As a digital marketer, finding the right (digital) marketing strategies just keeps getting tougher. It’s a moving target out there – as soon as you find an approach that works, the online game shifts and your targets move on, leaving your online tools in the dust. Banner ads offer a good example. Once a staple in the digital marketer’s toolkit, banner ads have fallen sharply out of favor. It turns out that many millennials, both male and female, simply ignore all online banner ads. The impact of banner ads on other age groups is eroding too.

If you’re a B2B marketer, just about everything you do now falls under the umbrella of ‘digital marketing’. Your marketing strategies have evolved into digital marketing strategies, which in turn guide your digital marketing plan. And in today’s world, you’ve got to have a great inbound strategy to reach your prospects – and you’d better be optimized for mobile, because that’s where and how your targets are searching.

Want to know more about the pros and cons of marketing automation for B2B? Read our marketing automation FAQs to learn more.

The days of the email blast are over. Once one of the key tools in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, the general email blast has, thanks to marketing automation, gone the way of the fax machine. It’s been replaced by customized and personalized interactions, tailored directly to your prospects’ information needs and buying stage – and presumably delivering more valuable leads than any generated through an email blast approach.

Growth marketing for B2B is based on the techniques honed by “growth hackers,” who use data and experimentation to boost growth for internet startups. These data crunching experts are the marketers behind the huge growth rates at companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook and others.

There’s a lot of buzz today about growth hacking, or growth marketing. The growth hacking concept has been around since 2010, when it was created by Sean Ellis, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and startup advisor. Ellis defined a “growth hacker” as a marketing expert who could generate explosive growth by using a product itself to gain more customers. Ellis’ concept applied to startups launching a new software or application. These new companies have to grow fast or they die, so they need innovative marketing approaches to jumpstart growth, and also to compensate for a lack of marketing resources.

We hear a lot about how the B2B sales process has changed. From push to pull, from outbound to inbound, from talking to a live person to receiving automated marketing replies …. The funnel looks a lot different now than it did 10, or five, or even two years ago.