Demand Generation Blog

The digital landscape for B2B marketing is shifting. Part of that shift is due to recognizing that even though we are professionals advertising to other professionals we are also all human. The fact is neither professional development nor improving our companies are time bound. Everything doesn’t stop at 5pm. Hence, we are seeing new potential and opportunities for social media and off-site publishing as well as more focus on customer experience and coaching of team members rather than managing people.

Good marketers want to know how audiences will respond to content but the reality is that audiences do not behave consistently. Sometimes a person will skim through the content and other times they will read it closely.  The question is do audiences behave predictively?  There is little question that content behavior and human behavior are complex in general. Even so, we can learn some deeper truths about behavior that are not necessarily complete or exhaustive but accurate and generally robust.

Content marketing has replaced advertising.  It surrounds and often overwhelms us. In many cases content is unloved and even abhorred despite the desperate efforts of marketers to make people “love” their content.  We see signs of the public’s fatigue with content marketing. We are always looking for the next big smash hit and in the efforts to attain it, content marketing has become ever more insincere.

According to several estimates the expectation is that spending on marketing automation software will hit $32 billion by the end of the year and continue to increase for the next several years. The primary drivers of this growth are more sophisticated tools and the many technological improvements that are occurring with machine learning, chatbots and analytics. Here are four trends to keep an eye on as the year progresses.

The appeal of video content marketing continues to grow. According to the statistics, 52 percent of  marketing executives that focus on video content state that video provides the best ROI when compared with all other types of marketing content in their overall strategy.