What do you think was the most important B2B marketing trend from 2011?

Hi Lauren! To me the most noticeable trend has been the dichotomy between marketers believing their own pronouncements and the marketplace’s growing skepticism about such. To wit:

The “content is king” mantra seems to permeate marketing discussions such as those here at Focus. But our clients and our clients’ customers seldom if ever mention content. As ever, they want relevant, timely communication based on them, not the would-be vendor. But content per se usually comes off as “stuff,” even if the marketers consider it substantive and not promotional.

There are “paradigm shift” cheerleaders who worship “inbound marketing” and consider all forms of outbound be outdated and perhaps evil. Indeed, a prior contributor to a Focus discussion wrote, “Another problem with (phone) calls is the recent paradigm shift we marketers experienced; Make your content available when your prospects want it, not when you feel like pushing them.” Wow, that would be some paradigm shift! No more proactive, informed outbound marketing or sales contacts … replaced by content distribution followed by passivity. A recipe for poverty. Fortunately, prospects and customers still engage with nice, smart marketers and sales people who approach them legitimately and honestly.

The good news is that reality always equalizes the pros and cons. That is why I predict a robust 2012 for intelligent marketing … propelled by a wise mix of new and traditional strategies and conducted in a dynamic mix of proven and new media. May the hype recede and the results soar!

Hi Lauren,

To echo somewhat of what Michael Brenner and Michael Brown have to say, I believe that content proliferation is a trend that B2B Marketers have to contend with. The gap that Michael Brenner speaks of as well as Michael Brown astutely pointing out that buyers and customers don't speak in the language of content as many are in such communities as Focus.

What both of these perspective point to for me is a much larger trend. That is that B2B Marketers realizing that all the anlaytics as well as mass content marketing still leaves them with the void of understanding contextual and business insights about existing customers and prospective buyers.

My prediction is that CEO's, CMO's, and CSO's will say "enough" on over-investing in content marketing and begin to desire real qualitative-oriented insights on how the world of buyers is drastically changing. As I previously answered here on Focus, only then can B2B Marketers fill the void and create the Intelligent Engagement and as Michael Brown mentioned - intelligent marketing - that buyers will find helpful.

Tony Zambito
@tonyzambito

I can't agree more with Michael. Which companies would you guess are among the most active "outbound" marketers? The answer is: marketing automation firms. An intelligent balance is absolutely called for. However, I am afraid that CEO's will continue to leave fixing the massive alignment problem up to silos that won't fix it. There is a clear path to fixing the problem and improving results by up to five times current results. That fix is not to leave the problem alone. Put simply, fixing the lead purgatory problem (leads lost between marketing and sales, or lost in the CRM by sales alone) is the key to improving results. Fixing that problem is going to take one person with a clear picture of success and relentless measurement.

The biggest trend we are seeing in B2B is the rapid rise in control that the prospect has throughout the buying cycle. Prospects only want to engage vendors when they want to, often far later in the sales cycle than we are accustomed. This shift means that we have to quickly develop and deliver proxies for early sales rep account involvement. The result is that companies are rushing to fill in content gaps (as many of you have asserted) with informative tactics that showcase thought leadership and a track record of success. Also, with dwindling attention spans, on-the-go work habits (think mobile and tablets), and established social networks, B2B marketers need to mobilize their content, make it shareable, and readily available across all platforms.

To me, the big change in 2011 was our understanding of how the business buying process has evolved to the point where sales people are pretty much out of the loop until maybe the last 30% of the cycle. So marketing has to jump in, and seek to influence buyers as they are researching and getting educated online.
This understanding has fueled the enthusiasm for both content marketing and marketing automation. But it also needs to be supported by good data (the thorny subject most marketers wish they didn't have to think about), and good insight into customer needs. The "old" basics that undergird everything we do.

Marketing automation taking off and being made available to everyone below enterprise.

I will say that marketing 101 suggest we define how to market based on the type of industry/target audience/where customers are.
No size fits all. One particular successful marketing programs in one industry may not work in another.

They key is to know your industry and your customers. Therefore integrated marketing is the key.

Again, my apologies if folks have seen my note on this as a response to another question. We see the following key trends and themes emerging for B2B marketing in 2012 (would welcome thoughts, comments from fellow marketers):

1. Maximize the Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Investment
See: http://www.kwanzoo.com/blog/b2b-marketing-2012-trends-part-1-maximize-your-rp...

2. Campaign and Funnel Automation
See: http://www.kwanzoo.com/blog/b2b-marketing-2012-trends-part-2-campaign-and-fun...

3. Go Social, Go Cloud without IT
Coming up week of 12/12/11 at http://www.kwanzoo.com/blog

4. Connectors, Connectors, Connectors
Coming up week of 12/19/11 at http://www.kwanzoo.com/blog

5. Marketing on Mobile to Business
Coming up week of 12/26/11 at http://www.kwanzoo.com/blog

The Death of Marketing Automation.

At the beginning of the year we were having this rammed down our throat as the biggest thing in marketing since the advert.

By year end Eloqua and Marketo had abandoned it, relegating it to subsidiary point.

The reason?

Marketing Automation was a hangover from the old days of interruption marketing - old wine in a new bottle.

It made it easier to interrupt more people, more often with less effort.

You could now set up sequential email messages to convey what you thought a person needed, without ever having to listen to them and what they really wanted.

It made push content marketing - talk at, not with - easy and automated.

But when the figures came in it showed it not only annoyed a lot of people, but it didn't work.

Sirius gave us the actual stats, averaging hundreds of implementations.
Fewer than 1 in 400 people convert from first interest to sale.

Yes - companies were reporting 200%+ improvements but when you dug down that was because they'd put in place other things - an understanding of a lead, a procedure to handle those not ready to buy yet, content to help them with their buying decision etc. Those should (add them up) produce a 400% improvement so MA was actually losing a lot of the benefit.

Towards the end of the year a trend started to emerge which is worth following for 2012. That is the realisation that Marketing and Sales actually need to work together closely from beginning to end, not just be "aligned".

Sales is the art of starting a conversation and bringing it to a mutually successful conclusion - and that's exactly what social networking is all about. So they can't be cut out of the business generation process and kept caged like dogs for leads to be thrown to when they're qualified.