Propolis is a new community for B2B marketers to join, utilise and enjoy. Propolis brings together a wealth of expert talent to drive your vision through networking with peers, competency assessments, training and an ‘open-source library’ of practical tools. To find out more about our offerings, check it out here!
Barbara Stewart, CX Expert, Propolis
The overnight shift to digital-first in 2020 revealed many pain points across omnichannel sales and services. This disruption demonstrated a pressing need for organisations to invest in their customer experience strategies and programmes. 2021 will see organisations build on the work of 2020, attempting to pivot from being reactive to becoming proactive.
Empathy will take centre stage. Customers hate being treated like a ticket number, especially in these strange and isolating times. More than anything, they want to feel like a valued customer, with real thoughts and emotions.
Remote work and social distancing will drive CX trends. Organisations will expand self-service capabilities for customers and look to invest in future-proof digital solutions for both customers and (remote working) employees. Traffic management strategies will help to ensure that the most complex customer problems reach customer service representatives at speed.
CX metrics will focus on customer satisfaction. Long-form customer feedback is going to make a comeback, with a twist. Contact centres will start using more open-ended questions to deepen customer knowledge and gauge customer satisfaction.
Whole-journey redesign for customer trust. Even once the pandemic is over, customer concerns about health and safety will remain. A whole-journey approach will be critical. If one part of the journey fails the customer safety test, trust will be lost.
Kate Roe, Branding and Content Management Expert, Propolis
Last year’s pandemic and ongoing pandemonium has, I believe, accelerated some trends, from widespread video-conferencing from home to the proliferation of niche online B2B communities and a lot of soul searching for what a brand stands for. Here is my personal starter for 10on brand and content trends to look out for in 2021, and I invite the B2B Marketing community to enrich with their own, or let us know which ones they are prioritising, on Propolis.
What do you stand for? Gone are the days where ‘We are the leaders in [add industry segment or product type]’ cut the mustard. More than ever, people will buy from or work for companies who see beyond profit and want to make a difference. The good news is that most companies already have a nobler purpose in life than making money. It’s just a question of uncovering what that is and aligning it with the cause that your customers most align with. And, of course, be sincere about it.
B2B is dead. Long live H2H. Companies successfully relating on a human level will push above the faceless corporates. Put a face to your brand, embrace story-telling and show the human side of your business. Many more people are now used to video-based interactions, from Zoom events to user-generated podcasts. And showing emotion – along with the gate-crashing family member – is OK!
Better collaboration between marketing and sales. Finally! With Covid-19 forcing everything online and killing any chance to connect in person, commercial teams will come to rely much more heavily on content and insights delivered by the marketing folks to help them make connections. This will be good news for the customer if companies leverage data, content, frontline expertise and insight to serve the customer across all touchpoints. My hope is that the silos break down further and include customer service teams too.
Maria Cameron, Teams, Resourcing and I&D Expert, Propolis
Marketing teams will need to address market uncertainty in the next 12 months by re-imagining team working practices and processes to look for ways to become more adaptable. Teams will re-examine principles from agile to address cumbersome processes and allow the metabolism and versatility of the team to increase.
Addressing skills gaps especially around commercial acumen and strategic thinking will be key. Team leaders will look to develop strong analytical skills within their teams to be able to explore and evaluate new trends and recommend a way forward. With a greater focus on ROI, the expectation will be that people should be able to demonstrate a strong connection between their executional day-to-day activities and the growth of the business in revenue or profit terms.
Many teams will face changes to roles and structures as businesses look for ways to keep operations efficient and costs under control. In addition, anxiety over illness, isolation because of continued remote working, and juggling parenting and caring responsibilities will make employee wellbeing a top priority for any marketing leader in 2021. This year though, many more will embrace a more holistic approach to employee wellbeing, making sure that initiatives don’t stand alone from everyday business.
Those with budgetary pressures will look increasingly to work directly with specialists like video producers and copywriters rather than the full-service agency route. The principal driver will be budget savings even though this may introduce complexity internally to manage agency hand-offs and deliverables.
Robert Norum, Growth Expert, Propolis
My headline prediction for 2021 is that companies will be increasingly looking to connect all parts of their business in order to leverage the learnings and join the dots more effectively to improve overall marketing and sales performance.
In this context Account-Based Marketing (ABM) will be a game changer, by getting companies to think much more strategically, not only about their existing accounts but also about their prospects and partners.
This will have a knock-on effect on Demandgen, where ‘spray and pray’ marketing is now irrelevant, and businesses are now focussing their demand generation on a much more focussed set of prospects and understanding the needs of the customer before landing their messaging.
Traditional channel marketing will migrate to true partner-based marketing (PBM) where vendors will create highly tailored go-to-market messaging with their most important partners gives them a better chance of engaging their largest accounts and prospects in a 1+1=3 model.
