It's safe to say that if 2020 has taught us anything, it's that predicting the year ahead can be a fruitless task! The 2020 plans of most European companies went awry by April of this year, and undoubtedly the majority of 2020 prediction articles became irrelevant around that time as well. Nonetheless, we will persevere with our annual tradition of predicting digital corporate communication trends with the hope that 2021 is more stable.Have we missed any communication trends? We would love to hear your thoughts on what lies ahead for your business in 2021. Get in touch!
Covid-19 will have a long-lasting impact on businesses and their stakeholders, and its effect will continue to be felt in 2021. With that context, we asked Comprend's experts to tell us what they think is coming next in the world of digital corporate communication. Their insights are based on close working relationships with our clients across Europe in a wide variety of industries, including technology, utilities, food and beverage, banks and financial services.
Internal communications
The dramatic increase in the number of employees working from home this year has made internal communications a priority like never before. I predict that the importance placed on this discipline will continue to grow next year, and internal communication teams will be valued as strategic advisors at the executive level. The fact that nothing internal is really internal these days accelerates this trend, as companies increasingly realise how vital it is to communicate the same messages to internal and external audiences.
Design
Inclusive design will become even more important in 2021. Accessible design has guidelines in place that empowers anyone with a disability to perform a task online, in a similar timeframe to someone without a disability. This has become the industry standard. Inclusive design focuses more on environmental changes that temporarily impact the user’s experience of an interface. Consider a commuter on a train watching a results announcement video without headphones. By adding subtitles to the video it might help not only with their experience, but other users may benefit too. Inclusivity recognises that exclusion can happen to anyone depending on content and inclusive design will focus on making products user-friendly for everyone.
Technology
There will be a continued trend towards more flexible infrastructure setups, where you can mix technology stacks and use lightweight decoupled implementations and cloud setups to full advantage. Due to Covid, good digital collaboration tools and automation are even more important than before so teams can work well even under the current restrictions.
Corporate reporting
A big area of discussion in 2021 will be what content should be presented in the annual report and what should go on the website. As digital reports become more common and PDFs are read on screen, I think companies will realise it's easier to link to online information and make the annual report more to the point and easier to produce.
Sustainability
Investors are getting serious about the importance of sustainability and specifically environmental issues. The need to communicate data on these issues is hugely important and companies need to put more focus on this. We have seen this in our own surveys with investors, and now also in Blackrock's sustainability survey. It's clear that poor quality or lack of availability of ESG data and analytics is a big challenge for investors.
Communication automation
We are beginning to see wider and cheaper availability of new functionality which is making communication automation more accessible to businesses. For example, relatively simple email marketing systems such as Mailchimp have recently added trigger automation functionality which allows you to build a series of personalised messages that are distributed in a timely manner based on user behaviour. We expect to see corporate communication teams take advantage of automation in 2021 to deliver more personalised content.
Social media
In 2020 we have seen a huge rise in event live streaming on social media. This is definitely something that will continue to rise in 2021. Companies will increasingly want to offer a more direct and personal approach to their stakeholders and will invite them for various different Q&As and discussion panels.