ARPR, a tech PR agency, released its 2nd annual data report in August 2020 — focused on where tech PR and digital marketing efforts were headed in 2021. The research, ARPR's 2nd Annual Tech Marketing Data Report: Marketing in a Post-COVID World, surveyed 100 tech marketers from enterprise brands, growth-stage companies, and startups.
Looking back, the report captured the inflection point. Five findings stand out as the early signals of structural change that the rest of the decade would prove out.
The Event Circuit Lost Half Its Audience — Permanently
More than half (56%) of respondents said they might opt out of the event circuit even if it returned in full force in 2021. That signal turned out to be permanent. The trade show industry never returned to its 2019 baseline. Hybrid events became the operating model. Digital-first audience cultivation replaced booth-based lead capture.
Digital Marketing Proved Its Value
An overwhelming 97% of tech marketers said they had been able to prove the value of digital marketing to executives during COVID. That was a major jump from previous benchmarks — the February 2020 CMO Survey had reported 21.2% of respondents couldn't use quantitative metrics to demonstrate marketing impact. The pandemic forced the measurement discipline that decades of marketing thought leadership had failed to.
Content Marketing Won
Tech marketers ranked content as the #1 area where they planned to increase investment. The reasoning was relational — content provided a partnership posture with prospects, not just a sales pitch. The companies that doubled down on content in 2020 built the citation authority they now leverage inside AI engines. The companies that didn't are still trying to catch up.
Reinvention Became Permanent
One respondent told ARPR: "What we've been accustomed to do as marketers, sort of on auto-pilot, will have to be reconsidered and reinvented." That statement aged remarkably well. The auto-pilot of 2019 — trade shows, generic press releases, broad-spectrum digital ads — never came back. Five years later, the auto-pilot of 2026 is being disrupted again by AI engines.
Why It Still Matters
The post-COVID tech marketing reset was the warm-up for the AI Communications reset. The marketers who learned in 2020 to measure rigorously, build content authority, and reinvent on a faster cadence are the same ones now figuring out citation share inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. The discipline transfers. The category-defining brands of the next decade will be the ones that take both shifts seriously.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
