Outlook 2023 What We Got Right (and What We Got Wrong)

Account Based Marketing (ABM) has long been a popular strategy for driving engagement with key buyers, however, a DemandMetric survey reveals that 53% of B2B marketers will spend less in ABM in 2023.

According to INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research, ABM is the predominant go-to-market (GTM) strategy of most surveyed marketers for 2024, which signals an increase in spend in this approach to target buyers.

This indicates that ABM has evolved to become a key method to drive demand and engage buyers, even if marketing budgets have decreased in the B2B space from 2022 to 2023.

In 2023, businesses will realise the human power ABM requires to deliver results and capitalise on 'True ABM' because of its promised high returns.

It is most likely that buyers today and in the future will spend little time talking with salespeople. Therefore, ABX must be designed to generate meaningful experiences for buyers when they are actively researching and considering solutions.

Content curation adds relevancy to what would otherwise be a generic offer, which will be paramount in 2023 as tighter budgets put pressure on buyers to make the best choices to enable growth with technology and partners.

In 2023, ABX will be sustained by knowledgeable and agile professionals, who can build out a holistic brand experience with tools/activators and guided by real-time data from buyers.

Unfortunately, in 2023, most businesses did not enrich their ABM targeting with experienced professionals and tools. In fact, 29% of marketers surveyed in the INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research indicated that identifying and targeting accounts continues to be a top challenge for 2024.

This demonstrates that the evolution of ABM remains a key challenge for most B2B organisations, even if some have advanced this approach in 2023.

Consultants and ABM providers will gain a footing on the management of ABM platforms and orchestration of campaigns that generate results.

User and client experiences will be the expectation from buyers in 2023, which means eliminating friction points and addressing concerns effectively will be crucial.

Longer sales cycles and buyers becoming increasingly scrupulous have led to the evolution of the marketing role to meet these challenges. Thus, the need to support the sales process remains a constant, if not elevated priority.

A Forrester report predicts that 20% of demand teams will be incorporated into the sales organisation in 2023.

This has not happened, as the majority of demand teams continue to work separately from sales. However, according to INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research, in 2024 the top challenge of demand marketers (35%) will be generating sales-ready leads.

Therefore, whilst demand teams have not been absorbed into sales teams, marketers are instead prioritising supporting sales goals and direct revenue.

This is indicative of a GTM imbalance. Marketers should focus on strategic initiatives for driving long-term marketing value, which are the foundation for generating demand outcomes and establishing a healthy pipeline. Such strategies should include developing a full funnel experience and innovative motions for meeting GTM goals.

Given the emphasis on demonstrating marketing ROI, channel performance and attribution will be key KPIs for 2023.

These metrics did not evolve as anticipated, to become priority KPIs for marketers in 2023. In fact, INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research demonstrates that pipeline opportunities created (58%) and revenue generated (also, 58%) are the top KPIs to measure success in 2024.

Even so, channel performance and attribution are top priorities in 2024, as evidenced by the rise of interest in channel marketing as a medium to boost outreach through partnerships. Attribution, naturally, becomes key to defining the success of these partnership campaigns and the validity of partner ecosystems.

Creating workflows to support strategies that yield a higher CLTV (such as cross-selling and upselling) remains a critical need for 2024.

Relationship marketing, client experience (CX), and client obsession become particularly important due to larger sales cycles and buying committees in 2023. Lead nurturing is crucial now more than ever.

For many looking to secure performance today, omnichannel marketing is ideal (and required) for adapting quickly. Also, the implementation of CSR initiatives is a core element of creating an omnichannel presence that drives demand outcomes.

As stated in a 2022 Tenbound report, 41% of companies already have a RevOps function, with at least 11% planning to switch to RevOps in 2023.

In a time when promoting growth is more important than ever, particularly with the risk of a recession in 2023, implementing RevOps can sustain a business for a difficult fiscal year.

Even though the recession risk at the beginning of 2023 did not fully realise itself as the year progressed, RevOps did indeed spark interest among B2B decision makers as an approach to drive revenue growth in the past year.

Due to its focus on interdepartmental alignment on key revenue goals, RevOps grew in 2023 and will continue to rise in popularity in the B2B space in 2024 and beyond.

RevOps data in 2023 will be mostly focused on optimising the buying experience, empowered by CX and user experience (UX) best practices.

