What Pandemic Poll Data Reveals About The Future of B2B Marketing

Forever altered by the pandemic, which new directions is B2B marketing going, and what’s in store for marketers in 2022 and beyond?

To help answer these questions and others, we’ve tapped into our poll data to see how the pandemic has affected how B2B marketers work, their outlook for the future, and what we’ve collectively lost and gained over the past year and a half.

Audience poll data offers a valuable gauge on the pulse of B2B marketers, and for over two years we’ve run weekly social media polls on our Twitter and LinkedIn* pages.

The insight you’ve shared with us during the pandemic gives us insight into what’s changed, what’s gone for good, and what may come back stronger than ever in B2B marketing.

We’ll use our own poll data to take a look at the B2B marketing trends that have emerged during this unprecedented year and a half.

Building on the insights we shared in “B2B Marketing Poll Sentiment: 15+ Eye-Opening Insights To Fuel Summer Success,” our most recent poll numbers paint a sometimes-surprising picture of B2B marketing sentiment in 2021.

Let’s jump right in and take a look.

Pandemic Poll #1 — Work Volume

The first pandemic related poll we conducted was on April 14, 2020, when we asked B2B marketers how the volume of work they’ve done with influencers had changed during the first few months of the global health crisis.

At that point relatively early in the pandemic, 36 percent of our respondents noted an increase in their use of influencers in marketing efforts.

Pandemic Poll #2 — Learning New Skills

A month later on May 12, 2020, our second pandemic-related poll asked B2B marketers whether they had used their time during quarantine to learn new marketing skills online.

A sizable 63 percent of respondents said that they had indeed learned new skills online while isolating.

Pandemic Poll #3 — Pain Points

As the pandemic moved into summer, on July 7, 2020 we were curious about the pain points B2B marketers were being faced with.

Decreasing business or budgets was the top concern, with 64 percent of our Twitter poll respondents saying that was their biggest pandemic pain point, a sentiment shared by 46.2 percent of our LinkedIn respondents.

Pandemic Poll #4 — The Rise of Virtual Events

As the summer wore on, virtual marketing event options began to appear as alternatives to long-standing in-person events, and on July 20 we wondered how many such events B2B marketers were planning to attend during the second half of 2020.

Most B2B marketers planned to attend between one and five virtual events before the end of 2020, with 11 percent noting they would attend between six and ten online events.