Sales enablement will become sales and marketing alignment with both teams working together as a single team on a set of pre-defined accounts with shared objectives and KPIs – empowering the sales team with relevant insights, tailored propositions, and customer-centric messaging optimised for remote working.
B2B businesses will need to learn from the success of consumer e-commerce to optimise their online presence and to make buying as easy as possible for their customers in 2021 – either through usage based ‘X-as-a- Service’ models or online purchasing.
Shane Redding, Strategy and Evolution Expert, Propolis
B2B marketing strategies will come under even closer scrutiny now to ensure that lockdown learnings are embedded, agile approaches maintained and savvy businesses will be investing in accelerating their effectiveness and efficiency. To achieve greater efficiencies, I think we will see CMOs taking a hard look at the makeup of their teams and deciding what core skills they want in house and what to outsource. There will be a continued focus on removing ‘martech bloat’ and stopping paying for tech that is not being used, or failing to deliver ROI. Many B2B organisations who up until now have relied on traditional sales channels are looking at rapidly testing and deploying ecommerce. I predict that a first step towards a more hybrid sales model will be that the companies who will grow fastest will be those using ‘conversational marketing’ with live chat functions, as well as bots to accelerate their sales funnel.
Simon Daniels, Operations and Processes Expert, Propolis
It’s always with some trepidation that I approach the task of making predictions, especially given the events of the last year. That said, there are clearly some key themes that will be prevalent this year.
Among these, privacy maintains a leading position, as regulations modelled on, or inspired by, the EU’s GDPR continue to spread around the world. At the same time, enforcement of both new and existing rules will continue to be ever more stringent. All this on top of the on-going pressure on social networks to be more transparent and the phasing out of third-party cookies for tracking purposes.
Similarly, the importance of data for developing and maintaining insight and driving customer experience will remain a hot topic, especially in conjunction with customer data platforms. Still more talked about than actually adopted, their value and potential is being increasingly recognised, although I don’t see 2021 as a breakthrough year. In much the same way, artificial intelligence will continue to be built into everything, to greater or lesser effect.
The silent revolution that Marketing Operations leaders and practitioners should be grasping though is in work management. Very much an internally orientated technology, this is the real marketing automation (as opposed to automated marketing). MOPS should be pushing these platforms for managing workflow, collaboration and approvals, driving efficiency and effectiveness. The increasing complexity of multi-channel digital marketing, sheer number of moving parts and adoption of agile practices means that these platforms are going to be crucial for marketing’s on-going success.
Steve Kemish, Execution and Campaigns Expert, Propolis
It may be a strange thing to say, from somebody who has spent over two decades in digital marketing, but I think 2021 will be the year we ease off and revert back to more traditional marketing channels.
Or perhaps we will find the much-needed equilibrium? The global pandemic accelerated digital transformation like never before, but perhaps it has pushed adoption too far. Some of the staples of strong B2B marketing (and sales) will hopefully start to return into the mix – face to face events rather than solely webinars. Networking won’t exclusively be about your dexterous use of LinkedIn – it will allow for the formal and informal chats, coffee meet-ups and the spontaneous moments that in-person events and conferences offer.
Channels such as direct mail and telemarketing will make a return. Hopefully in moderation and as part of a carefully balanced marketing plan, but these stalwarts that Covid-19 scuppered are still great ways to get your message across and gain cut through.
Digital is here to stay and the positive of the pandemic in that sense is we have been forced to embrace digital and technology, even the more resistant of us. Balance is necessary though, so, as 2021 progresses and business centres back closer to the ‘old normal’, we should find that we now have a deeper toolkit, containing both traditional and digital tools, helping both sales and marketing be even more effective and relevant than before.
Tony Lamb , Data Strategy Intelligence and Insight Expert, Propolis
2020 was chaotic, but also transformational in many ways. Covid-19 rapidly moved consumers and businesses to digital channels with organisations adopting and scaling AI and analytics much faster than they previously thought possible. Data moved to the centre stage, if it wasn’t already there, because businesses needed it to provide new answers or ways of working.
Organisations have been gradually increasing the personalisation of communications and use of intent marketing, as it drives greater responses and ROI. One of the big stories of 2021 will be the impacts in availability of third-party browser cookies for advertising campaigns and user targeting.
By 2022, the major browser platforms will have banned the use of third-party cookies to increase internet privacy and security. For the background and implications of this, Brian Giese, CEO at True Influence discusses what it means for B2B companies in his January 2021 article. This market change is going to drive a lot of activity and innovation. Collecting and acting on as much first-party user data will be paramount. To effectively achieve this, you will need a data strategy to allow you to better understand and engage with your customers,which is a positive move forward.
