B2B Marketers, take the offensive as Covid-19 causing a surge in audience attention.

While in many countries the physical streets are becoming deserted, the information highways are overwhelmed. As more and more of the world is keeping indoors, online activity, as the main connection with the outside world, is reaching unprecedented heights.  Verizon reports more than 20% week over week increase in web traffic volumes (source).  How is this affecting B2B marketers, as well as digital and content marketing in general?

In B2B companies, marketing organizations can and should respond quickly to changes in the environment.  We took a closer look at how b2b marketers are responding to those tectonic shifts in users’ behavior. Which activities are we seeing some companies doubling down on and why are they doing it?

How is COVID-19 affecting Marketing budgets and allocations?

A recent survey done by Viola Capital (link) asked over 62 marketing executives from mostly B2B companies how COVID-19 is affecting their plans for 2020. As offline activities are halted, one impact is that marketers are doubling down on their social and content infrastructures.

Where are you shifting your budgets nowadays?

It also appears that most companies are focused on increasing the top of the funnel and helping with retention and expansion efforts as opposed to helping secure new deals.

With events and conferences being canceled where did you move your budgets?

How COVID-19 is affecting people’s attention and consumption profiles?

Besides the fact that certain activities, like conferences, are no longer relevant, that still doesn’t answer the question of why invest more on your top-of-funnel. One possible answer that we may offer which is also supported by the content consumption data we see, is that due to COVID-19 people’s attention has grown. People are spending more time online, more time reading content and consuming information. One indicator for this trend is that people are consuming more B2B content on desktops than on mobile devices:

In certain industries, like Cyber security, we are seeing a spike in web conversions that were affected by content in the past month:

Key Takeaways – How should B2B marketers ride these tidal waves?

Among many of our customers, we see a clear shift towards upper funnel as well as retention efforts. I also know from personal experience that only after being forced to stop travelling, conferencing and chasing near-term immediate KPIs, I actually found the time to get back to creating and reading online content. 

Here are some takeaways from what we can see, looking across a wide range of B2B marketers and content marketing professionals that use TrenDemon:

1. Invest in marketing infrastructures (aka, pay your marketing debts) – Marketers have been struggling to capture their audience’s attention. Now is the perfect time to invest in your audience building and attention capturing infrastructures.  We are seeing more people subscribe to blogs, engage with online content and begin their journeys. This is a good opportunity to make sure your marketing pipes are flowing well and marketing analytics platforms are set up properly. 
2. Move to Capture Attention – In our scarce attention economy, it would seem that more “supply” is opening up. Although intent for adopting new solutions may be lower (as most companies are still on the defensive side), what we can already see from the data is that as online attention is growing so marketing teams that are quick to move, can capitalize on this opportunity. In other words, this is the perfect time to grow your top of funnel so that when the world will be resuming the normal order of business, you can have a  leg up.  
3. Create longer form content – Users on B2B websites are consuming more content via desktop computers. This could be a good time to invest in longer term, textual formats and deeper dives.   
4. Nothing Measured, Nothing Gained – Doing all of the above without clear baselines and benchmarks will pose a real challenge when trying to prove the impact of those efforts. Make sure you have a clear, systematic approach for measuring your top-of-funnel efforts. Use TrenDemon for content marketing analytics, or use any other marketing measurement solution for that matter. Just don’t charge into the fray blindfolded. 

In the longer term, COVID-19 may accelerate many organizations’ digital transformation efforts. Many will need to reinvent the ways they are communicating with their audiences. We are experiencing a time of rapid global change. Many of the consequences of recent months events are still unknown. But as any event of major change, like the introduction of the internet, or other disruptive technologies, the companies that survived were the ones that could adapt the new circumstances. There are also those that found a way to thrive. These were the ones that managed to also leverage those changes, even if that meant they needed to reinvent some parts of their company. 

Stay safe and healthy folks.

About TrenDemon

If you are wondering whether there could be an easier way to prove how your top-of-funnel marketing efforts are impacting bottom-line objectives like sales and revenue, take a look at what we’ve built. Over the past 5 years we’ve been working with over 130 marketing organizations, large and small, all struggling with the same challenge so we may be able to help your organization as well. If you’d like to learn more about content marketing analytics and attribution, and how to improve the impact of content on business outcomes, feel free to reach out and schedule a live demo , start our 3-month POC or learn more about our offering here. 

Prove and Improve Content’s impact with TrenDemon in 5 simples steps:

1) Schedule a 20 minute intro call via the Request Demo button at the top, learn more and see if there’s a click.
2) Start a 3-month trial to see why our customers love us.
3) Get help from our Customer Success team to get set up and define clear goals for the trial.
4) We monitor the actual uplift in business KPIs and share it via bi-weekly reports.
5) Continue together into the sunset with an annual contract.

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