Marketing: the new trends that aren't new

CHAPTER TWO

A significant shift to digital
dominance in the marketing world

As we have seen, businesses are looking to evolve or overhaul the way they go to market.

The biggest change will be the growth of digital. In fact, the survey shows an enormous shift in market focus.

Although digital has been a growing trend in marketing for three decades, our survey showed that the median proportion of marketing done through digital channels was only 58%.

So, three-quarters of marketing activity is set to go online. In other words, digital will now dominate.

Marketers predict that within 12 months, digital marketing will climb to 75%.

Sales and marketing priorities over the next 12 months

Click the graphic to open and explore

To get a clearer picture, we asked which areas of sales and marketing our clients will prioritize.

Three rose to the top:

Content marketing
Social media
Virtual events

While virtual meetings are a direct consequence of remote work, content marketing, and social media have been on the rise for many years.

When these “new” priorities are taken alongside lead generation (4th) and thought leadership (5th), a pattern emerges. Clients are driven by the need to reverse sales slumps.

To do this, they are trying to increase demand, rebuild reputations, and demonstrate expertise through content.

And of course, social media is a potentially lower-cost way of disseminating company information, which likely explains why it is set to rise in importance in 2021.

The nuances: comparing B2B and B2C organizations

Social media is important for B2B companies, but even more so for B2C.

Content marketing is reversed – rated high by B2B marketers, but not so high for B2C.

Other high-ranking marketing functions align with B2B or B2C as outlined here.

Top B2C areas
Social media	65%
Customer databases/eCRM	61%
Marketing automation	55%
Web/mobile optimization	48%
Content marketing	45%

Top B2B areas
Virtual events	73%
Demand/lead gen	70%
Thought leadership	65%
Content marketing	63%
ABM	60%

If you tell a marketer that digital is on the rise, social media is growing in importance, and businesses are more interested in content marketing than ever before – they may suggest your insight is a statement of the obvious.

But the numbers demand attention. New marketing trends resulting from COVID-19 are not new at all, but indeed are an acceleration of patterns that marketers know well.