B2B marketing drives crucial business growth and success. During Q1, companies focused on delivering value to customers, integrating new technologies into operations, and investing in building stronger brands. B2B marketing trends 2024 and forecasts indicate these three strategies will remain highly influential and widely adopted forces throughout Q2 and the rest of 2024.

This blog post guides brands with ambitious 2024 growth targets. It assists brands whether they develop their own in-house marketing approaches to reach new customer segments or partner with an external B2B marketing agency. The insights provided aim to support the achievement of high-growth objectives for these brands.

Knowing what’s next is essential for keeping your company ahead of the marketing curve. Let’s explore the top B2B marketing tactics you must implement in the remaining months of 2024.

Shaping future – B2B marketing trends 2024

Adopt these top B2B marketing trends to strengthen your position amidst cut-throat competition:

1. More Focus on Social Marketing and Selling

Social media platforms are rapidly growing, presenting opportunities that B2B enterprises must capitalize on. The popularity and importance of social media marketing for B2B companies will continue rising. B2B enterprises should leverage social selling, which involves building connections, prospecting, and generating leads through social media channels, as a key tactic.

B2B enterprises currently utilize LinkedIn as the most widely used platform for social selling. They can incorporate various social selling tactics into their effective b2b marketing strategies – from relatively simple ones like liking and commenting on relevant content, to more advanced approaches like running LinkedIn message ad campaigns.

By implementing social marketing and social selling initiatives, businesses can significantly expand their reach and drive faster, more efficient sales growth. Specific strategies businesses should deploy include running flash sales, executing social media campaigns, and collaborating with influencers – all geared towards achieving their targeted goals.

2. Proper Website Visitor Identification

B2B businesses not utilizing website visitor identification miss out on key opportunities. A website visitor identification program can boost sales by over 10-20%. This program enables businesses to identify website visitors, engage them further, and guide them through the sales funnel.

• Businesses should use it to identify anonymous companies accessing their website and reduce security threats. 
• They must determine which key personnel work for those companies and obtain contact details like phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, email addresses, and more.
• Analyzing which pages companies viewed, how long they spent on each, and their acquisition sources allows businesses to structure strategies properly.

3. Strategic Remarketing

Now is the ideal time for businesses to begin remarketing if they haven’t already adopted this approach. Remarketing via channels like YouTube or display ads effectively reaches customers who previously expressed interest in the business.

• Since 98% of website visitors do not convert on their first visit, remarketing gives businesses an edge and increases conversion rates. 
• Retargeted ad campaigns are 70% more likely to convert visitors into paying customers. To set up remarketing properly, businesses should identify their current audience, gaps, KPIs, and reset goals as required.

4. Utilizing Gated Content

While creating gated content requires effort, the long-lasting benefits make it worthwhile. Gated content refers to resources like eBooks, courses, videos that users access by filling out a form or providing personal details to assist or instruct them.

To access gated content, users must typically enter their email address, full name, and other contact information. After obtaining these emails, businesses can follow up by adding contacts to email marketing programs or CRMs. Businesses should link their gated content to their website to ensure those signing up have interest in the company’s offerings.

• Let’s say you run a b2b marketing agency, and you’ve created an in-depth eBook titled “The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing.” You’ve put a lot of time and effort into researching and writing this eBook, and you believe it provides valuable insights that can help businesses improve their social media strategies.
• To leverage this eBook and generate leads for your agency, you decide to gate the content. You create a landing page on your website where visitors can download the eBook by providing their email address, full name, and company name. Once they fill out the form and submit their information, they gain access to the eBook.
• As a result of gating your eBook, you start capturing valuable leads. You now have a list of email addresses from individuals who have expressed interest in social media marketing. You can use this list to nurture leads through targeted email campaigns, providing them with additional resources and information about your agency’s services.

5. Extensive Influencer Marketing 

Over recent years, B2C businesses increasingly adopted influencer marketing, and now B2B influencer campaigns are on a rage. Cisco, a networking and communication corporation, exemplifies this trend well. Cisco collaborated with celebrities and did influencer partnerships to promote their products online and offline.

They achieved remarkable levels of social media engagement while promoting their brand to influencer followers. While influencer marketing offers many potential benefits, it can be difficult and costly for businesses to master alone. Businesses unsure where to begin should consider working with marketing companies specializing in influencer marketing.

6. Emphasizing Privacy and Security

As governments and consumers become more aware of data breaches and privacy concerns around collecting and using personal data, data privacy concerns have grown significantly. Consequently, companies must prioritize data security and transparency in their marketing strategies to foster customer trust and avoid potential legal and reputational consequences.

• One crucial area companies should focus on is securing their data management and storage procedures. 
• They need to implement robust security measures to guard against data leaks and unauthorized access. Companies must also ensure they collect and maintain all personal information in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

7. Leveraging Interactive Content 

As interactive content like quizzes, polls, and assessments offers personalized and engaging customer experiences, marketers are increasingly utilizing these formats. A key benefit is that interactive content impacts content journeys as it encourages customers to actively engage with it rather than passively consuming it. 

• For example, a quiz gathers personal information that can later create personalized user experiences.
• An additional benefit is the ability to collect consumer insights and data. By using assessments that question customers about their preferences or pain areas, marketers can better understand their target demographics and develop more targeted marketing approaches.

Interactive content proves an effective lead generation strategy for gathering consumer data. For instance, a test or assessment may require users to submit contact details in exchange for personalized findings or recommendations. Similarly, users can respond to polls by providing email addresses or other contact information.

8. Wide Adoption of Voice Search Optimization

Voice search optimization aims to enhance a website’s content to be more responsive to voice search inquiries made via assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. As 2024 approaches, voice search optimization is becoming increasingly significant as one of B2B marketing trends.

The rising usage of voice assistants by B2B buyers for product and service searches has driven the popularity and adoption of voice SEO in B2B marketing. A Forrester report states that 65% of B2B decision-makers use voice-activated assistants at least weekly, a number projected to keep rising.

• A key advantage of voice search optimization for B2B marketers is that it facilitates buyers discovering relevant products and services. Voice search allows customers to easily ask for what they need and receive a real-time response.
• Another benefit is that optimizing content for voice search can enhance a website’s overall user experience. By doing so, B2B marketers increase the accessibility and user-friendliness of their sites while reducing bounce rates.

9. The Rise of AI

AI in B2B marketing emergence is driving a need for marketers at all levels to develop new competencies. Marketers are expected to undergo required training to upskill and better contribute. In this way, teams can identify the relevant use cases that work best for them, utilize new AI-powered tools, and create standardized procedures to promote efficiency at scale. This approach also allows teams to maximize the unique human value they can provide to their work.

The Bottom Line

Devising a B2B marketing strategy is never easy. It takes marketers through constant trial and error and multiple rounds of A/B testing to finally decide on something that works well for their brand.

And just when they have achieved it, arriving at the promised land, the trends may very well shift. The only constant about B2B marketing is that there is no constant. But marketers can view this as half the fun, being regularly challenged and rising to the occasion.

Are you yet to level up your B2B marketing strategy? Get in touch with Marketboats to start today!