New study reveals top investment priorities for marketers in 2021
According to HubSpot’s new report, marketers’ investment priorities for 2021 are focused on content, growth, and design. With a 47% increase in website traffic since COVID-19, content consumption is on the rise. This is also evidenced by the fact that 44% of marketers have witnessed an increased need for design assets.
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The survey conducted in partnership with Canva polled over 500 marketing leaders on their investment priorities for 2021.
What’s Driving Investments in Marketing, Content, and Design?
COVID -19 and the U.S. presidential elections compelled marketers to adapt their campaign to an increasingly volatile socio-political environment. The report found that moving forward, marketing leaders want to invest more in growth marketing, content marketing, and design.
While billboards, outdoor ads, and in-person events have taken a major hit, companies are investing heavily in content (visual and long-form) and thought leadership to drive traffic to their website.
Increased website traffic also means that marketing leaders are focusing their efforts on converting traffic into leads while maintaining traffic levels over time. Growth marketing is no longer a niche subject—it is a pillar of successful companies.
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In a year where the importance of human connection was felt by everyone, including marketers, channels like email, Facebook, Instagram, and blogs emerged as key focus areas. This fits into both content marketing and design investments— marketers are using design and content to connect their brand to their audience, with email, Facebook, and Instagram as the main channels for distributing that content. Design plays a huge role in all of these channels, allowing brands to stay adaptive, consistent, and recognizable for their audience.
What Does This Mean for Marketers?
Content marketing has been around for several years. But as consumer buying behavior changes, the marketplace in all industries becomes more crowded. Companies need to embrace the creation of rich content to stand them apart from their competitors. Setting up and scaling a consistent content marketing program should be a critical piece of your 2021 strategy.
Design plays a major role in your content strategy, allowing marketers to educate their target consumers through visual communications such as charts, graphs, frameworks, infographics, and more. It is also a major investment for marketing leaders in 2021, and for a good reason. 49% of businesses Venngage interviewed in their Visual Marketing Content Survey said visual content was “very important†to their strategy in 2020, and that number is growing.
The report also identified a few trends set to influence the marketing function as we head into 2021:
- Marketing leaders are struggling with remote team operations: 43% of respondents stated that their team workload has increased since COVID-19 hit, and 80% of leaders agree that I ha’s been difficult to motivate their teams and improve productivity. There is clearly more opportunity for growth, with 46% of marketing leaders responding that they have seen an increase in web traffic since COVID-19 broke out. Although that may be a positive element, this data shows a major predicament—there is more work to be done, but employees are having a hard time getting motivated to put it together.
- Investments in marketing technology are fostering collaboration: When implemented and maintained properly, marketing technology can improve team efficiencies and foster collaboration. Marketers must ensure that their tools are adding value to the business, are easy to use, and give the ability to collaborate across the organization. Misaligned tool usage could mean that teams have trouble working together, finding different assets, and feel like information is slipping through the cracks.
 Making sure that marketing software is integrated will impact on teams’ productivity, marketers’ ability to collaborate and bring the company closer to hitting its marketing goals. A tool audit will help marketers understand whether or not your software is hitting all the marks.
- Embracing marketing agility: The early months of COVID-19 saw some major slowing down in companies’ responsiveness. We were hit with a global pandemic and had to take some time to understand our new environment, where our audience was having issues, and how we might be suited to help. Businesses are being pressured to change and react. The survey answers highlighted this experience—63% of marketing leaders said COVID-19 has negatively impacted their teams’ productivity and responsiveness.
 This number is not unexpected. Teams had to take stock of their content, interview their audience about their newfound struggles, restructure their teams, and investigate their solutions for this new world. In the last eight months, businesses have been doing some soul searching, and we have found that today, 70% of marketing leaders agree that their marketing team can respond quickly to external pressures.
Pair this with other findings, though, and we are seeing that even though we are starting to bounce back, productivity is still an issue. The survey found that the biggest barriers to marketing team productivity include insufficient team resources (19%), team workload and burnout (17%), and constantly changing business strategies (11%) to respond to the global environment.
The survey is consistent—updating website content will be very important in 2021. We are experiencing constant changes on a global scale, and businesses will need to be able to respond quickly. It is critical that marketers’ content management system, or CMS, allows for easy updating with simple permissions and asset management for the organization.
Marketers cannot wait for developers to edit pages for them. Ensuring that their marketing software allows for easy editing across the organization, with permissions that make it simple, will improve agility. Marketers do not need to have a huge design team to create assets that work well for the brand and can easily be swapped into the CMS for use across the website.
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Conclusion
2020 was rocked by political, environmental, and health challenges globally. Businesses had to adapt to survive, with many organizations going remote, moving their business online, setting up ecommerce sites, and facing productivity and financial challenges. The HubSpot survey sheds some light on how businesses need ways to encourage their teams to come together organizationally and find ways to synchronize their content and design strategies. In 2021, more online growth and team alignment will emerge as a core metric of success.