How Marketers Can Enter 2021: One Foot in the Past and an Eye on the Future
By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer
Marketers are entering 2021 with nearly a full year of COVID experience. The vaccine rollout is in full swing, and the Biden administration is predicting a “return to normalcy” sometime in Q4.
This is great news for everyone struggling with the uncertainty of the past year, but it also means that there are at least two full quarters left of marketing and sales budget that will need to be allocated with COVID restrictions on in-person gatherings and travel in mind.
The stakes and opportunities are high – global recovery forecasts for 2021 are optimistic across all industries, meaning customers from all vertical markets will be more comfortable investing in IT infrastructure. Tech marketers need to be ready.
They can prepare by using the lessons of 2020 to their advantage; especially the success of highly customized account-based marketing.
As 2020 dragged on, marketers discovered that prospects, customers and sales teams alike were increasingly disenchanted with virtual meetings, webinars, and other approximations of traditional relationship-building activities. Once a lifeline as other forms of marcom activities were cut, prospects’ time and attention for Zoom pitches, brown bag lunch sessions and fireside chats were dimmed by screen overload.
Our investigatory sessions with seasoned tech marketing leads discovered that the most successful marketers are focusing on highly-customized account-based marketing. They are reducing investment in webinars, Zoom sessions and other low-customized channels in favor of highly customized touches curated for the business needs and interests of each account prospect.
This can be microsites devoted to each prospect, updated with the latest white papers or industry-specific research and drilling down into the specific value prop your company brings to the customer. If you have monitoring or threat telemetry, it could be a mini-report of that prospect’s public-facing risk posture or security status. Or it might be a series of marcom assets with customer success stories that map to their unique sector and business needs.
How can marketers use account-based marketing to set their offering apart from that of the competition? And how can PR, AR and digital marketing help? We are ready to share some fresh thinking with you to solidify your business value to your customers in 2021 and beyond.
