No, no, this doesn’t mean that you get a vaccine if you work in MarTech, sorry.

Like the rest of us, my anxiety and worry around well, everything, went through the roof and it was hard to stay focused in 2020. Really hard. It still is. It’s been one hard hit after another for everyone.

One of my goals in January 2020 was to simply write one blog per month and start sending out informative emails. As you probably guessed, that lasted through March 2020 and then I had to buy toilet paper and figure out what my own business was going to look like in the months ahead. All of my personal business goals truly went out the window.

I was 100% focused on my client’s needs. They needed it. How were they going to adapt? How were we going to manage the abrupt shift in the world?

What I wasn’t ready for was the influx of people who had never utilized marketing automation before. Businesses suddenly realized how vital it was and they needed to ramp up quickly. These newbies needed all the support they could get.

The biggest factors I noticed throughout the year were:

1. The resistance to marketing automation ended.
   The need was always there, but change is scary. What’s scarier though is not being able to keep your business going because of tech resistance. We were home and now we all depended on email and zoom (Good grief, Charlie Brown, all the zoom!). We needed visibility into what our prospects and customers were up to behind the scenes on our websites.It may have taken a pandemic, but businesses dove headfirst into marketing automation to maintain their relationships. Companies faced their fears and adapted. The vaccine works!
2. The message changed.
   Businesses were grasping at straws to figure out how to stay afloat all year long. However, they also had to be sensitive to what was going on in the world. Sure, the goal with email marketing is to build better relationships versus pitching a sale, but this past year was different.I noticed businesses trying to help one another and encourage their customers and partners to forge ahead. The selfishness around “the bottom line” seemed to fade, which only brought on more trust in their brand. It wasn’t all about making the sale, it was about making sure their prospects and customers were safe and felt comfortable to conduct business and make a living. The end result? More revenue for that bottom line.

Funny, caring about people’s well-being resulted in more trust and loyalty in a brand. Shouldn’t we be doing this all the time?? Deep thoughts…

Now more than ever, there is a greater need for automation and digital communication and it’s exciting to see everyone making it work for their business. The vaccine works!