B2B buyers increasing intent on educating themselves increases the importance of content marketing. Meghan Moraes, senior content strategist at Responsive Inbound Marketing, a Boston-based content marketing strategist, offers these areas of focus for building brand in 2016:
Relationship marketing – Personalized, data-driven marketing will become increasingly important. Intrusive, mass-target approaches to marketing will dwindle as marketers who focus on relationships grow their businesses. Transparency between customers and brands is essential; companies must keep this in mind when mapping relationship marketing tactics.
Virtual reality – Virtual reality technology, like Oculus Rift (which is owned by Facebook) will inevitably have a huge impact on the way that marketers engage consumers in 2016. It’s best to hop on the VR train now to get a first look at what these new eyes will show us.
Search past search engines – With Facebook already working on tests for its own search engine, it seems inevitable that search capabilities will go far beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo. As search capabilities improve within social media, brands will get an automatic boost. In addition, when buy buttons and payment messaging appear on social media in 2016, an all-in-one-type platform will manifest (more convergence).
Marketing automation – With even more focus on marketing to deliver results, marketing managers and CMOs should be taking stock of their team’s skills, noting the gaps and defining a robust automation strategy to help sales through engaging prospects, qualifying leads and shortening the overall sales cycle.
