by technical details and focus on the real business solution.

Right now, more often than not, those outcomes are building an environment that caters to every aspect of the buyer’s journey and customer experience without sacrifice.

If you want to learn more about what marketing leaders are saying, what the decision-makers are focused on, and what outcomes they’re looking for, check out our Marketing Buyer Trends.