With moderate optimism in 2021.

Trends in the current year greatly affect the predictions for the incoming year, and business investment decisions are closely related to business communication. Therefore, we have addressed these issues in our latest #DialogKnows survey, which will surely be of interest to all actors in the communications industry. The survey was conducted in the first half of November and involved 78 respondents.

In 2020. sales suffered the most

The coronavirus pandemic significantly affected most of the companies (59.7%), to a lesser extent affected approximately one third (29.9%), and 10.4% did not affect at all. All of the companies it affected, stated that impact was negative (100%). The biggest impact was reflected in sales results (60.3%). In almost a third of companies (28.2%) the biggest changes were felt in the structure of business, teams, products and services, and 11.5% of companies felt the impact of the corona crisis in marketing, ie communications.

Unfortunately, next year will be significantly worse than the current one in terms of marketing investments – half of the companies (50%) plan to reduce their budgets next year, slightly more than a third (39.7%) will invest equally, while only 10.3% plan to  invest more.

Of those who will invest less, 58.5% will reduce their budgets by 10-30%, while 41.5% of companies will reduce their budgets by 30-50%. Less investment will be made in ATL activities (57.9%) and public relations (42.1%).

Next year, digital investments will grow the most

A smaller number of companies that are planning to increase investment in communication will increase their budgets by 10-30% (71.4%), while the remaining 28.6% will increase their budgets by 30-50%. These desirable clients will increase their investments mostly in the segment of online advertising (92.7%), while others (7.3%) will invest more in social networks.

It is encouraging that the majority (55.1%) of companies expect that the next business year  will be better than the current one, while almost the same number of respondents expect that the next year will be worse or equal to 2020.

As the biggest challenge in the next year, the respondents mentioned sales (59%), and an equal number pointed out marketing and communication, ie employee motivation.

Most companies do not plan to lower the prices of their products or services (59.7%), and the fact that as many as 83.3% of them will launch a new product or service in 2021 is also encouraging. The vast majority of respondents (98.8%) believe that innovation will be very or moderately important for the success of their business in the coming period.

State aid for  businesses in 2021 is expected by 51.3% of respondents to a greater extent or in part, while 48.7% of respondents do not hope for such assistance.

Finally, unfortunately, as many as 41% of companies plan to lay off employees next year, 38.5% do not plan to do so, and 20.5% of respondents do not know whether their company will resort to this most unpopular measure in order to preserve business.