ITSMA: In the next two years, the focus of B2B marketers will shift from brand positioning to understanding consumers

199IT original compilation

B2B marketers expect their responsibilities to change in the next two years. The ITSMA November 2014 survey found that brand positioning is the top responsibility of B2B marketers worldwide, with 90% of respondents choosing it. Sales expansion and brand communication followed closely behind, with 85% of respondents choosing each.

However, the increased focus on personalization and data has made B2B marketers rethink how they can approach consumers and manage all the information they collect, and the situation has changed a lot from the previous two years. B2B marketers want to understand consumers, marketing technology tools, and competitor analysis, which are the top three responsibilities of B2B marketing in the next two years, and these are not on their current responsibilities. Brand positioning, brand communication and demand mining are not on the list, and expanding sales channels is only ranked fifth.

B2B marketers must make great progress in integrating data to understand consumers. According to a September 2014 survey by LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, only 19% of senior marketers in U.S. B2B companies said their companies fully integrated consumer data, and the same number said their companies did not integrate data at all; at the same time, 62% of respondents said they partially integrated consumer data.

Changes in priorities and responsibilities will drive structural adjustments next year. ITSMA found that more B2B marketers want to move to a hub-and-spoke organizational structure (i.e., a flatter organization). 48% of respondents said they currently use a hub-and-spoke organizational structure, and 56% believe they will adopt this organizational structure in the next two years. At the same time, the proportion of respondents who want to use a decentralized model has dropped to less than 10%, mainly because this model is not conducive to forming a consensus on consumers and data integration.

Compiled from: eMarketer Translator: Sun Ying