Marketing Learnings to Keep in Mind for 2021!

How can marketing leaders make use of a smart combination of martech and salestech to lead effectively through the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic while creating better customer impact and business output? Here are a few ideas:

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to drastic changes to consumer trends and digital marketing processes, requiring marketers across the hierarchy to invest in a different martech stack to help create better marketing ROI despite it. The year 2020 and in a lot of ways, even 2021 will be about rethinking marketing plans and martech investments while rebuilding digital marketing practices in a more organized manner that allows room for instant / over night shifts as well, based on the current market dynamics (sudden lockdowns (partial or otherwise), effect of vaccine distributions, etc). 

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B2B martech in the time of Covid-19 does look a lot different than the previous years. But here’s what marketing leaders can do to ensure they grab more market share or market value despite all the current economic and business challenges. 

A Touch of Direct Mail

Martech and marketing automation, when implemented with the right best practices can ensure that both enterprise teams and smaller-mid-sized teams have the right tools to help support digital outreach and digital marketing at scale. But one of the biggest drawbacks of today’s always-on and heavy reliance on digital marketing channels is that, most brands are focusing on the same multi-channel outreach and engagement practices and it can become too much to digest for consumers and prospects of today. Direct mail is not a new concept in B2B and technology marketing. But for teams who have not considered it in the past, integrating a direct mail cadence into your digital marketing campaign is beneficial, given the above factors. Businesses who want to consider using direct mail marketing can also use direct mail technologies to optimize this part of their marketing campaign. Personalized gifts, usable-valuable gifts to help prospects with their remote work struggles, even a mousepad with a motivational quite for that matter can draw a prospect’s attention to your brand and give your marketing the attention it needs to help drive the prospect through the typical buying journey, leading to more conversions. Direct mail tactics do not have to be heavy on your marketing budget, based on the buying intent of prospects and the likelihood of them interacting with your service/products (based on intent signals for instance) can help marketing leaders use the factors to shortlist only those to whom it makes greater sense to take the effort to send a direct mail. 

“Content has been King” for a while, But it’s Effective Content Presentation That Matters Most

It’s safe to say that every successful company will have a marketing plan in place that ensures the regular updating of their blog, for starters. Over the years, other content marketing trends like using webinars and podcast to engage with the target audience are concepts that have picked up pace, making the podcasting and webcasting marketplace fairly crowded!

The secret now lies in not only following these norms to try and create a deeper brand presence and boost customer engagement, it lies in differentiating your content with better presentation tactics. While these regular content marketing tactics will be around for a while, let’s not forget that while podcasts, webcasts, webinars do garner listeners, to effectively measure how well these channels are run, it is also important for marketing leaders to track the listeners / readers and see how many convert into paid subscribers or clients, as the case may be. 

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Today’s content marketing tactics viz podcasting, webcasting take time and effort. With the right marketing technologies, it is easy to streamline bits of the process but the onus lies on the marketing team and host of these channels to speed up the number of episodes or shows they do while assessing how much the channel is growing or in what ways it is adding to boosting brand market share. 

Besides, this, revisiting how the team wants to display or showcase their media like podcasts, webcasts in a differentiated manner is key to ensuring the content stands out in a market where almost every brand is now doing the same thing. 

Creating a successful blog, podcast or webcast requires constant hard work and commitment, but with the right marketing goals in place, it is easier to ensure these channels start generating revenue for marketing on the whole. 

Creating Marketing Content that Adds Value, Understanding what the Prospect Wants

Value-add content can be defined as content that is unique and well researched and something that the audience might not easily find elsewhere. As reiterated above, in a crowded digital marketing world where blogs, informative websites, whitepapers, ebooks, podcasts and webinars are commonly available for users to find what information they want, marketing teams need to be smarter about what content they plan to post in addition to choosing the best format possible to drive value for the audience. The primary goal of any content should be to provide interesting updates or to add value to the readers / listeners. 

Adding value while also creating personalized content, using AI driven technologies to identify what the target audience would want to read more of, running surveys to ask prospects what they’d like to know more of are just some ways that marketers can streamline this. 

Creating better marketing impact and marketing effect using emails, sms messaging campaigns, being consistent and crisp with what you want to share with the audience can ensure more marketing ROI on the whole. Today’s marketing and customer communication channels are undergoing major shifts, and it’s time for marketers to get smarter and more creative in order to grab more attention.

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