MarTech Trends: The Dream Team Recaps our Trip to San Jose! The Dream Team is back from the MarTech 2018 Conference, where the latest innovations in marketing, technology and management are shared with thousands of senior-level marketers. Our CEO and COO, Paulo Cigagna and Jim Londeree, flew off to San Francisco and took a leisurely
MarTech Trends: The Dream Team Recaps our Trip to San Jose!
The Dream Team is back from the MarTech 2018 Conference, where the latest innovations in marketing, technology and management are shared with thousands of senior-level marketers. Our CEO and COO, Paulo Cigagna and Jim Londeree, flew off to San Francisco and took a leisurely drive down to San Jose to learn about the upcoming trends in B2B marketing technology.
If you’ve ever seen the MarTech 5000 graphic, you know how large the marketing technology landscape has grown. In fact, the MarTech 5,000 now shows there are over 6,800 types of marketing software out there! That number just gets higher and higher every year, while showing no sign of slowing down.
That’s a lot of marketing technology to dig into. So, what MarTech trends stood out to us this year?
1) Marketing Attribution
Day one’s “5 Disruptions to Marketing” presentation by Scott Brinker gave us this insightful statistic: 58.2% of marketing leaders are restructuring their departments to better leverage marketing technology.
With so many new options out there, it’s important to re-assess our marketing stack to ensure it’s best equipped to:
- Automate for more efficient, streamlined marketing processes.
- Track campaigns for more accurate marketing attribution and ROI.
- Understand a lead’s behavior and their stage in the buyer’s journey.
- Document this data so that it gets to salespeople immediately.
As marketing technology gets smarter with more advanced analytics and data, so should our processes. That’s why this trend ranks as number one on our top three countdown.
2) Intelligent Content
Content is still king! One of our biggest takeaways from MarTech was how many options are out there for highly targeted content distribution and syndication. With so much content out there, you want to cut through the white noise to reach the right people with the right message.
Intelligent content—whether it’s an informative blog, a guest article, a video, white paper, case study, etc—can establish you as a thought leader while enticing the reader with information that’s valuable to them. In fact, as much as 49% of B2B buyers said they rely more on content to research and make purchasing decisions than they did the previous year!
With intelligent content, your goal is to make sure it’s highly targeted and optimized to reach your buyer with the information they need, the exact moment they need it. Google appreciates informative content, too, so keep SEO optimization as a vital part of your content strategy.
Marketing attribution matters here, too: you should track how long buyers spend on your content so that you know who’s seriously interested. This helps you focus on the buyers that matter.
Predictive lead generation software can make this happen, and that combined with targeted content syndication platforms creates an opportunity for reaching incredible, high-quality leads. Technology has come a long way for content marketing, and we’re excited to explore these new opportunities for our clients!
3) Visual Marketing
Not all intelligent content is text-based! Visual types of marketing such as infographics and video are also a must for 2018.
Video has been around for ages, but 2017 was one year where video marketing really took off. The statistics on this (found here and here) are pretty massive:
- Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
- 400% as many customers prefer watching a video about a product over reading about it.
- Videos can increase landing page conversions by 80%.
- Viewers retain 95% of a message in video in contrast to retaining only 10% of text.
- Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from Search Engine result pages.
- Embedded videos in websites can increase traffic up to 55%.
- By 2019, internet video traffic is expected to account for 80% of all consumer traffic online!
With this boom in video marketing, a bunch of new advancements and video creation platforms have come along with it. At Dream Factory, we’re always examining new ways to leverage and produce video for our clients. We’re looking forward to seeing what else 2018 has in store for visual media.
And that’s our top three round-up for MarTech 2018! Stay tuned to hear more from the Dream Factory blog about the latest in B2B marketing or follow us online to keep up with our thoughts on the industry.
Want to know more about Dream Factory’s analytical, results-driven marketing solutions? We’re here to provide the strategies you need. Contact us and learn what options are right for you.
