Last month saw the annual B2B Marketing Expo take place at the Excel in London. Not wanting to miss out on all of the latest in the B2B marketing world, we were in attendance. The event ran over two days and featured some great talks from industry experts, with some significant topics present throughout. In this blog post, I’ll go over a few key takeaways from the expo.So what were the key takeaways from the event?

One of the main subjects that featured was around the importance of defining user personas. Several of the speakers expressed the importance of creating personas at the start of any campaign or project, whether it’s online or offline in order to be able to effectively tailor content to user groups, increasing the likelihood of engagement. 

The creation of user personas is of particular importance when developing digital products and it is something that we champion here at MMT Digital. We begin each project with our ‘Phase 0’, during which we hold a number of workshops with stakeholders from an organisation to build up a picture of the different types of customers they typically encounter. With this information in place, it is then possible to create a customer centric solution.

Along with the importance of user personas, there was a heavy focus on marketing automation across the two days. This is a topic which has been an important part of digital marketing for a long time now and with constant improvements in technology, it’s something which is becoming more and more advanced. Several of the talks focussed on ways to reach your customers via personalised content and using well timed follow ups. It was clear that successful online marketing automation needs a strategic plan which takes the user through the buying process from start to finish using content that is relevant to them.

Also heavily featured on the agenda, was lead generation and some of the best practices and methods for this. In-keeping with the theme of personas, it also became apparent that it is possible to define the users you want to target during the lead generation stage. When you’re looking to generate leads, you are likely to have in mind your ‘ideal customer’ and you’re probably able to drill down and come up with several ‘ideal customers’ that fit into different categories, for example, different job roles. Knowing what you’re looking for means you’re able to tailor your content to ensure that you reach your audience with relevant messaging.

The final key takeaway from the conference is the increasing focus on the use of video within B2B digital marketing. There were talks from industry experts which reiterated the increase of video within the world of digital and demonstrated best practices for reaching your audience through this medium. During a talk by ITN Studios, we were given an insight into the best practices for creating video content that is topical, timely and authentic in order to better reach a B2B audience.

Throughout the whole expo it was clear how much digital marketing is still advancing within the B2B sector and how important it is to keep ahead of current trends. All of the above subjects place a focus on the user experience, by doing this, it is possible to create solutions which are customer-centric which in turn, will lead to the fulfilment of business goals.