Top B2B Marketing Trends By Paul Dunay

Real-Time, Data & Personalization

Last week, we caught up with Paul Dunay, global VP of Marketing for Maxymiser, a company that specializes in multivariate testing and web optimization experiences.

Dunay (@pauldunay) predicts that we’ll see a move toward more personalized web, social and mobile experiences and using data analytics to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time in 2013.

Let’s look at his breakdown of what’s important in the mobile, social and web marketing spaces this year.

Make Marketing Ultra-Personal

Dunay is a big fan of personalization as you can see at his blog, so we asked him to give us some first steps marketers can take this year. His response:

Personalization goes far beyond just recognizing the user with a “Welcome back, Paul,” message,” he says. “Now, you can combine CRM (sales) data with click stream data (behavioral) and even Facebook data (social) to predict the next best offer to show the individual user.”

Uses for this “360-degree user profile” include marketing across web, mobile, tablet, email, social and even display ads.

Video Becomes a Staple

As YouTube boasts 500 years of video content viewed on Facebook every day, marketers are seeing the added value for their customers. We asked Dunay for his take on where marketers should go with video this year.

He says marketers should “engage” with video and get over their fear that it’s cost-prohibitive and hard to manage.

Use Web Data vs. Focus Groups

Dunay says he loves to “take shots at the focus group” because it’s so out-of-date in a marketing world.

He suggests looking to social data analytics and website behavioral data for real customer insights.

“These are perfect and cheap replacements for focus groups which are typically governed by loudest person in the room as well as herd mentality,” Dunay says.

Real-Time Interaction & Cross Channel Marketing Top 2013 Predictions

Marketers have a chance to really wow their customers this year with two of Dunay’s top trends that focus on delivering the most relevant content at the right time – real-time interaction and cross-channel experiences.

“Real time interaction is starting to make a lot of sense right now,” Dunay says. “If you have access to all this great data — CRM, social, website click stream — you can really make something of that by predicting and serving content to the right person at the right time.”

He suggests that IBM is pioneering this effort by “serving up content” instead of users “searching and finding.”

He indicates another way that marketers can make a bit splash this year is to think outside the channel segments.

“Let’s get rid of mobile, social, tablet and website talk and have just one platform to serve content and optimize it across channels,” he says. “Any marketer can serve content in multiple channels, but few can publish and optimize it across channels – now that’s exciting!”

This goes right along with what he calls the “X factor” for marketers in 2013.

“I think the X factor for marketers this year will be in the consolidation of vendors — Oracle buying Eloqua and Vitrue, Salesforce buying Radian6 and Buddy Media,” he says.

“There is a patter here of the big boys showing us their cards as they try to create one integrated marketing suite. It’s going to happen over several years, but the elephant footprints are there.”

Next Steps:

• Email or call to discuss how you can operationalize your content marketing in 2013.