Base One blog

December 23 2013 4:09 PM

We thought we'd end the year with a little review of 2013, Base One style.  So what happened in B2B this year, what changed, what was new, what insight did we gather and what will the year ahead bring?  Here's a few collected thoughts, gathered from the festive souls still in the office/pub.

So, in no particular order, this is what 2013 meant to us…

2013 was when mobile went mainstream, and we stopped having to convince the majority of clients to optimise comms for mobile - it became the norm.  If you're not doing it, you're being left behind.

The biggest thing that I've realised this year, is that the need for all of us to adapt to the new way buyers are interacting with brands is increasing rather than slowing down. Most of our clients seems to realise this but they are hindered by the natural resistance to change. Our challenge for 2014 is to help them overcome that resistance.

I was perhaps not surprised to read that still in 2013 brands don't know how to use social. I was more surprised at the percentages - 70% of professionals don't think B2B brands know how to communicate with them via social media.

At last, 'quality over quantity' finally seems to have sunk in when it comes to creating engaging content. Hopefully, there's no more having to dust the cobwebs off 3 year old white papers. That just won't cut it anymore.

The biggest trend I've seen in 2013 was our clients' appetite for nurturing programmes. Some have gone in head-first with large and complex communication plans, some are dipping their toes and testing ideas on a smaller scale. Next year we'd like to work towards taking the concept of nurturing beyond emails and landing pages and truly integrating it across online and offline experiences. With the technology and the data that's available, there's a hope for a more personalised, more relevant and more human b2b marketing experience in 2014.

2013 has seen the return of a face-to-face customer service experience. Companies have risen to the demand of disgruntled customers wanting interaction with 'real' people which has seen banks extending their opening hours (and re-opening closed branches). The online user experience is more important than ever, but only when combined with a positive customer facing experience.

Here's my favourite ad of the year, and I can just about justify this as B2B - consumer's don't buy lorries do they?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10
It got everyone talking about Volvo and even what the advert was about (precision steering in Volvo lorries) and gathered nearly 65 million views in a month.

'The Keyword is Dead, Long Live the Keyword'. We realised that there is more to insight than keyword research and keyword analytics. Google's decision to secure all organic searches made us lose part of keyword data, which can be frustrating. But on the other side, it made us become even more aware of the importance of building a website with a well-thought content strategy in mind and an engaging experience for our customers/users. 'Quality' content has become even more important. We are changing our Web Analytics practices to adapt to this change...

Another good year for TEDx Teddington, this year we heard talks on everything from the Physics of Car Crashes to Knitting to hearing from the Vice President of Google in Europe.

With tablet sales forecast to overtake PC sales at the end of 2013, it highlights the importance of ensuring that websites are built with tablets & mobiles in mind. 2014 will be the year where everyone will start to get their act together to play catch up with the rapidly expanding growth of tablet & mobile device usage.

Adobe's expensive enterprise licensing for Digital Publishing Suite continues to prevent smaller businesses taking advantage of this great digital publishing platform for internal sales tools - something there's a massive market for. Adobe change this!

The year that HTML5 sites really took off. Look at some of the most inspiring here http://bit.ly/18HM2u0.  B2B - as ever - playing catch up but hopefully 2014 will be the year where we see more sites across B2B benefiting from what HTML5 enables.

New research has revealed the gender imbalance in marketing is worsening. And depressing that in 2013 we are still having this conversation. However, it's vital these discussions continue and female marketers speak out in order for inequality to be highlighted and rectified in B2B marketing as well as across the entire business community.

A couple of years ago the headmaster of my son's school said that 7 out of 10 jobs in the future had not yet been created - I found this confusing and hard to believe.  Now Data Scientists are currently the most in demand! I can't remember that being an option when I did my GCSEs.

Our teenagers should heed the old fogeys advice - don't post on Facebook, Twitter etc. that which you would not want to say or do to someone face to face! Recruiters have clever algorithms which finds those things we would much rather forget! Seems we should watch how we do all sorts of things, including how we ride our bikes - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25366998

2013 was Year of the Hack. We have a seen a number of high profile targets hacked including Adobe in Oct (38 million accounts) and more recently 40 million customer accounts at Target in the US. Fraud experts have seen a ten-to-twentyfold increase in high-value stolen cards being offered on the black-market - what can we expect in 2014?

So how was it for you? Go on, have a comment...