Meet The Marketing Superheroes Of Tomorrow

What will the marketing of tomorrow look like? In this article we tell you about the trends that will reshape the future of B2B marketing.

By the year 2030, a new class of superheroes is expected to dominate the marketing and sales departments. According to experts, this class primarily includes data analysts, business developers, behavioral scientists, and psychologists.

That's right, marketing will focus less on what we think of as marketing today, such as creating traditional advertising campaigns, and more on providing information and facilitating business development.

Katarina Raičević, SEE Area SME Sales Manager, Dun & Bradstreet Europe, is one of many experts who share the view that marketing decisions will increasingly be based on raw data rather than based on opinions, preferences and personal perceptions of marketers.

“I think the future of marketing rests very much on analytics. Understand what type of content and which drivers will have the best impact on my business. And here you need a lot of analytical knowledge, it's not just my instinct, it's not just that I love red and then I'll have all the slogans and all the rest of the stuff in red and I think everyone else will love it. No, you really need to test, test and see. We repeat, we learn from mistakes but we learn fast, which means that a lot of things in marketing in the future will be driven by analytics insights.”

Test and generate new ideas

Another important aspect will be the ability to test and generate new ideas in order to provide key insights. “It will be crucial in the future to have a function to generate hypotheses… look at different data, create hypotheses and then quickly test. Hypothesize, test, scale. The hypothesis generator is a really important competency,” says Carl Wåreus, Director of Customers, Agencies and Country Partners at Google.

As a result of this, the marketing department will need to have people who can actually extract these analyzes and insights from the available data. In turn, they will help make the marketing department more focused on information and business development, a unit that will occupy a more central and prominent position in the overall business structure, with its increasingly complex demands.

So don't be surprised when you look around your own marketing department in the year 2030, only to find it crammed with psychologists and data scientists instead of campaign managers and designers.

You will find the following content:

1. Explosion of complexity

Defining the marketing department of tomorrow is a constantly moving goal. In fact, even defining today's is getting more and more complicated.

2. Working as one

Marketing has traditionally been seen as the yin to the yang of the sales department: two distinct halves working together but separately.

3. It's the brand, stupid

Among B2B marketing departments today, the focus is generally on helping the sales department by generating leads. As explored in the previous section, this cooperation will only deepen in the future. But the marketing department itself will also adopt a new main focus: brand building.

4. The future is (even more) data-driven

The fact that data is often referred to as "the new oil" is more apt than many realize. While the description certainly rings true in the most superficial sense (data is an immensely valuable resource, capable of powering entire industries), there is also a deeper parallel: as with oil in centuries past, those who realized from the beginning of the value of data they gained a huge startup advantage, hopelessly leaving the competition behind.

5. Know your customers (...better than they know themselves)

Do you think customer data is important today? That's nothing compared to what the future will likely bring. 46% of experts agree that data on user and customer behaviours, attitudes and values ​​will be the most important data to view and analyze for the next 10 years. Almost as many say that the biggest stars in tomorrow's sales and marketing departments will be behavioral scientists and psychologists.

6. The insighter is king

By the year 2030, a new class of superheroes is expected to dominate the marketing and sales departments. According to experts, this class mainly comprises data analysts, business developers, behavioral scientists, and psychologists.

7. Automated knowledge: artificial intelligence taking us even further

Generating revolutionary new insights about your customers is a daunting task. Fortunately, the marketers of the future won't have to take it on themselves.

8. Marketing with emotion

Andrea Fryrear, agile marketing author and thought leader, has often been quoted as saying, “Our job is not to create content. Our job is to change the world of the people who consume it.”

9. From MEN (Traditional Media, Events, and Networks) to VAM (Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Mixed Reality)

A very tangible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a rapid shift from face-to-face communication to digital platforms, such as Zoom or Teams. “It drove the digital transformation for a couple more years”, as Katarina Raičević says.”

10. Centralized and stronger

Not only will the role, definition and staff of the marketing department change. It will also occupy an improved and more prominent position in the organizations of 2030, an overwhelming majority of experts agree.

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