B2B Marketing News: Demand Gen Adapts, B2B Buyers Taking Longer, Microsoft Digital Marketing Center Beta

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020 – Chatbots are projected to see over a 100% increase in their adoption rates in the next two to five years and are the leading AI use cases in enterprises today. Forbes

Bing is now Microsoft Bing as the search engine gets a rebrand – Microsoft doesn’t go into detail about why it added the company’s name to the Bing brand, other than it reflecting “the continued integration of our search experiences across the Microsoft family. The Verge

68% of B2B buyers say the length of their purchase cycles has increased over last year – The COVID-19 pandemic has led many B2B firms to lengthen their purchase cycles and to expect more personalized attention from vendors, according to recent research from Demand Gen Report. MarketingProfs

How B2B Demand Generation Has Adapted. Despite the impact of COVID-19, budgets for demand generation are holding up more than B2B marketing as a whole. Fewer than 1 in 5 (18%) B2B marketers say that they expect their budgets for demand generation to decrease, whereas 3 in 10 (31%) say their overall marketing budgets will fall. MarketingCharts

2021 B2B Content Marketing: What Now? [New Research] – Find out what content marketers are thinking, doing, and not doing when it comes to content creation and distribution, metrics and goals, team structure and outsourcing, budgets and spending. Content Marketing Institute

Study: Comparing the data from 8 SEO tools – The numbers you’ll find don’t match up. SEO metric tools are for general trend analysis and competitor benchmarking, not on specific numbers. Search Engine Land

Snapchat is pitching high-frequency, high-reach ‘Platform Burst’ ad campaigns – The new offer is a media buy advertisers can use to ensure their campaigns reach a certain amount of people in the app frequently over three or five days, according to three agency execs who are considering it. Digiday

Nearly half of consumers will try new brands if the ad is relevant – Consumers are spending more time at home with online content, especially connected TV (CTV) and social media. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the average time interacting with online content has doubled globally. Marketing Dive

Video ads drive a 48% higher sales rate than static ads, study says – WARC forecasting an 18.3% global increase for e-commerce ads this year even as overall ad spending drops 8.1% Mobile Marketer

Facebook Announces Integration of Messenger and Instagram Direct, Adds New Messaging Features. When complete, WhatsApp will also join Facebook’s messaging integration upgrade. Social Media Today

Google, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Amobee, Adobe and Adform Lead The Pack In Gartner’s 2020 Ad Tech Magic Quadrant – New entrants include Beeswax, Centro, Mediaocean and Zeta Global.  Ad Exchanger

Microsoft Digital Marketing Center is now available in open beta in the U.S Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Center for search and social management adds features, opens beta. The free platform is now open to U.S. small businesses. Search Engine Land

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

“In trying to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, it’s important for marketers to draw a line between cool and creepy.” by Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Home Depot’s Sold-Out Giant Halloween Skeletons Creep Into Brand’ Social Feeds – Budweiser, Slim Jim, Natty Light and others are getting into the Halloween spirit—but might just turn people green with envy. AdAge

TOPRANK MARKETING IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — What’s Trending: Getting Better All the Time — LinkedIn (client)
• Lee Odden – The Norse God, Lee Odden on Fitness and B2B Influencer Marketing – CoronaRadio 8.18
• Lee Odden – 365 Marketing Quotes to Keep You Fired Up All Year – Skyword

Have you found your own top marketing stories from the past week of industry news? Please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us for the weekly B2B marketing news, and we hope you’ll return again next Friday for another look at the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.

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