5 Ways the Pandemic Has Forever Changed the Voices & Visions of B2B Marketing

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How has B2B marketing changed forever during the pandemic?

The voices and visions of B2B marketing have been forced to shift over the past few years, as have many of the goals and methods we strive for and use to connect with our current and potential customers.

Some of these changes are subtle while others are decidedly not, yet each brings with it both new opportunities for embracing the future of B2B marketing along with risks for those who don’t heed the call when the winds of digital change shift.

Let’s take a look at five of the most substantial changes in B2B marketing that the pandemic has driven, and explore new insights that can inform and inspire your efforts in the push towards 2022 and beyond.

1 — Remote Yet Closer B2B Relationships

The remote Zoom, Slack, phone and email communication we’ve all had to embrace over the course of the pandemic have surprisingly brought closer B2B relationships in many cases.

How being physically distanced from each other has actually brought us together in new and fascinating ways is a phenomenon that will likely be studied for years to come, yet successful B2B marketers have already embraced this shift and are doing everything they can to nurture our new world of remote business relationships in creative digital fashion.

The heart of online communication are the people at either end of the conversation. The particular tools they use come and go like the shifting seasons, and in my 37 years of online digital communication this fact has become more pronounced.

The way our communication tools today are generally able to work together seamlessly is a far cry from the days when I operated a 300-baud computer bulletin board system and each person had to take turns phoning in with their modem. Two formats carried over, however — email and chat — and both are still successfully used today by countless B2B marketers.

Relationships between brands and influential subject matter experts have also taken on new qualities since the pandemic began.

For Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs, a new variety of these opportunities has been arising.

“I think in B2B what we’re seeing, and this has been fueled by the pandemic, is that we are seeing those relationships start to happen between brands and influencers like me where they’re reaching out to me proactively and saying, ‘Hey, we don’t have a thing right now, but we want to work with you. Can we sort of get to know each other?’” Ann recently told our chief executive and co-founder Lee Odden in “Inside B2B Influence 14: Ann Handley of MarketingProfs on Content Marketing and Influence.”

[bctt tweet=”“Integrating influencer content is a direct line to building trust and customer confidence.” — Ann Handley @annhandley” username=”toprank”]