The last 3 years have been unpredictable, to say the least. With 2023 underway, businesses are under increasing pressure to differentiate themselves to prove business value.
It’s safe to say, marketers don’t have it easy right now.
In a world where marketing must quickly adapt to evolving buyer behaviours, changing market conditions and brand-new marketing fads, it’s never been more important for businesses to be innovative to drive efficiency, retain customers and outperform competitors.
Here are some marketing trends that will set you up for success in 2023.
1. Aligned sales and marketing teams will win
It’s becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing teams to work together more effectively. When these teams are aligned, marketers get a more complete picture of their customers, and sales feel more confident in the messaging marketing provides them.
But when this doesn’t happen, it creates a whole host of problems for everyone involved. In our report, 71% of sales and marketing professionals agreed that a lack of alignment between their teams has had a negative impact on revenue. At a time where every dollar counts, ensuring your teams are aligned and working together is an essential component that can no longer be overlooked.
Sales enablement makes alignment easy and ensures your teams have a shared platform for content, as well as visibility on what is driving revenue. Aligning both teams to work as one is an essential ingredient for businesses to thrive in 2023.
2. Integrated Sales Tech and Martech Stacks Drive Powerful Revenue Outcomes
The time for stand-alone, siloed tools is gone. For any tech stack, the theme for 2023 is lean. Doing more with less. It’s not so much about consolidating or right-sizing tech tools as it is about the right connections and integrations between them.
Better integrated stacks will be crucial to delivering a more efficient and effective buyer experience. Asking questions to identify current gaps will help you to shortlist what is and isn’t essential to your workflow.
– Which tools enable your business to reach your growth objectives?
– If content marketing is central to your buyer’s journey, which sales tools are helping your sales reps to deliver more value-led sales engagement with content?
– Do you have visibility on how many people have viewed the content that’s been sent and know how close they are to a decision?
– How do your existing sales and Martech stacks speed up conversions?
3. Repurposing Content Is the Silver Bullet for Accelerating Growth
At least 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson, and most expect businesses to create content that appeals to their pain points and grabs their interest.
Content doesn’t have to be something that is constantly in the works. Having visibility into top-performing content and choosing to repurpose and distribute it via alternative channels and formats is critical to maximising the lifecycle and ROI of your content and ensures your brand stays top of mind for your buyers.
Instead of coming up with new ideas, taking what’s worked in the past and optimising it for the present is key.
A blog, for example, is an excellent source of repurposed content because it is typically lengthy and contains a wealth of information about your product or business. It can easily be repurposed into a video, podcast episode, webinar, in-person event, or pitch deck.
4. Content Intelligence will be key to demonstrating ROI
In our recent European State of Sales and Marketing Alignment report, we interviewed over 750 sales and marketing professionals in the UK, France and Germany to understand their barriers to success. The study revealed that 30% of marketers lack confidence in creating marketing assets that have demonstrable success at meeting specific business objectives and driving sales growth and 37% said they lack the necessary technology that effectively tracks ROI.
Not having access to analytics that effectively prove the dollar value and impact of your sales content can be detrimental to marketing as it results in wasted time, resources and unused content.
Having access to real-time data and metrics allows you to understand what is and isn’t performing, get deeper insights into your buyer’s behaviours and provide valuable insights to drive repeatable revenue.
Within most sales enablement platforms such as Highspot, marketers can track metrics such as external downloads/views, total viewing time, viewing time per asset, contribution to revenue won and more.
This means marketers can finally claim their seat at the revenue table and demonstrate the impact their content has had on sales outcomes.
5. Eliminate Content Chaos to Win
Content chaos is every marketer’s worst nightmare. Ensuring content is stored in a single place ensures all information is accurate and up-to-date and makes it much easier for your teams to find it – this ensures your content does not get left gathering dust and is front and centre, and readily available for your stakeholders to use in the exact moment they need it.
Marketers can also benefit from internal metrics of content assets to address content gaps, understand what is performing and refresh existing content (if the internal content use is low) to ensure that they’re investing their time and efforts efficiently and demonstrate the ROI of their efforts.
Not only does a single source of truth help with findability and gathering accurate data that supports with driving pipeline, but it also bridges the gap between both marketing and sales teams and provides mutual benefits for both teams.
Own 2023
2023 is set to be a rollercoaster for marketers. Get ahead of the curve by taking advantage of these 5 marketing trends to set your business up for success. If you’d like to see how to make an economically unpredictable year, a predictable one, book a Highspot web demo to find out how we can help.
