Digital Marketing Trends 2019 in B2B: Evolution instead of revolution

B2B digital marketing will continue to be characterized by the constant trend towards personalization in 2019. Advertising will become more precise and personalized in its form and content. Automation will be noticeable everywhere. Search queries via voice and search engine optimization via voice recognition will be a significant trend in 2019.

In 2019, B2B digital marketing will continue to be characterized by the trend towards personalization. The form and content of advertising as well as the chosen communication channels will be adapted to the individual customer with increasing precision. Constantly growing volumes of data and improved analysis tools based on artificial intelligence will noticeably improve the accuracy of existing personalization tools. A second trend will be the increasing automation of marketing processes. In addition, all marketing managers are of course well advised to keep a close eye on technical developments in 2019. Chat offers have the potential to significantly speed up communication with customers. Furthermore, speech recognition and especially speech search are becoming increasingly important. Google expects that in 2020 about half of all search queries will be made via voice search. It is currently difficult to estimate how this will affect search engine optimization.

marketing automation

Numerous software solutions for the automation of marketing are already available, and they are performing quite well. These systems can already cope very well with any form of data, but they still have difficulties in communicating with people. In 2019, these tools will learn to communicate in a more authentic and natural way. This includes the ability to automatically generate a text from given information, which ideally cannot be distinguished from a text written by humans. It is even conceivable to make stylistic adaptations for individual customers. A simple example is the form of address. In many industries, there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to whether customers should be addressed in mails and newsletters in the form of a "first name" or "first-name". It does not seem utopian to determine the customer's preference in this respect from the customer profile and automatically adapt the texts individually.

Personalization

Again, improvements in detail are more likely to be expected than a revolution. Even today, it is already reasonably successful in forecasting the interests of an existing customer on the basis of his purchasing behavior and other data, and in making him correspondingly personalized offers. However, the error rate is still quite high in mass business and especially in new customer business. Of course, spectacular individual hits receive a great deal of media coverage, for example when Google itself recognizes that the person concerned is pregnant before she does. However, less attention is paid to the countless failures. How many residents of a rented apartment were offered a photovoltaic system just because they did a little research on the subject? How many loan offers were sent to people who would never be granted a loan because of their creditworthiness? To interpret the behaviour on the grid correctly and to distinguish reasonably reliably between general interest and concrete buying interest is a typical task for self-learning systems of the AI. Presumably, 2019 will bring some progress in this area.

Data visualization

It is not a new insight that graphical representations of data allow a faster grasp of essential information than endless columns of numbers. In the age of Big Data, an effective visualization of data is even absolutely necessary in order to be able to extract any meaningful information from the amount of data. A more recent trend is to make greater use of data visualization in external communication. So-called "interactive maps" have long been part of the standard repertoire of many web portals. But beyond that, many possibilities of interactive data visualization remain unused. Some web tools open up new possibilities here. The trend is not to present visualized data on the net, but rather interactive visualization tools that allow the user to select the data to be displayed.

account-based marketing

In a certain sense, account-based marketing in the B2B segment anticipated what is now being pushed forward, at least to some extent, in the B2C segment under the keyword "personalization": The targeted approach to a specific customer based on a precise analysis of the specific customer needs. The actually surprising news here is that there is not much new. When it comes to acquiring new major customers, account-based marketing continues to prove to be the marketing strategy with the highest ROI. In fact, many companies do not want to be approached via new digital sales channels even if they use them for their own sales.

Chat offers are now accepted

Research shows that it is a myth that customers do not want to talk to machines. They are simply afraid that at some point they will not know whether they are talking to a human or a machine. Commercial chat bots are a long way from that. That is why chat bots will continue their triumphal march in telephone inbound marketing in 2019. Wherever the use of chat bots is possible, you should seriously consider it. Customers prefer chat bots to waiting in a queue because all hotline staff are on the phone at the moment.