2017 was the year when B2B marketers shifted their focus from the product to the customer.  Looking for greater engagement with target accounts and buying groups, companies showed interest in new frameworks, such as SiriusDecisions’ Demand Unit Waterfall. They also welcomed inside sales into marketing teams for greater alignment to better cater customer demands for more personalization and one-on-one interactions.

Today’s B2B CMO is tasked with being the driver for customer experience and revenue. In order to accomplish this goal, CMOs must care about their impact on the sales process, tell great stories to enhance customer engagement and remain tech savvy to streamline and maximize their team's efforts.

With buyers continuing to become more empowered and demanding, companies are rethinking their marketing strategies to drive one-to-one engagement fueled by detailed buyer behavioral data.

At Marketo’s annual Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco, speakers from companies such as Panasonic and Amazon Web Services discussed how new processes and tools are helping B2B organizations to boost engagement with relevant storytelling, while also staying adaptive to buyer demands.

There is an endless amount of content in the B2B atmosphere, so it’s critical for marketers to ensure theirs stands out above the crowd. One way to do that is by telling a story. But oftentimes, B2B marketers aren’t equipped with the right information to do so. This is where buyer personas can have a significant impact on targeted messaging.

The Content2Conversion Conference has grown substantially over the past three years — both in terms of attendees and the content covered during the event. Expanding to four tracks in 2017 — ABM in Action, Content2Conversion, Demand Gen Summit and Sales Impact Summit — the event is now moving under the umbrella brand of the B2B Marketing Exchange (Feb. 20-22).

Much like aspiring comedians have to stand out among the competition in order to catch their big break, marketers have to make sure their content trumps others’ for clicks and engagement. With a sea of content out there in the B2B marketing space, buyers have no shortage of information to help them make their decisions. That’s all the more reason to not just create batch-and-blast content, but instead give current and potential customers a unique story to remember.