This year has proved to be an exciting one for marketing. With the year coming to a close, marketing experts across the globe have been weighing in on the trends most likely to become even more valuable in the new year. Today, we’re highlighting a few of these trends and sharing resources you can use as you prepare your marketing efforts for 2017.
We’ve gone through the benefits of A/B testing many times on our blog — and for good reason. A/B testing on landing pages consistently boosts conversion rates and will continue to provide value for organizations looking to improve their site design in 2017. However, A/B testing can only benefit conversion rates on landing pages that exist in the first place, and a surprising number of B2B organizations still don’t use landing pages as extensively as they should.
This trend is starting to take on a greater role in B2B marketing efforts. While only 56% of clicks to B2B sites go through a custom landing page first, we believe this number will skyrocket in the new year as organizations look to create custom content and better use it to convert prospects. If your organization is one of those adding landing pages and directing more traffic to them in 2017, it’s time to review the best practices for A/B testing and put it to use to make your landing pages the best they can be,
For more insights on A/B testing, take a look at our blog posts: How A/B testing can transform your B2B marketing and The truth about A/B testing.
Marketing automation is another trend to continue to watch in the new year. Automation ensures that new leads have the best chance of being nurtured into sales and accounts for a 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity. If your organization hasn’t implemented a marketing automation system yet, you are likely sending many leads to sales that are unqualified. For those looking to boost sales in 2017, this can’t go on. Organizations who invest in marketing automation see a 451 percent increase in qualified leads.
With numbers like these, we certainly expect this trend to continue to grow in 2017, and expect to see many more B2B (and B2C) organizations investing in marketing automation platforms. Will yours be one of them?
To learn more about marketing automation, read How marketing automation manages your lead-to-revenue lifecycle.
It’s no surprise this makes our list. Targeting made significant improvements in 2016 and we expect this personalization to reach new levels in the upcoming year. We’ve written before about the psychology behind consumer decision-making and many marketers are looking to gather increased insights into customer behavior. From there, marketers will look for and develop more new ways to put this personalization to use in campaigns. We expect software to advance further in the new year to provide even more targeted options for B2B.
Read our post, Getting started with PPC: keywords and targeting, for more insights on one area in which you can improve your targeting.
This will be our last blog post of 2016, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait to read more. Browse our past posts for more marketing insights for your B2B or healthcare organization.
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