According to INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research, most lead nurturing is implemented via pre-set sequences (36%), which signals that RevOps data is not being leveraged to its fullest extent to personalise buying experiences.

Rightly so, the top priorities for the surveyed marketers were pipeline and revenue generated (58%). However, the same data should also be utilised to enrich the buyer’s journey.

In 2023, it will be paramount to move on from legacy RevOps programs and implement technology that gains data insights from buyers and target accounts timely, to empower agile changes.

The need for partnerships has been compounded ahead of companies evaluating renewals with service providers at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

The ideal partner in 2023 will have a one-to-one relationship with their audience, identifying accounts and buying teams who are in-market to then deliver activated, actionable opportunities.

Brands that offer the highest quality-price ratio of products will secure the most sales in 2023. Therefore, marketers and their partner companies should strategise what offerings to promote as bundles, discounts, or upsells to encourage conversions.

Sharing data and KPIs with partners will be paramount for successful partnerships in 2023—eliminating silos and individual metrics must be a top priority.

As the gravity of the pandemic decreased, businesses were left with bloated tech stacks thanks to hurried digitisation, which in 2023 demanded companies to reassess their budgets and rethink strategies.

Relationship building, long-term demand generation strategies, and reputation monitoring become essential for those looking to drive buyer engagement in 2023.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 47% of interviewed marketers say their companies plan to increase budgets and hire new content producers in 2023.

Rounds of layoffs in 2023 across B2B sectors (particularly tech) impacted content professionals, which meant that several businesses decided to deprioritise their content marketing efforts from a staffing perspective.

Even so, content marketing grew in popularity in 2023 as a key inbound tactic, a trend that continues into 2024. According to the INFUSE Insights Voice of the Marketer research, 70% of respondents utilise content marketing to build brand awareness and authority, followed by 69% leveraging it to educate their audience on pain points and solutions.

This interest in content marketing for branding stems from the increased demand for content by buyers—INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer research indicates that 40% of buyers consume 4-6 pieces of content, followed by 20% consuming 7-10 pieces.

Therefore, despite layoffs, content marketing continues to be a key approach for engaging and driving conversions among prospective buyers. This becomes even more important with the rise of AI, which unfortunately also led to an increase in irrelevant content for audiences.

Applied observability, a technique that leverages observable data across business functions, will become more relevant due to its capability to analyse the buyer’s journey through an evidenced-based, AI-fuelled approach.

Applied observability is a valuable strategy for organisations that are aligning their databases and adopting AI to glean insights on their teams and their interactions with clients, prospects, and leads.

Even so, the tech has not seen widespread adoption in the B2B space, and is still an emerging technology in 2024. This could be correlated to an ongoing stall in purchases in the tech sector.

The Digital Immune System (DIS) combines observable data, AI-testing, automation, and experimental input from chaos engineering to enhance cybersecurity. It will become more popular in 2023 to detect unforeseen operational issues and enhance UX.

Superapps, centralised platforms where users can install miniapps to tailor their experience for different demands, will become more prevalent in the B2B space.

Superapps have been prevalent in the B2C market for a whilst, however, their adoption in the B2B space has not been as widespread.

It is worth considering that superapps are more popular in APAC and, in the past few years, there have been strides in LATAM for the launch of superapps (both B2C and B2B) to democratise access to digital banking, ecommerce, and governmental services.

Thus, stating that superapps have become more prevalent in B2B is ambivalent, as there is still a lot of room for the development of these solutions in EMEA and NAM.

Platform engineering is a discipline where engineers design and build work platforms that include all of the functionalities teams require. This approach will evolve in 2023 to streamline workflows and increase productivity.

Wireless Value Realisation is an approach where next-generation wireless tech can enrich UX through data from previously impractical approaches, such as location tracking and low-power units capable of energy harvesting.

This trend was envisioned by Gartner in 2022, and since then has not seen any observable traction in the B2B space. This is most likely due to data collection continuing to be a key challenge for industries from more traditional approaches, let alone from emerging wireless technologies.

B2B marketers will keep track of the metaverse, despite its uncertainty, for any notable news.

As 2023 progressed, faith in the metaverse dwindled even further, with most B2B organisations perceiving it as a fad incapable of driving engagement and ROI among key buyers. Even in B2C, it has lost popularity, with funding decreasing for metaverse/augmented reality startups (Crunchbase, 2024).