How will tech businesses market themselves in 2021?

2020 was a challenging year in all aspects, but for most B2B companies it meant that their most important sources of new leads vanished altogether: networking events.

As a result, 2020 was the year of digital-only marketing campaigns and the year of virtual selling.

It was, at the same time, a good year for learning, testing, and adapting. We saw an increase in the volume of educational content, webinars almost became the norm and some tactics that used to work, declined.

At the end of 2020, here ar STOICA.Co we wanted to understand how technology businesses are approaching 2021, what tactics they will be focusing on, what channels they will invest in as well as how their marketing toolkit looks like. We discussed with 6 marketing experts working with dynamic tech companies in Belgium, in trying to grasp how they see this year unfolding and what opportunities they have their money on.

We are grateful to have had the opportunity to pick their brains and we would like to thank them for sharing their thoughts:

• Alexandra Mogin, Marketing Manager at TenForce
• Isabelle Hanet, Growth hacker marketer at Deliverect
• Karina Kovalenko, Marketing Manager at Geckomatics
• Mieke Houbrechts, Marketing Manager at Cumul.io
• Nicu Enache, ACIM, Digital Marketing Consultant
• Tanguy Verbelen, Growth Marketer at StoryChief

What we learned from 2020

We conducted a similar study in August 2020, this time speaking to tech companies in Romania such as UiPath, DRUID, FintechOS or SmartBill.

The most important learnings were:

• Listen to your customers and create solutions for their current needs: as times change, so do the needs of your customers. Whether they need an immediate solution or up to date content — you can best serve them when you truly listen.
• Content is (still) king: it’s an important tool to win trust, build a good reputation and attract customers. But that content has to provide immediate value, teach your audience how to do things — not just tell them what to do — and be specific.
• Alignment between marketing and sales ensures everyone is pursuing the same ideal customers: both the people in charge of demand generation as well as the people in charge of closing deals.
• Social Media, SEO, the company’s blog, and email marketing remain powerful communication channels.
• Account-Based Marketing, Inbound, Content Marketing and Influencer Marketing are the top tactics that the digital experts we consulted will continue to invest on.

How are tech companies in Belgium adapting in 2021?

Digital marketing tactics that will pay off in 2021

The top recommendations that our contributors shared:

• It is safe to say that an inbound-oriented strategy will pay off: addressing customers at all decision stages with relevant information, being there to offer support and nurturing the relationship even after the purchase.
• Creating personalized, high-quality content that shows a company’s involvement, attention and focus on their target audiences, educational content and taking all of this a step further and building flows, communities and nurturing leads — this is one of the winning bets for marketers.
• Collaboration in creating and sharing content is a practice that we’re seeing more and more: it can help you create better, more informed content and reach more people with it.
• Growth experiment as a means to test different hypotheses and learn what works. In 2021, it’s time to become agile.
• Email marketing, SEO, Account Based Marketing and marketing automation are also tactics that marketers can put their trust on.

Tactics to abandon in 2021

Some of the main tactics to consider abandoning this year:

• Offline tactics will be on decline in 2021:offline events and conferences. Also print as a medium will be ineffective, considering the accelerated move in the online space.
• Producing generic content that waste your audience’s time is a bad investment.
• Banners/display ads will probably be less and less effective in 2021, especially if you’re tracking their performance as an individual channel.
• Sales pitches dressed in webinars, people have gotten enough of them last year and we need to make webinars useful again.

Digital channels to focus on in 2021

• The blog is the top communication channel for the experts we consulted. And this is no surprise, given the focus on content and marketing stated. The emphasis is on optimizing that content for search engines, to help with both organic visibility and give value to readers.
• Email marketing remains a great communication channel to nurture and develop a relationship with leads.
• SEO is top of mind as well for the express we consulted. Marketers need to pay attention to optimize their content and produce the right type of content. At the same time, with the announced Google May 2021 update, marketers need to pay even more attention to page experience: factors such as loading performance, interactivity and visual stability will count as ranking factors.
• Social media continues to be critical, as a channel to engage in meaningful conversations with our target audiences. LinkedIn is however seen as an untapped opportunity: there are still not that many companies posting regularly and communicating in an authentic way. The platform has been adding new advertising formats and improved the targeting capabilities, so marketers have a lot to experiment with when it comes to LinkedIn.

In closing, the marketing experts we consulted emphasized the fact that there is no silver bullet in marketing: what works for a company may not work for another. The solution is to create experiments, test, learn and adapt.

If you want to read the entire material, you can find it in our blog.