These Are the Only 2018 Marketing Trends You Should Care About

It’s a new year. Time for the prognosticators to tell you all about the 2018 marketing trends that you’re about to miss out on. But if you’re a small B2B company, a lot of those trends are expensive and resource-intensive. Ugh.

The thing about trends is they’re…well, trendy. They come and go, and a lot of the time they’re more gimmicky than anything else. Anyone remember QR codes? How about “going viral” just for the sake of going viral? Periscope was supposed to provide all kinds of great marketing opportunities. While live video marketing has matured as a tactic, Periscope itself disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived.

What marketing trends should you REALLY care about, and which ones make the most sense for a company that’s a bit stretched for resources? Here’s my take on marketing trends for small B2B companies in 2018.

[bctt tweet=”What marketing trends should small B2B companies REALLY care about in 2018?” username=”billkerschbaum”]

Video Marketing

Video is big—like, BIG—right now. And it’s showing a ton of ROI. According to HubSpot Research, 54% of customers want videos. And video content is more memorable (43%) than text (18%) or images (36%). Everyone loves video, because it’s engaging, highly mobile, and highly visual. And the great thing is, you don’t need a big budget to create videos people love.

[bctt tweet=”You don’t need a big budget to create marketing videos people love” username=”billkerschbaum”]

Marketing videos are also extremely versatile. There’s so much you can do with the format, and innovative companies are finding new opportunities all the time. Here are a few examples of marketing videos that small B2B companies can easily produce:

• Demos—Make it easy to see how your product works, without having to go through the annoying steps of scheduling a time late next week—when your buyer’s interest may have faded.
• Explainer videos—Take your buyers through a fictional journey that explains how your solution solves their problems.
• Customer testimonials—Record your best customers as they talk about how your company solved their specific problem in a specific situation.
• Pesonalized messages—There’s nothing better than getting to see the soul of your company. Share a holiday greeting, or tell a little about how your company got started. Show the human side of your business.
• How-to videos—Do your customers need some instruction to use your product? Create a series of how-to videos to walk them through it.
• Education videos—Establish thought leadership and help your buyers be more successful by talking about some aspect of your industry. This guy below has done a crazy-good job of it, with just his camera phone and a free YouTube account.

Less Blogging

Blogging will still be one of the most effective B2B marketing tactics in 2018.

Do less blogging in 2018.

Huh?

Even a year ago, the prevailing advice was to churn out as many blog posts as you could. Stats showed that companies that posted 16+ articles per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published 0-4 monthly posts. And B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more traffic than those blogging once a month.

But the tide has turned (as tides are wont to do), and content shock is a thing now. Basically, companies that have the firehose turned on are inundating their audience with too much content. The thing is, when you’re churning out blog posts at an unbelievable pace, you’re forced to crank out low-quality content.

Instead, marketers are realizing that quality really is more important than quantity. In 2014, the average time to write a blog post was 2:24 hours. In 2017, it was 3:20 hours. The lesson is clear: do less blogging and make sure each post is amazing. How much should you publish, then? Looks like about once a week is the sweet spot for most small B2B companies. Of course, it’s also dependent on several factors, including your industry, your customers’ expectations, and your company’s needs (for example, a startup might need to post like crazy to get noticed and generate an audience).

Marketing as a Profit Center

Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi is making waves with his latest book, Killing Marketing. In it, he argues that innovative companies are about to create a major paradigm shift for content marketing. These companies have stopped treating marketing as a cost center, but turned it into a revenue generator. Companies like Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson and Arrow Electronics aren’t just selling products—they’re publishing content that audiences pay for. They’re actually selling the content that fuels their marketing.

For example:

• Red Bull publishes Red Bulletin, a men’s lifestyle magazine.
• HubSpot is nearly synonymous with its annual INBOUND conference that draws about 20,000 people from around the world.
• LEGO’s movies are big box-office draws—The LEGO Movie grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.
• Pepsi launched a media division in 2016.

Et cetera.

And the great thing is, you don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar global giant to do this. It’s possible for small B2B companies to approach marketing as a profit center in 2018, too. You don’t have to produce a full-feature movie, but there’s a lot you can do. It might be as simple as publishing an industry-leading quarterly magazine, or offering regional workshops. Publish an ebook on Amazon.

One of my dreams is to create a comic book series for a client that would be published on a monthly basis. If it’s done right, it could be offered as a paid content offer or a paid subscription.

Topic Clusters

What if I told you that keywords don’t matter anymore?

Okay, what if I told you they don’t matter AS MUCH anymore? It’s true. When most people think about SEO, they think about keywords—long-tail, on-page and off-page optimization, backlinks, tagging, meta description—all that sexy stuff. You still need to be using long-tail keywords and all the standard SEO techniques, but they just won’t be enough in 2018. And really, they weren’t enough in 2017 either.

[bctt tweet=”Long-tail #keywords and all the standard #SEO techniques just won’t be enough in 2018″ username=”billkerschbaum”]

What’s more important these days is thinking in terms of topics. Search engines have changed their algorithms to favor topic-based content, rather than strictly looking at keywords. This makes searching much more helpful for people searching the web, because it means search engines are thinking more contextually, like humans do.

What that means for your marketing content is that you should be shifting your strategy from a purely keyword orientation to a “topic clusters” model. In a topic cluster model, a single “pillar” page acts as a hub of content for an overarching topic, and multiple content pages that are related to that topic link back to the pillar page and to each other. This linking structure tells search engines that the pillar page is an authority on the topic, which helps boost the page in search results over time.

Check out HubSpot’s incredibly helpful video from the INBOUND 2017 conference on topic clusters. If you aren’t using topic clusters to boost SEO and rank higher on Google, start thinking seriously about it now.

Personalization

You’ve probably heard that including your recipient’s name (or company) in an email subject line or greeting can boost your ROI. In fact, personalized emails have a 6.2% higher open rate than those that aren’t personalized. But buyers are becoming accustomed to seeing their names in subject lines, and marketers are looking for more effective ways to personalize their content.

Some companies go all-out with their personalization. But as a small B2B company, you’ve got limited resources. What can you do to improve personalization without killing yourself? Here’s a few thoughts to get you started:

• Use your CRM. Take note of specific prospects’ personal information and track it in your CRM software. Include demographics, job title, birthday, anniversary, number of children—even upcoming vacations. Use that information to send thoughtful emails that show you’re interested in them. Is their company entering an important season that’s relevant to your product? Send a well-timed email. Is their silver anniversary coming up? Take a moment to say congrats. Maybe those important milestones provide a great opportunity to send a special offer. The opportunities abound!
• Segment your emails. Your customers aren’t all the same. Segment your email list by buyer persona and create email content that targets each segment. You’ll show your audience that you get them. You really get them.
• Time your emails. Schedule your emails based on time zone so that they arrive at the ideal time, no matter where your recipient is located.
• Steal from others. Check out these 13 examples of email personalization and try out a few yourself.

Boost Your Marketing in 2018

So those are the 2018 marketing trends that you actually need to pay attention to. Ignore all the rest, at least for now. As your small B2B company grows, you can add on the more complex marketing tactics. Just don’t double down on QR codes this year.

Want some strategic help with your marketing in 2018? I can help you figure out your marketing needs and create original content for you. Let’s talk!