B2B Marketing – Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads
Today is THE actual Back to the Future day! The day when Marty McFly travels from 1985, to the ‘future’… today’s date, 21st October 2015. In the movie, the world was expected to be filled with food hydrators, hoverboards and even flying cars, but sadly these predictions haven’t quite come to fruition.
How have our predictions faired then? In November 2014, we made predictions regarding developments in B2B marketing which we expected over the next 12 months, so how many of them have become a reality? Just for the record, we didn’t stretch so far as to imagine a 3D shark appearing from the front of a cinema, ours were a little more marketing-related.
More video content – Prediction score 5/5 
Not even two weeks ago, we published a blog relating to the rise of video in B2B Marketing. Given that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has predicted that Facebook will be mostly video in 5 years, and Cisco is predicting that by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic… It makes sense for B2B marketers to take advantage of this.
We don’t predict that this trend will be going away any time soon, if anything, it’s only going to continue to grow for 2016.
Mobile marketing – Prediction score 4/5
As we predicted, mobile marketing is continuing to grow in popularity. As more and more consumers purchase smartphones and proceed to use them in almost all aspects of their daily lives, marketing for these devices is quintessential. In our original predictions last November, we suggested that businesses ensure their website and pages were fully optimised for mobile devices, but now things are more imperative. In the hyper-connected world in which we live, businesses that have yet to focus on mobile optimisation of their website are seriously endangering the further success and future of their organisation.
So, if you’re looking to the future and have yet to fully optimise your site(s), now is the time!
Data protection – Prediction score 5/5
In our original predictions for 2015, we suggested that businesses begin to focus on securing opt-in permission from their customers in order to overcome the imminent arrival of the updated Data Protection Act. Well, during the course of this year, the latest draft of the new data regulation has been released and it seems our predictions were bang on the money. The EU’s plan to place tougher restrictions on contacting prospects has again been confirmed in the latest draft and it appears these changes will be sure to make it to the final regulation. The result then, is that if you haven’t already started looking to secure opt-in permissions from your prospects, leads, and customers, then this needs to be added very close to the top of your ‘to do list’.
As you can see, our predictions for 2015 have been fufilled and our insight has hopefully enabled you to avoid some of the industry pitfalls and better prepare for a bright future.
To see what else we predicted and to find out whether they have also come to fruition…
