The Readjustment of the Tech Market By David Verwey,
VP of EMEA

A survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute states that 71% of B2B marketers consider content marketing to have become more important to their companies in 2022. Consequently, 47% of the interviewed marketers say their companies plan to increase budgets and hire new content producers in 2023.

Some of the pertinent challenges encountered by marketers in this scenario are:

Given the importance of content marketing for driving marketing performance as a keystone of demand generation, it is essential to approach content creation with the right strategy.

For example, Gartner states that marketers should avoid overloading their audiences with early-stage information, focusing instead on buyer enablement, guiding them to easily overcome the challenges that may arise throughout their journey. This is manageable by closely keeping track of buyer intent, which varies according to their stage on the sales funnel.

The longer buyer’s journey also puts emphasis on the benefits of always-on marketing strategies, such as demand generation, which accompany all the stages of the buyer’s journey, from sparking interest to attracting leads and nurturing them from marketing-qualified all the way to closed-won deals.

Investing in building long-lasting partnerships based on relationship marketing that offer value and support even after a deal is closed is another crucial tactic for managing today’s challenges. Not only does this help to maximise client lifetime value but it also supports humanising brands to create a stronger image.

As personalisation becomes increasingly efficient, organisations must strive to adjust nurturing strategies to match specific personas and even accounts, promoting a more client-centric buying process. This should include the personalisation of content as well as the frequency and tone of the outreach sharing it.

Another interesting strategy to address this scenario is optimising your channel mix: companies are narrowing down on their audience’s preferred channels of contact and content distribution to cut down on wasted budgets and low-performing channels.

All of these strategies aid in collecting relevant data to promote increasingly client-centric experiences, tying in with the current personalisation trend, as well as in reviewing your company’s tech stack, in tune with the aforementioned inclination to review systems and halt strategies that are not driving results.

Client buying behaviour has the potential to constitute a source of valuable data. However, many companies still struggle to put such data to use. One solution for this issue is Applied Observability, as this approach leverages observable data gathered across different business functions, fostering alignment. This procedure allows businesses to make future decisions faster and more assertively, based on metadata and results from previous decisions, which then undergo Artificial Intelligence (AI) analysis.

Applied Observability can then be employed to shape the buyer experience by referring to data from previous deals and their different levels of success. Furthermore, this method can inform demand generation campaigns with real-time observable insights on client behaviour, allowing needed adjustments to be made on the go. This strategy becomes even more relevant when considering the previously discussed changes of the buyer’s journey, as well as the increasing need for personalisation, thanks to its highly evidence-based way of collecting and handling data.

3 steps to implement Applied Observability in 2023:

What’s in it for marketers:

Since it can offer useful insights on client behaviour and preferences, observable data is an invaluable asset for marketers. Applied Observability enables efficient campaign planning, as well as the health-checking of ongoing campaigns, providing marketers with a roadmap for improvements.

Another candidate for 2023 is implementing Digital Immune Systems (DIS). These combine observable data, AI-augmented testing, automation, and input from experimental testing backed by chaos engineering. This not only promotes security and resilience within a company's systems but it also enables them to automatically react to unforeseen operational issues, and ultimately delivering the best possible user experience (UX). According to Gartner (2022), the utilisation of DIS might reduce downtimes by up to 80%.

As we further our comprehension of how to best interpret and leverage data, even failures in a business can now be utilised as learning opportunities—both for employees and AI systems—to build increasingly secure and effective practices.

3 steps to implement a DIS in 2023:

What’s in it for marketers:

In an age when data security is becoming increasingly important, best practices regarding data protection can earn your company reputation and client trust. This can be an important aspect to highlight when marketing your business to audiences who work with sensitive data, for example.

A Superapp is a centralised platform where users can install independent miniapps that share data and go beyond the platform’s core functionalities. This way, each user has a highly personalised iteration of the app, tailored to their particular needs and preferences. Miniapps can be designed either by the same company, or have the platform’s development framework made public (open source) for potential developers to build and publish their own applications.

A perfect example of a successful miniapp is Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most used messenger app. Within it, users can shop at big and small businesses, access public services, order food, and even trade goods similarly to eBay. Its electronic wallet function is so widely used in the country that many users completely forgo cash and credit cards to favour transactions done via WeChat. Even its biggest competitors gave in to designing a miniapp within it—after all, its colossal outreach within the country’s population represents a major opportunity for attracting leads.

In B2B, many marketing and management tools operate in a similar model, such as HubSpot and Clarizen, whose functions can be customised, enabled, or disabled according to the company’s needs.

3 ways to create a B2B superapp in 2023:

What’s in it for marketers:

Increasing the scope of features offered by your Superapp product is a valuable approach to broaden your target audience as well. Creating the opportunity for third-parties to design their own customisable miniapps may also reduce the need for other companies' solutions, maximising adherence to your platform.

Platform engineers design and build work platforms that include all of the functionalities teams require, arranged in a way that perfectly accompanies user workflows. This promotes a focused, frictionless workflow by avoiding excess information. Platform Engineering has demonstrated great potential in increasing productivity by reducing cognitive burden.

3 ways to implement Platform Engineering in 2023:

What’s in it for marketers:

Streamlined work platforms boost productivity by cutting any unnecessary burden on workers, enabling your company to be more agile. By concentrating data from different departments, Platform Engineering helps align teams and maintain members' focus by filtering out irrelevant data for each work function. This increase in efficiency will result in quicker project deliverables and more satisfied clients.

Wireless Value Realisation is the term used by Gartner (2022) to describe the potential of next-generation wireless tech to improve user experience and gather valuable data from previously impractical approaches, such as location tracking, via low-power units capable of energy harvesting.

3 steps to implement Wireless Value Realisation in 2023:

What’s in it for marketers:

New wireless tech can empower marketing campaigns with valuable data inaccessible elsewhere. However, it is prudent to wait for this innovation to become more widespread in order to ensure its efficiency and relevance. Therefore, there is untapped potential for pioneers, but the investment is still high as the infrastructure for this technology is still in its infancy.

This buzzword, referring to a combination of virtual and augmented realities, spatial computing and Web3 technology, seemed to be all the hype for 2022, with Meta (previously known as Facebook) spearheading investments in tech and pressuring the market to follow suit. However, investors do not seem to be putting much faith in the trend.

This fact, paired with the information that the company is approaching $10 billion in losses, demands businesses considering this venture to be more careful. As stated by Gartner (2022), it is difficult to know beforehand which metaverse initiatives will prove fruitful in the long term. Additionally, IAB’s 2023 Outlook Survey shows that a significant portion of marketers consider the ability of metaverse advertising to deliver ROI unclear, especially since the industry is still in its early stages.

Therefore, due to the uncertainty of how the Metaverse currently supports B2B business strategies, I have refrained from proposing ideas on how to leverage it in the following year—however, this remains a trend that B2B marketers should keep up to date on as it develops.