How B2B marketing is evolving in 2022
Connecting with top marketing experts in your industry and learning how they approach their marketing strategy is an underused exercise.
You can go beyond generic recommendations you can find elsewhere and understand the thinking behind the strategy, and take those insights to improve your own approach to marketing.
Back in 2020, we launched a study together with 12 marketing experts in leading tech companies in Romania, trying to uncover how they were adapting their marketing in the face of rapid change.
In 2021, we created a second edition of the study, this time together with six marketing experts in the most dynamic tech companies across Belgium.
We are continuing this exercise in 2022, trying to make sense of what tactics and channels to focus on, and most importantly, how seasoned marketing professionals approach their marketing strategy in 2022. We’ve picked the brains of 11 marketing leaders in B2B SaaS & tech companies in Europe.
You’ll learn how our contributors leverage content beyond the inbound playbook, how personal branding becomes just as important as the company’s brand, how to leverage collaborations with industry experts and influencers to grow your brand recognition and build trust.
Looking back: what worked well in 2021?
#1 Content as a powerful way to reach your clients
Content is one of the most important marketing assets for a B2B brand and we would even go on a limb and say that in 2021 it was the only way to reach potential clients effectively.
An effective content strategy implies educating your potential clients (what problems you solve, help them diagnose those problems, and compare alternative solutions), inspiring (thought leadership and deep insights derived from your unique experience, telling your company’s story), and entertaining (interesting ideas from relevant experts in your field, building a community to facilitate knowledge sharing).
“The tactics that worked best for us in 2021 was launching high value, actionable content: webinars, workshops with small groups of people, checklists, templates, or eBooks.” — Marilyne Dupuy, PickYourSkills
“We focused on getting the right message to the right person, at the right time. We’ve spent time understanding each of our different personas and their specific challenges, creating relevant content to address them. Industry-specific content delivered to a narrower audience has rendered our offer more relevant and we managed to unlock more opportunities.” — Anna-Theresia Bohn, Babbel
However, merely creating content and distributing it was not enough anymore, so how did the marketing experts we consulted manage to make their content stand out?
Focus on video, and short-form video in particular
Video consumption has been growing and people are watching more videos than ever before: Wyzowl’s Video Marketing Survey shows that we now consume an average of over 2.5 hours per day, almost double than in 2018.
Not only is video popular but it’s also very effective in terms of attracting new business. In a recent HubSpot study, 76% of surveyed marketers that use video, call it their most effective content format. And 27% say it’s the content format that yields the biggest ROI.
“For us, video has become the most effective content type for generating high-quality leads. I strongly recommend creating short-form video content, that can be used across multiple channels and targeted at different stages in the buyer’s journey.” — Daniel Ionescu, DRUID
But what makes video so attractive? For companies, it’s a great opportunity to show their “personality” and become more than a faceless organization. Through video, you can create an emotional connection with your audience.
Plus, video makes it easier for marketers to explain complex products or services and showcase how they work in real business scenarios.
“Last year we focused on explaining our product to our audience and answering their most pressing questions right away. Producing video content (including tutorials) for this purpose proved to be very successful: potential clients could gather information at their convenience before they got in touch with a Sales Representative.” — Nicole Lontzek, CELUS
Wyzowl data confirms the power of video in making a buying decision: 78% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy or download a piece of software or app by watching a video.
Take the example of Lemlist, they’re a start-up with a growing YouTube channel, using it to teach you how to do outbound emailing right and how to use their tool at the same time.
Sara Lattanzio also experienced the power of video in B2B, explaining that being human and focusing on conveying valuable information wins over perfectly produced videos.
“I noticed a radical difference between simple videos for LinkedIn, featuring leadership and team members, that performed significantly better in terms of engagement and traffic than any other more ‘polished’ campaign. It is evident that in B2B people want people and good content over high-end production.” — Sara Lattanzio, B2B marketing strategist & content creator
Building content for humans, not for search algorithms
Producing highly optimized content for SEO was no longer a winning bet in 2021. But rather understanding the intent behind keywords and search queries, and adding a layer of storytelling and useful information, as Andreea Serb explains.
“Matching keywords to our audience’s search intent is the fine line between ranking for a topic that no one bothers to engage with or really offering something of value that real people look for. It’s a balancing act to create optimized content and frame it in a way that offers a layer of storytelling, information, and entertainment.” — Andreea Serb, Channable
Jonathan Bluemel also stresses the importance of looking at your user’s journey from the angle of intent and creating content that matches that intent.
“Understanding our users’ journey from the angle of search intent and awareness stages, a concept also developed by MOZ and the likes, helped us develop customer-centric campaigns and content”. — Jonathan Bluemel, IDnow
Build trust with thought leadership content
For B2B companies, establishing authority is key to getting noticed by the right buyers and building trust. It helps you drive awareness about your company and positions your solution as a viable option.
