Here are my top B2B lead generation trends to watch in 2011.
In 2011 B2B Marketers will:
1. Continue increasing their spending on online marketing activities (content creation, blog, SEO, email marketing and paid search) and will decrease spending on their offline initiatives (direct mail, trade shows and print advertising). Given the changes in how buyer's research products and services they want to purchase I see this trends continuing in the coming years.
2. Use social media marketing in a more effective way. As social media becomes more mature as marketing tool and more success stories emerge we will start seeing an increase in lead generation initiatives on these various platforms. Social media will also become an excellent tool for customer service and customer retention programs.
3. Mobile marketing will explode. With the emergence of all the new platforms (Apple iPhone and iPad, Googles Android) mobile marketing will move beyond mobile messaging. Mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications will become a valuable channel for marketers in 2011
4. Concentrate on understanding their prospects behaviours online and offline to gain a deeper insight in their prospect buying cycles. Using these insights marketers will be able to produce higher converting content and marketing programs that will allow them to generate quality leads for their business.
5. Investments in marketing technology will ramp up as marketing needs more and more data and automation to be efficient. This will allow marketers to gain valuable data that will help them.
Do you see other trends that will emerge in 2011?