Which marketing channels have grown in importance the most since Covid struck?
Webinars
57% of B2B tech marketers felt that webinars have increased in importance the most since Covid began
SEO
39% of B2B tech marketers felt that SEO has increased in importance the most since Covid began
32% of B2B tech marketers believe email marketing has grown in importance the most since Covid began
This was one of the questions we were most interested to see the data for. As events and conferences have been cancelled, field marketing budgets have either been put on hold or reallocated to other marketing channels – predominantly digital channels.
It’s fair to say that webinars might be a bit of an obvious answer given the impact of Covid, with nearly 60% of the marketers we surveyed saying they had increased in importance for them.
More interestingly, SEO seems to be the channel that lots of B2B tech marketers have been turning to.
From discussions with our members we know this to be true. Given the time SEO can take to build and start delivering ROI, lots of marketers wish they had started working on it many months ago. It’s interesting to see more B2B marketers realising that organic search can be a big driver of awareness, engagement and lead generation.
Aside from SEO the other channels that have increased in importance for B2B tech marketers are email marketing, LinkedIn ads, social media and PPC advertising.
“In line with the FINITE research report findings, we at Tide have also launched a series of webinars (our Small business Masterclasses). As all in-person events had to be cancelled and we still wanted to be there for our members and Small Business owners.
We also continued to invest in SEO as 39% of the survey respondents did. Personally, I think this is a very sensible approach given a number of reasons:
- SEO is one of the cheapest, most cost-effective marketing channels. If you don’t have the budget for any other marketing campaigns you can still utilise SEO to generate traffic/leads/sales at nearly no additional cost at all.
- SEO is a long-term effort and takes time from implementation to seeing results. The more competitive your industry is the more you need to put in an effort continuously. So stopping isn’t really an option.
- When everything stands still it is an opportunity to clean up old SEO-debt. While everyone is busy and campaigns are running more general non-campaign related tasks (such as updating your website’s CMS, cleaning up tech-debt, updating old content) tend to get pushed down the priority list as nice-to-haves/do-later. With things potentially being a bit quieter, now is the time to go through those lists and prepare for full speed again.”
Kerstin Reichert, SEO Digital Marketing Manager, Tide
