7 Key trends to focus on as a B2B marketer in 2023

1. Use of artificial intelligence

When you've never heard of ChatGPT have heard, it's time to come out of hibernation. In recent weeks, the news and mainly social media has been dominated by this artificial intelligence-based chat tool from OpenAI.

Microsoft - by the way, the largest investor in the organization behind ChatGPT - already announced that it will implement this technology in tools such as Microsoft Outlook. My advice? Don't wait for such implementations and start using ChatGPT today! For example, as a basis to generate even better content yourself.

PS: as I recently stated in A blog on "Marketing AI. wrote, there are some AI tools besides ChatGPT that are interesting for marketing:

• Copy.AI
• Soundraw
• Writesonic
• Play.ht
• DALL-E 2
• Synthesia
• Deepface
• Photosonic
• …

2. Video above photo: Long live flashy images

We can think what we want about it, but TikTok will only become more popular in 2023. In fact, according to a global research from WARC marketers are going to invest primarily in TikTok and YouTube:

3. Millennials find their way to TikTok

If you think only teenagers are active on TikTok, you are wrong. According to a recent study, some 46% of users are between the ages of 20 and 39. An interesting target group for many companies. For example, towards open vacancies. It is therefore logical that more and more companies are also finding their way to this Chinese social media platform.

Do you plan to include TikTok in your social media strategy by 2023? Then be sure to follow @Tech4Marketing.be! ☺️

4. Personal branding & thought leadership

I myself have been very active for several years on LinkedIn and realize better than anyone else the importance of "personal branding. I can advise fellow marketers - if not already - to do the same. "People do business with people" will only become more relevant in 2023 (see visual below).

Through "personal branding," you will demonstrate certain expertise (thought leadership). This can be done by writing blogs, recording podcasts or simply sharing content on social media.

LinkedIn is also capitalizing on this trend of "B2B Influencer Marketing. For example, it will soon be possible to run ads through a personal account.

5. Automation: Do more with less

Financially uncertain times prevent some companies from providing additional marketing resources or budgets. By Marketing Automation properly deployed, you can get more done with less as a marketing department.

Another form of automation is using a social media planning tool. If you want to know how you can use this more efficiently as a marketer, be sure to check out my comparison between Buffer vs Later vs Hootsuite read or the article on the Belgian start-up PostProval.

6. Companies are moving away from Google Analytics

As of October 2020, GA4 is the standard for new properties in Google Analytics. This successor to Google's Universal Analytics (UA) was necessary to comply with current and future developments in privacy regulations.

However, the majority of marketers are not enthusiastic about this new interface of the world's most widely used website analytics tool. This and the fact that Google Analytics issue privacy keeps coming up only negatively in the media makes many doubt it.

Popular alternatives to Google Analytics are: Piwik Pro, Simple Analytics and Matomo Analytics.

7. Communities, Co-Creation & Partnerships

Not only companies are looking for each other, but company directors, managers and ambitious employees also like to talk to like-minded people and share knowledge. In addition to well-known initiatives such as Unizo, Voka and Etion (see photo below), we are now increasingly seeing smaller, regional initiatives emerge.

Or consider the private Facebook communities where sector or job colleagues help each other. After all, you can't know everything. In such a situation it is useful to call on a community. An interesting group for marketers, for example, is 'SEO Benelux' or 'Bloggers Benelux‘.

More or less in the same theme as "you can't know, can't do everything," is the phenomenon of co-creation and/or partnerships. More and more B2B-oriented companies are looking to each other to collaborate. Something we've seen in terms of marketing in B2C for some time.