Jeff Benanto for 2021 Marketing Predictions

Speakers: Jeff Benanto, Head of Customer Marketing, Logz.io

Jeff Benanto: So the biggest prediction for 2021 when it comes to digital marketing is: you're going to see more convergence between demand oriented digital marketing or general digital marketing initiatives and what's emerging as a customer marketing. Historically that they've been a little bit siloed. Customer marketing has been a bit more focused on driving an advocacy and evangelism from the base, but I think increasingly, savvy SaaS B2B marketers in particular, will look to the customer base as a group of users that needs those additional touchpoints not only to increase engagement and make sure that they're receiving, the right messaging and product positioning and make sure that they're aware of the broad community that's building around the product but also to help drive account expansion. You can't just rely on account managers and customer success managers to drive that crosssell and upsell. I think you'll see demand and digital marketers will look to the base, incorporate them in a lot of their programs and a lot of their campaigns, like ABM for example, so you can start to expose those customers to the same sort of ads and same messaging and the same nurture campaigns across different channels. You gotta do it in a more tactful way, but it can be done, and I think you're going to see more of it. And I think it's gonna go a long way to helping organizations usher more multi product growth, improve their net dollar attention and obviously reduce churn.

Jeff Benanto: Video will continue to be everywhere in 2021 for our organization and across B2B marketing, especially in SaaS. As we transition to a remote workforce in 2020 you saw the bar being slightly reduced for video communications. Not every organization every marketer had to create those consistently high quality videos. You could create more informal, more off the cuff videos using using things like Zoom and other and other tools. And it created more of an informal approach. Especially things like customer testimonial videos. You no longer have to rely on those sort of buttoned up formal case studies including a lot of b-roll. People are looking for more authentic, informal real conversations, whether it's from customer of software that you may be looking to purchase or whether it's from executives within an organization that you're looking to partner with, right. We use video extensively across all our channels, we pull off and executed two virtual events that were pre-recorded and highly reliant on video and we're going to do more of it in 2021. We're going to continue to focus more on the message, the conversation, on the relatability and a little bit less on the production quality. And we're going to try to continue to find different channels where video will make an impact, whether that's inside the application to our customer base or whether that's out there and in the broader echo chamber of of noise across social media and whatnot. So it will continue to be super relevant tactic across net new demand generation product, customer marketing and beyond.