The landscape of business-to-business marketing strategies is constantly changing, and as salesmen within a certain industry, B2B companies need to stay at the top of their game. Here are some marketing trends practiced in 2021 that will help B2B businesses.

Selling to businesses is a more precise game in which the marketing needs to be spot-on. Assuming it is a niche market you are selling in, the target audiences are significantly smaller, and the potential customers are better informed about the product or service, as well as the potential competitors they might pick instead of you.

As such, B2B marketing, and with it its design, must be elevated to its best purpose. From a better user experience, intuitive use, all the way to convincing and well-researched content marketing, here are some trends you can adopt to help your B2B business.

B2B website design trends

Seeing that B2B businesses are mostly software-as-a-service (marketing automation, development, design, customer service, etc.) or a traditional service company (insurance, finance, retail, security, etc.), they need good web design to convince potential companies interested in hiring them.

Here are the best B2B web design trends that have been prevalent this year.

Responsive for full screen

The ability to provide an experience that is personalized to a user’s device drives web design. Providing an accessible mobile user experience has long been in its focus.

While mobile is still a top priority, the finest B2B website designs are flexible and accommodate numerous views, including a full screen one. A growing number of desktop monitors have a resolution of 1080p.

As screen sizes grow larger, your website should be able to accommodate the possibility of additional visible space. A website’s design ensures a constant user-friendly experience by having the grid adapt to higher resolutions.

Custom cursors

The mouse signifies the first point of interaction with your company for potential clients surfing your website. A unique cursor can communicate with your users how to connect with your site and boost their engagement for B2B enterprises interested in introducing an eye-catching interactive feature to their site.

It can be something important to your brand or even part of your branding identity, an animation that will wow your website visitors, or perhaps something completely different and minimalist in approach.

However, keep in mind that such a feature, if a very complex design and hard to integrate into your website, might damage the loading speed.

A cool custom cursor found on the website of creative director Sylvain Theyssens

Simple animations

Another powerful approach for attracting the interest of your website visitors are is motion graphics or minimal animations. A tool like that will give your website the flow and dynamism that it might need.

Interactive animations inspire people to interact with your design. When used correctly, they can teach visitors how to interact with your website. They also prevent form submission problems since they are built to provide hints in response to user input.

On top of that, you can use these tools to enhance the user experience, if you apply animation in a “How it works” page or knowledge base.

Another obvious placement for a micro animation would be the homepage: if you feel like stock photos and illustrations are too “2000 and late” for your cutting-edge website, an animation will do the trick.

But, your designers will have to be careful with video formats and coding to avoid slowing down page load times.

Textures and layers

Using textured backgrounds and multiple layers in your website will help certain elements pop out, almost in a 3D way.

The use of layering and texturing is very commonly used to divert the attention of the viewer to something that looks out of place and stands out as if it has a different size or dimension.

You can do this to emphasize particular elements, such as a product shot, testimonial or calls-to-action.

Amazing use of layering on the website of Powerhouse

The more white space, the better

Over-saturated design with too many elements and colors nowadays seems tasteless and spammy. We’re lucky that websites aren’t on paper, so there is no need to use every single corner available to fit more in them.

White space, or negative space, allows the website visitors to do two things: first, focus on what needs to draw their attention, and second, to have a break from all the information stimuli that they are receiving.

If you bombard your audience with too much information, they aren’t likely to remember what is important.

So, make sure you have enough white space around CTA buttons, products, prices, testimonials and other important elements on your website.

Digital marketing trends

Last year saw many changes and trends in design even in the digital marketing sphere. Email newsletters are more and more personalized, lead generation is slicker and more minimalist, and social media design is colorful, catchy and straightforward.

Here are some of the most prominent trends we’ve noticed.

Email marketing: personalization and accessibility

B2B companies must take it one notch up and think outside the box when it comes to email marketing. Getting your content in front of the proper audience is only half the battle. You should also pay attention to the appearance of your emails.

Making connections, creating trust, and keeping subscribers engaged with your email marketing all require good design. You must keep up with marketing design trends in addition to offering outstanding content.

Luckily, it is much easier to deliver this with all the email design tools available to B2B marketers these days.

A very important element of email marketing seen in B2B companies’ strategies these days is personalization.

According to this Litmus research, personalized emails generate a median ROI of 122%. But using someone’s name in the subject line isn’t the only way to create a personalized email experience.

Rather, your design should be based on your client’s preferences. For instance, some clients surely respond better to a more serious, professional-looking email. Others might prefer a wacky and humorist touch that might be unconventional but is funny.

These preferences should be reflected in the visuals, style, and language you employ in your email design. This level of email customization is easy to do at scale thanks to marketing automation and dynamic content solutions.

Another important feature that will improve your email marketing is inclusivity and accessibility. For the sight-impaired audiences, you can include an audio version of your emails. You can also use fonts that are easier to read for people with dyslexia, as well as use colors that are visible to people with forms of color blindness.

Social media: LinkedIn improves its organic content

The ongoing pandemic only added importance to good social media marketing, which in the case of B2B marketing isn’t as easy and effective as Instagram giveaways and catchy ads.

It takes more skill and better (re)targeting to reach the right audience in this case, and the trends are moving more in the direction of LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube courses, microblogging and good use of chatbots on all platforms.

But if we need to give the floor to one platform that improved for B2B marketing, it is undoubtedly LinkedIn. Even before, it was where people went for all things concerning their career and professional network, but nowadays we’re also seeing change in the world of LinkedIn organic reach.

Every B2B company should take advantage of the chance to build awareness, community, and reach new audiences through content. You can easily set your brand up for conversion success there, by giving your audience solutions to a job-related problem or sharing insider information within your industry.

While the platform is still primarily focused on business, it is seeing a change towards a more conversational, transparent, and community-driven culture.

Lead generation: Sharing knowledge grips the attention

As a business selling to businesses, you should be able to flaunt your expertise and share knowledge with your potential customers. A great lead generation tactic that B2B companies used in 2021, especially because of the impossibility of traveling, expos and fairs, was the good old webinar or course.

Learn from the veterans: companies like SEMRush, Hubspot, Gartner and Marketing Week often empower and inspire marketers to do better by learning from their learning hubs. However, most of the time the conclusion is that by subscribing or using their marketing automation tools, you’d do much better. On top of that, they compile many emails by qualified leads that they can then reuse for retargeting and email marketing campaigns.