IBM’s Susan Emerick: Top B2B Marketing Trends in 2013 (Part 1)

Manager of Social Enterprise Programs at IBM Predicts 2013 Trends

Backbone Media recently hosted a webinar entitled “Top B2B Marketing Trends 2013,” which included a panel of B2B marketing experts that was moderated by veteran journalist Ellis Booker. In her remarks outlining her vision for the coming year, Susan Emerick, Manager of Social Enterprise Programs at IBM, shared how marketing professionals are generally ill-prepared for leveraging the opportunities available for using data and analytics tools to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors and market trends.

B2B marketing leaders need to move beyond simply consuming data to using data in real-time and applying predictive analytics to better align the insights that are obtained with the strategic initiatives the organization is focused on, says Emerick.

Another big focus for marketers this year will be to leverage data to better understand granular aspects of individual relationships in the B2B marketplace. In B2B, a critical element of success is about forging strong relationships, says Emerick. As such, marketing leaders will need to increasingly use data to understand the nuances of individual relationships and the touchpoints that are involved to better manage relationships and act on opportunities as they emerge.

To do so, marketers and their organizations will need to be able to funnel data that’s gathered from multiple touchpoints – such as social and transactional data – to be able to gain a single view of the customer to help drive the one-to-one relationship more strategically, says Emerick.