However, creating thought leadership content goes beyond just having an opinion. Thought leadership content has to be rooted in your unique perspective, and it has to be backed by experience, data, arguments. Something few companies manage to get right.
Andreea Serb details her approach to creating thought leadership content.
“Thought leadership is combining original thoughts and ideas with key experts who have a unique set of knowledge and first-hand experience that will help your audience look at something from a new angle. Identifying key contributors from my team and the industry who helped us produce such content proved to be the kind of content people like to engage with.” — Andreea Serb, Channable
Using internal data to create unique content
One last idea of how our contributors managed to create outstanding content? Mining through their internal data to discover unique insights and pack them into reports or guides.
Andreea Serb explains
“Packaging original data into reports and guides not only gives you an edge from an editorial perspective but also positions you as a unique authority in the space and the go-to brand to look for when you need a certain type of industry-related information.” — Andreea Serb, Channable
#2 Focus on brand, both company’s brand & key employees’
Brand drives demand but it can easily be overlooked because the effects of branding are not easily quantified and tracked.
However, our contributors talked about investing in their company’s brand awareness as well as key employees’ brands as a winning approach for them in 2021.
Personal branding got a lot of attention and traction in 2021 and with good reason: key employees can do a great job at connecting and interacting with potential clients or partners and conveying your brand story. They become your brand ambassadors.
“I grew my Linkedin profile to over 6,000 followers in 7 months. Employees with strong personal brands are an asset for employers as they become brand ambassadors. I joined several podcasts and shared results and learnings from our marketing initiatives. ” — Sara Lattanzio, B2B marketing strategist & content creator
“Some of the best performing tactics for us in 2021 were paid advertising campaigns focused on brand awareness, and amplifying the organic content of our co-workers on LinkedIn.” — Adam Holmgren, GetAccept
“In the past year we managed to increase our brand awareness through podcasting: our German HR Podcast “Working Language” launched and is ranking on Spotify in a top position for our relevant keywords.” — Anna-Theresia Bohn, Babbel
#3 Get the right people to talk about you
Establishing your company‘s authority is not an endeavor you can conduct on your own, you need trusted industry journalists and influencers to vouch for your company.
Daniel Ionescu shares his experience at DRUID.
“2021 was an inflection point in DRUID’s global brand awareness. To quickly penetrate international markets, especially mature ones, state-of-the-art technology, powerful partners, or talented marketers are not enough. Getting subject matter experts and well recognized tech-trends predictors such as Gartner, Forrester, or IDC to talk about us has helped tremendously, placing DRUID in the top 3 conversational AI technologies today.” — Daniel Ionescu, DRUID
Nicole Lontzek adds “Collaborating with other industry experts and industry-relevant media has paid off last year. I would say it´s a combination of classic public relations and content aggregation with other companies.”
#4 ABM to reach and engage specific target accounts
Focusing the company’s resources towards engaging with a selected group of companies was another winning approach in 2021 as explained by some of the marketing experts we consulted.
“Strategic Account Based Marketing (targeting a select list of target accounts with tailored marketing and sales support) helped us focus our resources and have a better view of the marketing & business development impact on revenue.” — Alexandra Mogin, TenForce
There is no playbook for doing ABM and working against the rules sometimes pays off, as Marilyne Dupuy shares.
“Our second most performing actions was what we call “phygital”. We sent our most qualified prospects a postcard in the middle of summer, when business is usually low, that included a QR code to our website. 78% of the recipients checked our website during summer, and a lot of them even booked a demo!” — Marilyne Dupuy, PickYourSkills
#5 Strategy alignment and deep understanding of the customer’s journey
All the tactics mentioned by our contributors cannot work in isolation, but only if they are rooted in your clients’ challenges, motivations, and buying journey.
And for that, you need to study and know your ideal clients like the back of your hand and align the different marketing teams or members around that journey and the overarching marketing strategy, as Anne Smink pointed out.
“What has brought us the most success is really digging deep into our customer’s journey and the personas, and aligning the strategies within different marketing teams. The journey is so complicated in B2B, and for a lot of touchpoints, it’s a dark funnel. So we’ve been taking the time to understand our personas, know what keeps them awake at night, what they come to work for, what their journey really looks like. As we are scaling rapidly and so does the marketing team it has been equally important to break the siloes and make sure we work towards the same goals.” — Anne Smink, Recruitee
From our own experience at STOICA, what we worked on the most in 2021 was helping clients consolidate their website as an educational content hub (building pillar pages around key topics, building on-demand video libraries), improve their website for search engines (optimize site speed, ensure website’s technical health) and improve the users’ experience on site.
Increasing our team members’ visibility on LinkedIn and developing our strategic narrative were also in focus for us last year.
