Ain’t nothin’ gonna slow a marketer down, oh no…

This darned pandemic has been a real gut punch for businesses that market directly to consumers.

Shops are shut, customers are stuck in their homes, supply chains have been disrupted — the chaos has been coming from every direction.

But you know who hasn’t broken their stride? Marketers.

Earlier this month the Content Marketing Institute released its Benchmarks Budgets and Trends report for B2C content marketing for 2021. The data within it, naturally, was gathered last year — and the questions were tweaked to find out how the industry had responded to the pandemic.

Here’s what stood out to me:

• 82% of respondents agreed their organisation had quickly changed their content marketing in response to coronavirus
• 80% said the changes to content marketing activities had been effective
• 63% said they changed their targeting/messaging strategy
• 46% changed their distribution/promotion strategy
• 50% did it all on the same budget
• 17% did it on a smaller budget.

As I read through the report and saw this data, an absolute banger of a song popped into my head. You’ll know it, if you’re of any kind of vintage. It’s by Matthew Wilder, who was a bit of a one-hit wonder in the early 80s. It goes:

Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride,
Nobody gonna slow me down, oh no
I got to keep on movin’.

When the history books are written about how the world coped with Covid-19, there’s unlikely to be a chapter dedicated to the marketers — no matter how hard, fast and smart everyone worked. But these figures show marketers definitely deserve a round of applause for keeping the show on the road.

But what kind of content were we creating?

I realise I’ve just infected you with an absolute belter of an earworm, but before you head off to YouTube or Spotify to get it out of your system, spare a minute to look at the kinds of content we were all creating last year:

• 83% created blog posts and short articles
• 74% used email newsletters
• 29% produced ebooks and guides
• 24% created case studies
• 22% produced long-form text (e.g., 3000+ word articles).

Unsurprisingly, in-person events were down last year and live streaming and virtual events were up. Which shows we didn’t just keep on movin’; we adapted.

The pandemic might have been a gut punch for business, but marketers didn’t break their stride.

Dan Hatch
16 February 2021

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