“The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be”
That famous quote by Yogi Berra is one way for B2B marketers to consider what may be coming down the pike in the next few years. If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that it’s impossible to predict with certainty what the next big trend in integrated marketing will be.
Jeffrey M. Killeen, Chairman and CEO of GlobalSpec, a search engine and information resource for the engineering, industrial and technical communities, was recently asked by B2B Magazine to share his thoughts on what the future of B2B media might look like. Killeen cited six “mega-themes” that marketers will need to master in order to build solid integrated marketing strategies:
- Build platforms, not just products. Your content, services and apps must be platform-agnostic, and you should be on every platform that your user audience is on: Web, mobile, tablet and discrete standalone apps.
- Focus on work flow solutions. Your content must be viewed as “must have” and essential to the work flow of your target audience.
- Vertically specialize. Wherever possible, create segment-based service and audience packages as applicable for your category.
- Be an expert at analytics and big data. It will be increasingly important to be able to organize, mine and harvest all the data that flows through your business and then package it into dashboards that offer data visualization and crisp, insightful answers to drive marketing plans going forward.
- Master social media. Whether you like it or not, your customers, prospects and competitors are talking about your products/services and your brand; you need to be there with them, using all the social media channels to proactively monitor and interact with your audience.
- Retrain your salespeople. In today’s competitive, multiplatform environment, your sales teams need to be both fluent and proficient in all of today’s media platforms.
Add to the above the ability to hyper-aggregate large, highly qualified audiences, and have those audiences exhibit behavior that is both loyal and high-frequency in nature, says Killeen, and you will have a B2B business that matters and that is both scalable and sustainable.
