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As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, it's hard not to get a bit nostalgic. Over the years, we've witnessed countless marketing trends ebb and flow, but some core practices have proven timeless and remarkably effective in the B2B space. Take a look at three that have stood the test of time:
Knowing your audience inside out remains essential for any marketing strategy. Back in the day, gaining insight into our clients' needs meant conducting phone surveys and arranging face-to-face interviews. We spent hours meticulously transcribing notes, trying not to spill coffee on the paperwork. Fast-forward to today, and while digital tools and sophisticated analytics have taken over, the core goal of deeply understanding our audience stays true.
Who could forget the times we pored over printed market research reports and manually tracked industry trends? Those days helped us lay the groundwork for our current digital dashboards and data tracking. Back then, we might have had fewer grey hairs, but the principle of staying attuned to client sentiment is timeless—like a fine wine, it only gets better with age!
We still fondly remember the days of printed newsletters and mailed brochures, and although we’ve moved forward in delivering assets, storytelling remains paramount to client engagement. Nowadays, we can share content at the click of a button, whizzing whitepapers or blogs into inboxes at the speed of a marketer on a last-minute deadline. However, the common denominator is always captivating clients (and their audiences) with the art of storytelling to connect emotionally.
Providing valuable, informative, and educational content to our B2B audience has always helped establish authority and build trust. Back then, we distributed detailed industry reports at trade shows and conferences, feeling quite sophisticated with our glossy pamphlets. Today, our methods may have morphed into sharing insights through webinars, eBooks and articles, but offering valuable insights stays cemented in our marketing masterplans.
Understanding and catering to the unique needs and preferences of each client has always been crucial. Gone are the days of wall-to-wall filing cabinets and hand-scrawled cards in our Rolodexes listing every client’s favourite ice cream flavour. Now, our first-class CRM systems allow us to hyper-personalise marketing efforts, making our clients happier than a creative with an endless campaign budget.
Using customer data to inform our marketing strategies and campaigns has always been essential. We still remember manually compiling customer feedback and sales data into spreadsheets, analysing trends, and making strategic decisions—back when “data entry” was a literal term. While technology has made this process more sophisticated with real-time analytics and CRM integration, leveraging data to understand and meet our clients' needs has remained a fundamental principle.
These core principles have stood the test of time, surviving multiple industry changes, ever-evolving trends and a pandemic thrown into the mix. We’ve adapted to keep pace with new technologies and platforms but stayed true to the fundamentals of getting to the heart of what our clients want and how to engage them so they keep coming back for more. These old faithful strategies are the bedrock of marketing success, and even if our clients morph into flying robots and start requesting that we cater to their coding preferences, we know we can roll with the times and deliver again and again. We can’t wait to see what the next 25 years will bring!
