In many B2B organizations there hasn't been a traditional marketing function. The public relations or communications team may handle corporate branding, for example, while regional marketing or business-unit level marketing generates demand and handles product marketing.

That's changing, in part because of greater access to data, new business model innovation, and a desire to sell more within established accounts.

More centralized core marketing functions are becoming more prevalent, in part because they can fuel growth by turning to customer and account insights to reveal new product and revenue opportunities.

Combine that with an unsteady economy and customers who expect B2B businesses to provide the same high level of experience they get with consumer brands, and the case for a single marketing team gets stronger.

When you think through what type of marketing leader you want to be in the face of such expanding business pressures, four strong B2B marketing archetypes emerge. They go beyond the roles that most senior marketing executives find themselves in—i.e., just great brand builders and stewards.

These are the four marketing leader/chief marketing officer archetypes:

1. Growth and revenue optimizers, who take on the tighter alignment of customer journeys with Sales and Service. These CMOs have a goal of optimizing investment that drives demand, conversion, and loyalty.
2. Culture builders and connectors, who take on the human element of transformation of the business, setting a vision for the business internally and externally. They have the goal of connecting across functional areas toward a shared set of outcomes and purpose.
3. New product and service innovators, who take on product and service innovation that drives improved experiences in service of growth across new areas. These CMOs have a goal of increasing markets served, customer segments, ways of selling across company offerings, and opportunities to upsell into existing customers.
4. Ecosystem builders, who source and build valuable partnerships that expand the product or service offering and overall value proposition. They sign up for the goals of developing financially motivated, win-win relationships to increase reach in the market and the value provided to customers.

The reality is that most CMOs and marketing leads must play all four of these roles at different times, along with being world-class brand builders, to ultimately succeed. Moreover, those marketing leaders must understand the trends that are shaping the CMO world of today.

Here are five B2B marketing leadership trends that can lead to more revenue, stronger brands, loyal customers, and effective leaders.

1. CMOs as Growth Integrators

B2B marketers are widening and narrowing their scope of responsibilities as they play a more significant part in driving business growth.

They are playing a more critical role in the company's most important nexus—the intersection of product or service and the ways customers experience it. There's a significant shift: More CMOs are setting the customer experience (CX) agenda, and occasionally CXOs report to them. The CMO is in a unique position to weigh CX investment to achieve optimal demand generation.

Accordingly, CMOs are working harder to prove how Marketing delivers value to the organization, taking on specific growth targets. They are taking a more active role in uncovering new pockets of growth and the segments that offer new opportunities.

Board-level expectations are behind these changes—i.e., insistence that marketing investments be able to prove their value—beyond traditional marketing KPIs. That means marketers are using a different language, switching out marketing buzzwords for financial terms that speak to the enterprise's strategic and financial goals and objectives.

2. Enrichment of Customer Understanding

Driving loyalty is always important, but in leaner times it's vital. Customer experiences that focus on the post-purchase journey are essential to lasting relationships.

Just as CMOs in consumer companies are stepping up their investment in CX, B2B organizations need to boost engagement with their customers.

The single view of the customer, which B2B brands have been chasing for decades, is quickly becoming untenable. As centralized marketing comes into focus, marketers are finding ways to approach a company's siloed data set from a horizontal and more holistic perspective. They're trying to live inside a customer's head and understand a day, a month, and a year in their life.

Customer data platform tools are rapidly improving, and a new generation of marketing leaders is increasingly skillful at understanding how to harness data to reach new and existing customers in different ways. The technology to realize account-based marketing ( ABM) is fully in place at most companies. This year, more will finally be able to deliver on it, as long as marketers help identify revenue opportunities and set more business growth-oriented performance measurement.

3. Proving Marketing Investment

Turbulent economies push companies toward fear-based budgeting, wherein Marketing is often one of the first places companies look to save money. Moreover, because the C-suite is eager for quick sales gains, it's also common for companies to