It highlights four primary areas of concern and asked a host of brilliant and innovative marketing thought leaders for their most helpful advice. It is possible no other piece of content will be as valuable to marketers as they seek to adapt in the year ahead.

These top marketers include well known bloggers such as Anne Handley, Jeff Bullas, Heidi Cohen and Jay Baer. But you can also read thoughts from Vala Afshar from Salesforce.com, Michael Brenner from Insider Group, Jason Miller from LinkedIn and John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing. Together they represent a brains trust of extraordinary vision. Having this eBook at your fingertips will be like calling up your own agency dream team.

1. Planning your strategy

“In 2017, the smartest companies will slow down at the right moments.”

With change happening so quickly, Anne Handley of MarketingProfs makes the surprising point of the importance of slowing down. Sometimes taking the time to make sure that what you are doing ties back to your strategy and that the quality is high enough to succeed is more important than activity for its own sake. While she admits there is such a thing as “bad slow” in marketing, there is also “good slow” and she encourages marketers to slow down, and sometimes even to say “no”.

2. Creating top quality content

“For 2017, one of the trends I’m thinking about is focusing not on more content, but more relevant content.”

In a similar vein of “less is more”, Jason Miller of LinkedIn stresses the importance of focussing on relevance over volume. Often marketers can feel the need to constantly create a huge volume of content without taking the time to check if it is effective. Jason recommends using Click Through Rate (CTR) as a good measure to see what is achieving the best results and then focussing the content machine on creating more success around those themes. Using A/B testing to refine this process means that content creation will always be addressing what your audience wants and responds to, as opposed to just what is easy to do.

3. Leveraging the tools and technology

“If Watson can diagnose a rare form of cancer and self-driving cars will change the way we get around, think about what AI will do to and for communications.”

Several of our experts, including Gini Dietrich, Founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, are focusing on the power of analytics, data and predictive intelligence in 2017. Marketing automation became incredibly sophisticated in 2016 and in 2017 brands will begin to really understand how to use its power to make marketing much more trained in on real business objectives and value. In turn this will increase the authority and influence of marketers within their organisations.

4. Working with industry influencers

“Promote brands and products through people consumers already look up to and trust.”

As the pace of change becomes overwhelming, our experts including Shane Barker Digital Strategist, urges marketers to look for those efficiencies that are most effective. Making the most of economies of scale by building powerful and efficient content machines and outsourcing wherever possible. But a key trend for 2017 that they agreed upon was the growth of influencer marketing to collaborate with influencers that your audience respects and trust. So identifying who those influencers are and bringing them closer to your brand will be a very effective strategy for 2017.

Download the “Top tips from top marketers: The secret to B2B marketing success in 2017” ebook now to get a better view of how 2017 will unfold and how you can adapt what you are doing to be the best in your field.