2023 B2B Marketing Trend Predictions

Now that 2023 has arrived, let’s remind ourselves of some of the predicted B2B marketing trends we should see this year. Given the global economic climate and with businesses operating in an unknown territory moving into the New Year, the focus for many B2B organisations will be their customer health.

What is meant by the term customer health?

Simply, customer health is all about retaining current customers, ensuring they are satisfied, reducing churn rates and that they will ultimately be or become loyal customers. This is key for many businesses but especially in 2023.

Given the competitive landscape of B2B tech, the strategy for many businesses will be around protecting and working with their current customer base. After all, it is harder to win new clients than it is to retain existing ones.

One of the main predictions from Forrester’s research is that CMO’s and marketing leaders will be including customer metrics on their dashboards in 2023. Doing so will enforce customer health being a priority and not a second thought. Forrester has predicted that from approximately 11% of dashboards featuring customer health metrics at the end of 2022, there will be an increase to 33% during the period of the year 2023.

As such, building close relationships with customer-facing teams will be a priority. It will not be a surprise that businesses are going to dedicate more time to understanding how they drive customer loyalty. Marketing teams are likely to do this by seeking insights into how customers use their product to make them more successful and help them retain, upsell and cross-sell to their existing customer base. With such priorities in mind, it is fair to assume that we will all see an increase in case studies and testimonials.

Customer health works hand in hand with brand awareness and brand trust. Given this, Cognism outlined a noteworthy prediction, that B2B marketers will be striving to achieve three goals with content marketing:

1) Creating brand awareness
2) Building credibility
3) Educating your audience

Achieving these goals will still be vital in 2023.

The method for achieving these goals will be to harness interactivity through social media and personal branding, ensuring business authenticity. The Marketing Profs survey found that 57% of respondents planned to invest in community building through social media in 2023.

The Outcomes

So given these predictions, it would be fair to assume that the customer experience this year will be at the forefront of mind for all. Targeting strategies are impressive, with the use of predictive analytics and machine learning to predict consumer behaviour but such strategies undoubtedly will evolve into being more sophisticated. As we move forward and we witness the increasing use of customer data, it is ever more likely that such data will respond to more positive customer behaviour.

At the core of customer health and the customer experience, what businesses will have to ensure to get right, is customer personalisation. Personalisation will continue to be a major priority for B2B marketers this year.
To summarise, leaving 2022 there were many predictions for what 2023 had in store for B2B marketing.

However, retaining, protecting, and nurturing current customers is most likely what B2B marketers will focus on in 2023. Marketing teams will put content and customer marketing at the forefront of their demand-generation strategies, ensuring that ultimately the customer is put first.

If you would like to discuss any of the themes raised in this article or build out your marketing function to help on your journey to creating customer champions, please get in touch at charlotte.dickinson@zerenglobal.com.