Mitchell Mackey
Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are. Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with ease. Their vision, leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.
Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles.
Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another.
In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

Paul Liddiatt
2020 has demonstrated that whatever challenges the world presents us with our business leaders will still expect their B2B marketing teams to perform. Throughout this year marketing and sales teams have had to rapidly respond to ensure they continue to meet the needs of their clients and prospects.
For some this meant the really hard decision to pull back from marketing while their target customers responded to the pandemic. While all marketing teams seem to have gone through a process to re-evaluate their solution offerings and make changes to ensure their products remained aligned to their market’s needs.
72% of respondents to this year’s survey indicated that they didn’t achieve their marketing objectives for the year. While 82% said they have a limited or no ability to communicate the Return on Marketing Investment to their business leaders. In stark contrast 83% expect next year’s marketing budgets to increase or remain the same. For how long can Marketing continue to rely on the good will of the business to fund their activities when the marketing teams do not deliver on their objectives or, at the very least, show a measurable return from the investment?
Surely, after the challenge of 2020, it is now mandatory for all B2B marketers to be accountable for their performance and demonstrate the value they add.

Lynda Cavalera
As the peak body for marketing professionals the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) aims to help fuel the careers of marketing professionals and advance the marketing profession. With that as our mission, the AMI is proud to partner again with Green Hat in bringing you this latest report researching the B2B marketing landscape in Australia.
Here are some of the key highlights that stood out to me:
- Over 90% of us were challenged due to the pandemic, with impacts to our budgets, our people and our activity. For many it’s escalated the importance of marketing in responding to changing customer needs and market and environmental conditions, especially in elevating our digital engagement with customers.
- 74% of respondents cited the focus in 2021 is on developing a strategic plan to recover from the pandemic.
- Growing and measuring brand awareness and health has increased in importance from previous years with 90% of respondents stating this as being somewhat significant or significant. The highest score we’ve seen here since we’ve done this report.
- With the many changes to marketing and the opportunities ahead, there is a recognition in needing to invest in our people and develop their skills across a number of key areas including performance measurement and analytics, lead generation and nurturing and digital events planning amongst many others. This is definitely a key space for the AMI to assist, and encourage you to find out more about how we are helping organisations meet this challenge.
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a key focus area for many of us marketers in the next year or so, with only 6% of respondents having a mature program.
- It was wonderful to see that 70% of respondents had the CMO role reporting into the CEO/MD. That’s a significant step forward in raising the credibility of marketing and ensuring we are strategic partners to the business.
There are so many great insights into the findings in this report. I hope you enjoy reading it and it helps you in your planning for 2021. All the best for the year ahead.

Emma Roborgh
For B2B marketers, the Pandemic year started off with decisions around cancelling, postponing or turning events virtual. We saw Salesforce and Forrester overnight moving their in-person events to virtual while others chose to postpone or cancel theirs only to launch into virtual much later in the year.
The ones that pivoted early gained the advantage of seeing their virtual forums and webinars sell-out with 10x the numbers of attendees their in-person events would get. Once everyone else had caught up on the digital-webinar bandwagon, the conversation moved to “How do I cut through the digital webinar clutter” and “How best to engage C-level executives virtually”. Here we saw creative virtual experiences such as whiskey tasting, celebrity chef, meet a rock-star (Keith Urban) and more. In short, B2B buyers loved catching up with peers sharing their Pandemic experiences and as long as the content is great – you’ll cut through.
My 2021 predictions: Corporations won’t give up their offices in favour for WFH – we can’t wait to get back into the office to see our teams again. With regards to events – again, we are social beings, and want to meet and learn in person. As for virtual Events and webinars – they will stay for sure, reaching much wider audiences and will complement our hybrid-in-person events.
