B2B Marketing: Year in Review

2018 has been a year of change with several trends combining to shake up go to market strategies and change priorities. Some of these changes were predicted going into the year, but others were not. The end result is that many B2B marketers are struggling to work out how to make the best use of their budgets heading into 2019.

Data Protection

It is difficult to discuss the year without commenting on the overriding priority that overshadowed the first half of 2018. GDPR dominated the first six months, certainly among Marketing Operations teams whose workload was overwhelmed by compliance challenges and implementing new consent and data protection frameworks prior to the law coming into effect at the end of May. In some cases work has continued since, with up to half of businesses still not fully GDPR compliant.

Companies had plenty of warning about GDPR, but the impact of the law on marketing was frequently underestimated by many inside and outside the industry. This left marketers scrambling to plug the gap in company-wide GDPR efforts led by IT or legal departments who frequently misunderstood the consent issues involved as well as the effect they had on marketing databases. The unexpected vagueness of the law didn't help. When first drafted in 2016, it appeared to be straightforward EU directive with predictable but worrying consequences. The focus of discussion for Marketing was on the consent requirements and little else. The importance of the legitimate interest clause was initially overlooked, but since then it has been adopted by many businesses to justify some or all of their marketing efforts. This was not the original intention of the clause, and efforts are being made to restrict or eliminate legitimate interest as part of the upcoming ePrivacy regulation, the next wave of EU data protection legislation due to be ratified in 2019.

GDPR was not the only data protection headache for Marketers in 2018, as the fall out from the Cambridge Analytica scandal made headlines across the world. For the first time, questions about what social networks and tech firms do with personal data grabbed consumer attention. The reputation of Facebook has suffered precipitously since, but the broader marketing industry has been affected too. Consumers are a lot more cautious about handing over information than they were a year ago, which makes effective personalised user journeys a lot more difficult. This has affected the entire industry and really couldn't have been better timed as the scandal peaked just as companies were looking to renew or acquire opt-ins during the spring build-up up to the GDPR enforcement deadline.

Death of Email

The inevitable consequence of GDPR was the decline in the importance of email marketing. Smaller mailing lists meant that many firms struggled to build large enough audiences to justify investing in outbound email. This applied equally to email nurtures. Critics have been questioning the level of investment required to design effective nurtures for years. Nurtures tend to be more expensive than other types of email campaigns, but only generate the expected uplift in revenue if done correctly. The reduction in database sizes has given ammunition to their detractors, and many firms have reduced investment in email nurtures as a result.

Instead, there has been a definite shift towards social and PPC, with firms seeking to promote content and nurture prospects over inbound channels. There is also a broader range of B2B firms experimenting with other types of advertising such as programmatic or content syndication. These tactics don't work for all companies, but marketers are testing them in their quest to reach prospects who have opted out of email. Expect this to continue into 2019.

Personalisation

GDPR has had more subtle effects too, by decimating mailing lists and marketing databases, it has forced marketers to up their game. Better personalisation was identified as a priority by many at the start of the year. So it has proved, with efforts to populate data gaps and enhance one to one web personalisation occurring across marketing departments. Progress has been slow going though, and outbound channels have been ignored or left behind as businesses focus on making inbound channels more effective.

There is a growing awareness that personalisation works best when it is reactive, with touches based on buying signals or past engagement. Many marketers struggle to make this a reality, often unable to bridge the gap between the solution or product based content matrix and the wealth of data they have on prospects and their activity. Expect closing this gap to be a priority in 2019.

MarTech Consolidation

2018 has seen the first signs of consolidation in the rapidly expanding MarTech sector. There have been several high profile acquisitions this year, such as Adobe's purchases of Marketo and Magento. This was driven by their desire to round out the Adobe Experience Cloud and attract B2B and SMB customers. Other deals that drew attention include Terminus's acquisition of Brightfunnel and Marketo's acquisition of Bizible. Expect this wave of mergers and acquisitions to continue. The consolidation trend started in AdTech a few years ago and has only accelerated in 2018, with telcos such as AT&T and Verizon making significant investments this year.

The consolidation trend is beginning to affect customers of MarTech vendors too. Many enterprises have built up tech stacks of 50 or more technologies and are looking to optimise this number in an effort to reduce ballooning technology budgets. This will drive further deals in the MarTech sector, as vendors look to expand their capabilities to retain existing customers or win new ones. There are still plenty of businesses looking to invest in new technologies, but CMOs are reaching the limits of their technology budgets and need to make better use of what they have.

AI Hype

MarTech vendors would have you believe that the number one trend of 2018 is AI. There has been an explosion in the number of new AI products or vendors adding AI capabilities to existing products. Marketers have not been by fooled by the AI buzz. Vendor investment in AI has not been matched by customer interest. Whilst businesses are looking for increased automation to cope with the big data challenge, they understand that AI is only one potential solution to the problem. Increasingly, AI is a bullet point feature. Vendors list it because it sounds good and makes their product appear more sophisticated. The question that marketing departments really want to know is how much effort is required to implement a particular technology given limited resources and expanding tech stacks. If AI helps reduce the burden on overstretched Marketing Operations teams, then it's a bonus. If not, then customers just aren't interested.

The AI hype in the broader technology space is beginning to cool down. This will affect MarTech too. Much like Machine Learning before it, the technology isn't going away but will continue to be used where it makes sense. Making better use of the data they have is an ongoing challenge for marketers and one that AI is well placed to help with. In 2018, the priority has been on compliance - making sure that you only have the data you're legally allowed to use. Going into 2019, priorities will shift back towards making the best use of that data and gleaning the right insights from it. The compliance concerns haven't gone away though with additional territories due to follow the lead of California and adopt GDPR like legislation. The world of B2B Marketing changed in 2018, and there is no going back.