Year 2020 changed a lot of things. As the Covid-19 pandemic raged on, many industries and economies were gutted. Almost every individual, business function or organization have had to innovate to survive and sustain amidst lockdowns and information overload. B2B marketing was no stranger to this. In the initial days, a majority of B2B companies reported reducing their overall budget by 4-25%. On the contrary, a quarter of B2B companies planned to increase it to combat sluggish sales. Most importantly, a clear shift to digital channels was noticeable.
According to Mckinsey Company’s research, digital interactions became twice as important as traditional sales interactions. While the world continues to grapple with the public health crisis, there’s definitely a rise in optimism for 2021. This is majorly due to the introduction of multiple vaccines and affirmative government action. Additionally, the resilience shown by many industries in not only surviving but thriving during the pandemic adds to the optimism. So what will the new year bring for B2B marketing in 2021?
For B2B marketers, 2021 will be an extremely important year. One one hand, marketers have to make up for the lost business in 2020. On the other hand, they have to optimize their strategies to future-proof business growth. With digital marketing becoming critical to success of B2B marketing in 2021, here are some tips and strategies that will help any marketer out there looking for some inspiration.
Since this space is constantly evolving, I am also sharing my thoughts on some key trends that’ll define B2B marketing in 2021.
5 Tips and Trends for B2B Marketing in 2021
1. Email Marketing Is Awesome – Keep Doing More of It
Any company looking to succeed in B2B marketing needs to keep focused on building a holistic strategy that involves analog as well as digital tools. However, very few can match the success of email marketing when it comes to achieving B2B marketing goals.
Not only do experienced business professionals prefer email as a communication mode, over 70% of millennials love it too. The simple, direct approach in an email communication seems to do the job for B2B marketers whether they’re trying to create awareness or book a demo.
A top tip for B2B marketing in 2021 will be to continue optimizing your email campaigns.
Looking for a helpful resource to create highly effective sales emails? Check out this guide by Gong.io, a revenue intelligence platform known for their awesome marketing work on the 7 laws of highly effective sales emails.
2. ABM Marketing Demands Your Attention
Marketing and sales teams can no longer afford to operate in silos. In fact, even synergy won’t do it now. 2021 will demand marketing and sales teams to emerge as a unified force focused on creating personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts.
Traditionally, B2B marketing has been all about generating more and more top of the funnel leads. ABM strategy implores marketers to focus on dollar value and not just the raw # of leads every period.
ABM marketing will no longer stay a buzz word in 2021 and emerge as something which B2B marketing teams will consider critical to their growth marketing plans.
3. Design is Important But The Entire Website Experience Matters More
Speed matters.
Navigation matters.
Answering the questions your target audience has matters.
Sharing valuable content that they like in an easy, accessible manner matters the most.
Design is important but B2B marketers should focus on the overall experience their website provides to the visitors.
Everyday, we see a new web development platform or innovation come to the shores with the promise of building the best-looking websites. As B2B marketers, we should stay updated with the latest trends but keep our eyes on the prize – helping our audience get what they came for! With the least amount of steps/hoops involved.
4. Video Marketing Will Rule – Make It a Priority
Rise in popularity and strategic importance of video marketing is something no marketer will contest today. What was once thought to be only something B2C marketers raved about has become a staple for B2B marketing teams as well. Every year, more and more businesses use video as a marketing tool.
Videos work – they attract people, engage them to stay longer than any other content type and give you the results you want – sales, leads, organic boost, anything.
If you’re B2B business isn’t spending time and resources on video marketing – let 2020 be the last year that was the case. Whether it’s a video blog, an interview, a webinar or just a promo video – do it.
It isn’t hard. Atleast, as much as it used to be.
With free resources like Canva making it easier than ever to experiment with video marketing for B2B success.
2021 is the year Video marketing in B2B will conquer everything. Without a doubt.
5. Remarketing Right Will Do the Magic
Remarketing is the art and science of bringing your messaging back to the people who once interacted with your website or content and engaging them to take action.
When done right, remarketing has the power to be the single biggest booster of ROI for your marketing spend. It does wonders for technical companies and software products. At Preseem, we almost swear by it!
And yes, it does require you to have good content to invite your audience the first time. But that is something you can work to fix. As part of your overall B2B marketing for 2021 strategy, include content development as a key responsibility for the team. Put a # and timeline on that. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see hundreds of people flocking to your website or blog. Keep writing. Keep translating your content into different mediums (turn into infographic, case study, blog, video, 7x everything) and people will come.
And once they do, make sure you have all the right code snippets in place (like FB pixel, Google analytics code) to ‘track’ and ‘store’ the data. Build your remarketing audience and engage them with targeted campaigns and stroke the familiarity they have with your brand/product.
There are many other B2B marketing tips and trends that will define 2021 but I hope these 5 tips above give you a good starting point.
Here’s wishing the best to you in 2021 and I hope all your B2B marketing dreams come true!
I’m sure there are many other good B2B marketing tips and tricks that you have! Feel free to share with me here or post in the comments below. Thank you.