• by Ray Schultz , November 12, 2020

B2B marketers are falling apart from the stress of COVID-19 and its ongoing impact, according to Revealing What’s Fact And What’s Fiction, a study by RollWorks.

Of the marketers surveyed, 50% have suffered from pandemic-related burnout, And 50% say the lines between work and personal life have become more blurred in a negative way.

Only 22% say these lines are now blurred in a positive way, and 34% find it a struggle to come up with creative ideas.

There are several impacts on marketing. For one, while 32% report higher registrations virtual events, they say this is accompanied by arise in no-shows. 

Moreover, the pandemic is “highlighting simmering anxieties while elevating long bemoaned resource challenges like time, money and people,” states Randi Barshack, CMO of RollWorks.

Adoption of account-based marketing (ABM) also appears to be slowing down, although this seems to be driven more by an inability to define the discipline than by COVID-19 -- 60% have trouble coming up with a definition. 

Of the firms polled, 48% are engaged in ABM, 14% are not but plan to, 19% are not and 14% were involved it but stopped. Another 9% are not sure. 

Email ranks high as a channel used as part of ABM programs. Here is the list: 

• Digital advertising—68%
• Mass email—50%
• Virtual events (including virtual roundtables, webinars, etc.)—50%
• Segmented email—44%
• Direct mail—41%
• In-person events (when allowed—41%
• High-end and/or personalized gifting—33% 
• Custom landing pages—32%

 Of the professionals surveyed, 55% are in marketing, 22% in sales, 14% in operations, 8% in executive leadership and 1% in other.