During these unprecedented times, it may make sense to change the course of your digital marketing strategy. After all, prospects are shifting priorities as they cope with uncertainty and work remotely from home. The good news? Everyone’s online.
Many companies that allocated marketing spend on live events are now doubling down on digital marketing. According to a survey conducted by B2B Marketing Zone and Webbiquity LLC, 39% of marketers expect to reallocate event marketing dollars to the digital realm, spending on areas such as content creation, online events, search marketing, and website engagement.
There’s been a lot of change in a short time. But B2B companies are rising to the challenge. We’ve seen many companies nimbly adapt their digital marketing strategies so they can continue to build pipeline and support their customers.
Here are a few examples of how companies are effectively adapting their digital marketing efforts to connect with customers and prospects right now.
A lot of time and effort goes into a live event, so it’s disappointing when these can’t come to fruition. Rather than give up on events entirely, consider going fully remote.
SaaStr’s conference is a huge event that brings together leaders from companies like Zendesk, Twilio, Atlassian, Slack, Salesforce, and many more. This year’s conference was originally scheduled for late March in San Jose, CA, but was canceled due to COVID-19.
Rather than throw in the towel, SaaStr held a fully remote summit on April 22. Not only did this provide an opportunity for attendees to learn from some of the best minds in SaaS, but it was also extremely well-attended. SaaStr reported that 16,000 individuals tuned in. Many of the speakers talked directly about the ongoing crisis, as well.
If you had your heart set on a live event, don’t give up. You can still bring together your community virtually.
Are there any new products or features you can offer that would be particularly helpful to your customers right now?
Salesforce introduced Work.com, a suite of apps to help companies manage the crisis. Work.com is set to help businesses reopen safely with a suite of apps, services, and expertise as a guide.
Similarly, Dropbox rolled out a number of updates to help their customers collaborate while working remotely. These updates included features like saving Zoom meetings, new people pages, and locking shared files.
Offering product and feature updates provides customers with what they need, ensures that you’re relevant, and keeps you top-of-mind.
SBA Funding helps package and place loans for small, independent businesses. When the Payment Protection Program (PPP) was rolled out in early April, a loan designed to incentivize businesses to keep their workers on payroll, SBA Funding needed a quick and efficient way to answer customer questions. They shifted their Conversational Marketing strategy on their website; they went beyond their standard welcome greeting and invited visitors to connect instantly with their team about PPP. During this time, their volume of website conversations spiked by 6X, proving the value of this tailored PPP messaging.
Now’s the time to double down on your website experience. Conversational Marketing opens the door for instant conversations with your customers and prospects, right on your site. Use this channel right now to stay connected to your customers and maintain momentum in your pipeline.
Many companies are creating valuable content that can help their prospects and customers not just survive, but thrive during this time. If you can identify what your audience is hungry to know, then supply that information, you’ll gain a lot of trust.
Samsara has created blog content specifically for fleet management during COVID-19, Asana compiled their best remote working resources and emailed them to customers, and BetterUp hosted a series of live shows with inspirational speakers.
All of this content is different– targeted directly to each company’s prospects and customers– but it all has the same aim of providing genuinely helpful information during a time of uncertainty.
There’s always an opportunity to help! Content marketing allows you to provide resources to prospects in their time of need.
RollWorks’ sales and marketing teams delivered highly personalized 1:1 emails and phone calls driving traffic to a timely ebook called Marketing Plan B: 8 Tactics to Build Demand in a Down Economy.
The sales team at RollWorks sent personalized messages to prospects, acknowledging the amount of COVID-19 messages in their inbox, and offering a potential answer (in the form of an ebook) to some of their questions. The emails were personalized and came from individual sales reps. Here's a snippet of their outbound email messaging:
...B2B marketers are hungry to figure out their marketing plan B. And we all know that plan B needs to be specific, quick to execute, and differentiated. So our team created Marketing Plan B: 8 Tactics to Build Demand in a Down Economy. This guide may not be the answer, but it is an answer. In this quick read, we share 8 specific tactics (plus some no-cost growth hacks) to adjust to and maybe even thrive in this new normal.
You don’t have to pause your sales efforts right now. Rather, make sure they’re tailored to what your prospects are going through.
It can be tough to adapt, especially when there was a marketing plan in place for the year. However, adapting to the current moment by offering new products, providing support, and creating new resources will help you gain trust from your prospects and customers.
In creating this post, we found many examples of B2B companies that have shifted their digital marketing strategies to be as relevant as possible for the present moment. If you’re looking to double-down on your website and have more conversations with your prospects and customers right now, Conversational Marketing is worth exploring.
Discover how we can help you convert more prospects into pipeline–right from your website.
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