Joel Harrison, on B2B Marketing Trends 2019

Yesterday, we welcomed Joel Harrison, Editor in Chief at B2B Marketing to our office in Portsmouth. He gave a talk on Marketing at the speed of light: The future is now for B2B marketing.  

Having originally launched B2B Marketing as a magazine in 2004. Joel has since led its development into the multi-purpose tool kit it’s become for B2B marketers today.

Joel covered a range of different trends in his talk. Focussing specifically on ABM, customer experience, mar-tech and the transformation of the marketing industry.

From B2B Marketing’s 2019 Trend Tracker, they identified CX as the number one focus for agencies, and the second biggest focus for clients, preceding data privacy and GDPR.

 

Marketers were asked to rate the attributes shown above. Based on how focused their team was on each – from 1 (0% focused) to 10 (100% focused). Figures shown are the average scores for each attribute for both agency and client-side marketers. 

Customer Experience

We know that customer experience has always been important for businesses. Over the past couple of years, businesses have started paying extra attention to their cx strategy, making it a hot trend for B2B marketers. Joel addressed some key ideas associated with the challenges of CX and how it should be conducted from a business perspective.

A major challenge that businesses continue to face is where CX should fall departmentally, with Joel stating that ‘ownership of the customer is a challenge of CX’. This has seen the recent introduction of new job roles, including Customer Experience Analyst, Chief Customer Officer and Vice President of Global Customer Experience.

The prominence of CX in the B2B space has increased over the last few years. Businesses and agencies are really looking into the correlations between customer experience, client retention and increased revenue.

Organisations classifying themselves as “very advanced” at customer experience are almost three times more likely than their peers to have exceeded their top 2018 business goals by a significant margin. (Source)

 

He went on to say that as marketing are often responsible for up to 2/3s of the buying journey, ‘customer experience is something that should belong with marketing’.

Joel identified 4 defining areas of the customer journey:

• Discovery – a prospect discovers your services, either via an inbound channel or an outbound marketing campaign.
• Purchase – the transition from prospect to buyer, when a customer/ business decides to use your services.
• Use – the period of service/ product usage (this is where CX is increasingly important).
• Retention – Based on the previous three stages, your buyer will either choose to continue to use your services through renewal or up/cross sell, or conclude their work with you.

As customer experience continues to dominate the conversation in B2B marketing, research has been carried out that highlights the benefits of a really strong CX strategy and how the strategy can be implemented into different stages of the customer journey.

50% of customers have left a brand for a competitor who was able to stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs.

77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience. (Source)

Looking at B2B Marketing’s 2019 Trend Tracker report, they recognise the first cases of AI are in the CX space. This is forecasted to increase in 2020.

We would like to say a huge thank you to Joel for coming to speak to the team. It is a highly anticipated session and we look forward to hearing more on marketing trends of 2020.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Customer Experience, marketing strategy, Marketing Trends