The pandemic is significantly changing the landscape for in-person conferences, congresses and trade shows. Most professional conference organizers are postponing their events to next year, with any paid registrants switched to the future event. In the meantime, we are all missing opportunities to meet with our customers and prospects.

In 2020, most B2B marketers had to switch gears and completely re-invent their marketing plans, shifting the focus to supporting their customers in a time of need and moving in-person initiatives to virtual. Now, almost a year into the pandemic, we’re realizing that a lot of the changes wrought by Covid may be more permanent, both from a marketing and a personal perspective. The experts at HubSpot have put together a report on the key trends that will shape marketing in 2021. It’s no surprise that most of them are driven by the pandemic, but the good news is that in 2021 marketing will be able to move on from the ‘panic pivot’ of last year to more thoughtful and strategic marketing approaches that reflect our changed world, and the altered needs of our audiences.

The concept of branding started with our ancestors "branding" cattle so they could easily pick their own animals from a larger herd. Today, a "brand" stands for much more than the mere identification of a product. With a good brand, you can create an emotional bond between your product and your customer.

In GDPR times, it’s more challenging to build mailing lists. These regulations stipulate, among other things, that contact persons must actively agree to be contacted. You can’t simply e-mail to purchased address lists, or to contact lists of professional associations. Yet email marketing remains a strong means of staying top-of-mind with your target audiences.

Today, many companies are engaged in sustainable production and business practices. In an ecologically-aware society, it’s important to give your branding a green boost. But how can you communicate about sustainability without resorting to clichés?

Hospitals are scaling up to more COVID-19 capacity at the expense of non-COVID-linked activities. Many clinicians will be forced to reschedule their activities from home in anticipation of the decline in Corona numbers. As a healthcare vendor, how do you learn to surf the waves of these (and coming) pandemics?

The Chinese consumer has an increasing amount of purchasing power, and is quite familiar with technology. In fact, in the first half of 2020, the volume of e-commerce exports to China increased by 24%. Many Western companies are looking at the potential of this market, and considering how to explore it through digital channels.

Healthcare changes faster and is more complex than almost any other industry, meaning that healthcare marketers face a unique set of challenges. But change management hasn’t typically been part of the healthcare marketer’s skillset. It’s the same for big data analytics expertise. Increasingly, however, these are emerging as two of the most important skills that a healthcare marketer can have.i

We all do it – we experience an ache or a pain, and we turn to Google to help us figure out what’s wrong, and what we should do about it. Health has been one of the most-searched topics since the very beginning of the internet. And it’s just another way that the internet has served as a disruptor – by offering unprecedented access and amounts of information, the internet has in many ways replaced the hard-to-reach G.P. or other healthcare provider.