The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

B2B Marketing Marketing CMO

B2B Tech influencers gain insight from their position, and predict key trends, study suggests

Author

By Laurie Fullerton, Freelance Writer

January 16, 2017 | 4 min read

A recent report in Forbes Magazine suggests that B2B tech CMOs are a combination of C-level executives, authors, and professional speakers who leverage insight gained from their position.

B2B tech influencers

B2B tech influences

Leadtail, a social media insights research company that tracks over 1,300 North American CMOs who are active on Twitter, recently analyzed over 680,000 tweets that specifically B2B tech CMOS are talking about.

While many of the B2B tech influencers speak best about what they know (e.g., @rwang0 is a principal analyst, founder at Constellation Research); they often leverage domain expertise about a specific topic (e.g., @ttunguz tweets about SaaS startups); and create and curate compelling content (@larrykim). Typically, the most influential use some combination of these different approaches, the Forbes article notes.

Leading trends are discussed at length by such B2B influencers as Jill Rowley, who predicts sales enablement and social selling will better unite the two functions and align them to, with, for, and around the customer. She writes that in 2017, the B2B CMO will support, but not lead, digital sales transformation, of which social selling is a component. Rowley notes that we will see more companies move away from ad-hoc, informal, point-in-time approaches to developing an integrated, holistic strategy to social selling enablement that equips the sales team with modern-day knowledge, skills, content, and tools.

influential B2B tech CMOs

In the age of the connected customer, B2B influencer @ValaAfshar notes that personalization, immediacy, and intelligence are the currencies of success for both consumers and business buyers. Leaning on technology and recognizing that customer experience is the new battle ground for competitive differentiation, in 2017, digital savvy marketers must focus on three important marketing initiatives: customer journeys, precision marketing powered by CRM platform, and intelligent sales and marketing alignment, the article notes.

When it comes to brands, B2B influencer @TamaraMcLeary notes that CMOs in 2017 will harness the power of technology to increase the human feel of their brands. What I’m seeing from the companies I work with is a return to building a deeper level of engagement with customers through high-tech tools. Savvy brands are looking to AI and big data analytics to support them in owning the customer journey.

On the heels of the announcement of the record-setting Yahoo data breach, B2B influencer @KimWhitler notes that cyber security will finally become more important to CMOs. B2B CMOs will lead their B2C brethren in figuring out how to engage the C-suite and help them understand that a data breach is a customer problem, which makes it a marketing problem, the article reports.

Leadtail analyzed 131,579 public tweets from its panel of 294 B2B Tech Company CMOs that were active on Twitter in 2016. The company ranked the results by calculating the number of unique panelists that mentioned or retweeted a given handle in the report period.

B2B Marketing Marketing CMO

More from B2B Marketing

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +