“We had to quickly pivot and find other ways to not just drive pipeline and business but build awareness and engagement with our target audience.”

“We're transitioning all live-event spending to digital efforts and may even increase our digital marketing spending further…”

“We are producing content, webinars and more to help keep prospects and customers engaged..."

During a survey by B2B Marketing Zone and Webbiquity LLC 456 B2B marketing professionals were asked to describe the impact this pandemic is having on their marketing plans and these were some of their answers. As we can already see, the pandemic pushed most of the offline marketing activities into the online world really fastly.

58% of B2B marketers say they will cancel all live events scheduled in the next 60 days, and 80% plan to cancel at least some events over the next six months.

39% of them plan to reallocate event marketing dollars to other areas. The marketing activities most marketers plan to reallocate their budget for live events into, are...

• content creation (43%),
• online events (40%) and
• search advertising, for example Google etc. (33%),
• followed by Social Media and SEO.
  

By diving a bit deeper into the content creation topic, we can see a clear increase of video marketing. The Wyzowl Video Marketing Statistics 2021, where 813 unique respondents were surveyed, show that:

• 68% of consumers say the pandemic has impacted the amount of video content they’ve watched online, with the overwhelming majority (96%) saying this has increased.
• 91% of marketers feel video is more important for brands in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
• 24% of video marketers said they used video for the first time in 2020.
• 47% said video was made necessary by new challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic.
  

So despite everything the crisis has accelerated the digitization of brands enormously. Many of them have seen an unprecedented increase in their online sales during the lockdown. Even if this has not offset the losses in offline business during the lockdown, it is a strong indicator for the future development of business and marketing.

From Hubspot's research, it was found that corporate websites and their traffic and conversion rates are benefiting from the current situation. For example, according to Hubspot, traffic to the websites studied increased by 13% in March compared to February.

So it’s clear that people are online and the pandemic is causing significant disruption to plans for B2B marketers, because all of the marketing activities have to be transformed into the online world. 

If you’re also remodeling your marketing plan and want to create more Social Media Posts or Ads, just let us now. We are always happy to help!