Despite all the 2020 marketing budget cuts, every marketer knows how crucial it is to leverage the right marketing technologies to cut through the noise and achieve marketing ROI within a shorter timeframe. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on not just marketing budgets but martech investments as well, a recent survey by Gartner signified that 58% of the reviewed marketers had decreased their martech budget in 2020.

While on the one hand, every business leader including marketing, sales, operations and other heads have to find newer ways to optimize their processes and use of technology while keeping business goals in mind, in the process of doing so it is just as important to ensure that some of the biggest marketing fails and marketing mistakes are best avoided.

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What are some of them?

Too Much Email Marketing, Is not Necessarily a Good Idea

Granted that email marketing is a popular medium and it was especially made more so during the 2020 pandemic, because marketers and even sales teams suddenly had only multiple digital channels to use (to replace face to face meetings) and email marketing played a key role. But when most marketers and sales people think of using email as a medium to reach their target audience, this can lead to a situation where the audience and prospects are bombarded with multiple marketing and sales emails that crowd their inbox. Email marketing campaigns consist of multiple emails in most cases, but when multiple companies start relying on the same channel to reach their target audience it can start to create a content overload for the recipients leading to lower ROI. Moreover, at a time of information and content overload, no prospect wants their inbox clogged and especially, they don’t want emails that might not matter to them and their interests which brings us to the next point:

Lack of Personalization is Akin to a Great Big Marketing Fail in 2021

Given the range of email automation, AI-driven capabilities and even hyper-personalization  techniques and tools, it is not difficult to plan relevant marketing and even sales campaigns that pique the interest of those prospects and audiences who are already in-market or have some signs of being in-market for your product in the near future using the right triggers based on past buying behaviors and other buying intent signals. This is where marketing and sales leaders need to work more closely together to breakdown their target list and identify who should be delivered what kind of marketing messaging or sales campaigns based on their interest, future buying prospects and current buying trends.

2021 is a year to bid good bye to the days of base level personalization techniques where only a prospects first name and maybe company and designation is used to denote that you know who they are. Customers and prospects alike expect a brand that interacts with them to know more about them and their personal as well as professional interest and these new buying trends are now shaping the need for new marketing technology investments and AI-powered tools that help marketers understand and predict what their audience wants or will like to know more about.

Doing the Same Marketing Things Won’t Work, It’s Time to do Something Different

Most of the world thought that 2020 would be the year of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and that 2021 would be the year of capitalizing on the vaccine and return-to-work mode. However, so far as the reports go, with places like Brazil and many others announcing a near-collapse of their health infrastructure due to a startling rise on Covid-19 numbers and Covid variations/strains, it looks like 2021 will again be a year of driving digital marketing and sales outreach for most industries to replace face to face business meetings.

This is why marketers (who by and large are expected to be creative in their line of work) have to think of various ways to help ensure their marketing messaging, marketing techniques and brand stands out from the crowd amid all the email, online campaigns, LinkedIn ads and social media promos. The rise of marketing technologies and newer features in martech makes it easier for marketing teams to scale their marketing processes and reach a larger number of people in a shorter period of time, but the use of tools cannot replace the basis of creativity.

Planning new interactive sessions that can bring the customer and prospect value, involving them to contribute to content hubs and learning sessions, hosting quick online QnAs or simply having small online virtual catch ups are just some of the methods being tried out by various marketing and sales leaders today. If Covid-19 has taught marketers and sales teams one thing, it’s that traditional marketing and sales models have to be merged with out of the box plans to help achieve ROI today.

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It’s not Only About Creating Value, But About Creating Value that Lasts

In a digital-only marketing and sales environment, no marketing leader has shied away from the importance of focusing on the ‘value-add’ that their marketing campaigns and marketing plans need to create. But seeing how every prospect today is being bombarded by marketing and sales campaigns from multiple places, there has to be refocus on creating value that lasts, well into the future or near-future at least. How can that be achieved? A deeper understanding of the customer and prospect are just starting points. Creating content plans and marketing content that is evergreen, not limited to the current state of tech or state of business, using buying trends and interests to build content that might be useful to them a year down the line…it’s time to take marketing and sales to the next level in 2021 by focusing on the longevity of everything that is done for the audience.