Hi Anushree,
I am so sorry for not responding to this sooner – I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave any of these questions unanswered, and my weekend got in the way. I hope you can forgive me!
Re SMB marketing priorities I think some of the changes have been pretty clear to me:
- Ditching budgets for in person events.
- Re-evaluating whether those budgets made sense in the first place – only time will tell. My opinion is that in person events will always be an effective channel and have been put on pause, but will perhaps change in focus.
- Adoption of Zoom / webinar software to do more online video – particularly for education to existing customers.
- Further push towards “Product Led Growth (PLG)” for SaaS business, because folks are forced to not have in person meetings, and a lot of traditional sales pipelines are far less predictable than before.
- A lot of people in SMBs – whether founders or marketing folks – no longer have a commute. I personally have seen this as a tremendous opportunity to look at how I spend my time, be more creative, and also more deliberate with where I spend my morning time.
I think “post COVID” is a long way away, and I think we will not return to “normal” – we will have seen a forced push into the future on a lot of marketing approaches.
Some stuff will be different, but the stuff that was good, that was genuine, is always timeless: building something people want, being authentic, obsessing over your customers, making something so great they tell others about, getting people to not just buy, but to LOVE your product.
Hope this helps, Anushree!