In the wake of the pandemic and its adverse effects on businesses; marketers are re-strategizing their marketing plans. We are all witnessing a paradigm shift in the way business is being carried out today. Some of us have reconfigured our business strategies to get more leads, more customers and thus more business. And amid these changes, B2B Demand Generation techniques are proving to be most helpful in combating several business challenges.
The biggest challenge in B2B marketing is getting enough and quality leads. For any B2B Sales and marketing professional, who may be fire-fighting the crisis situation at present; getting a lead is also a challenge. However; if one changes the perspective and optimizes demand generation strategies, it can change the status of one’s B2B business.
Here are some techniques or trends observed in the B2B Demand Generation realm that can help you turn around your B2B business. These trends aren’t tools or statistics; these are some strategies that can turn in your favour in the given situation.
After all, it is all about beating the competitors and thriving even amid these challenging and uncertain times.
Table of Contents
Focus on Intent:
Your customers aren’t in the same place as they were before. Naturally, a change in their purchase behavior, patterns, buying choices and even their brand preferences is expected. This is urging B2B marketers to refocus their efforts when it comes to analyzing and offering services differently to different customers. This is the time to optimize the power of your Intent Data that can help you understand the changed behavioral patterns of your customers in the customer journey.
The data acquired from Intent resources can help you know who is active and what your customer expects from you right now. Intent data can help you get a clear picture of where your audience is at present, who is inactive, who is spiking and much more. If you know the right questions, Intent data has the right answers for you. This will allow you to focus in the right direction in this “new normal” as they say.
Optimize Social media:
Be it LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram; whichever channel has favored your business and business objectives; social media shouldn’t always be your focus when it comes to a lead-converting machine. But you can make sure to divert all those curious prospects from social media onto your website as much as possible, where their more likely to convert. And for that to happen it is important to have an excellent call-to-action (CTA) or CTAs that can navigate your customers to your website. Social media can help you have an online presence; however if there isn’t appropriate and enough action oriented CTAs you might lose a potential prospect. This is like having intelligence which is not actionable. So it is the time to also refurbish your social media strategy to gain more leads.
Rethink messaging:
This is no time to be aggressive. This is the time when your demand generation campaigns are all about the way you say things to your customers. Your marketing and messaging needs to change during times like these. There isn’t a better time to integrate empathy into your messaging and personalize it to the fullest extent possible. It is best to go slow rather than lose your chances with potential prospects due to the wrong style of content. Give out less but with more thought and caution. Above all, create personalized and focused messaging for all the customers that you have prioritized. It is very important to focus on what would work most at this time rather than shifting your focus on less probable areas. In doing so you can hike up the chances of converting the most potential leads into customers. Nurturing your existing customers who have consistently engaged with you is also very important and it will only bring more business to you. Also make sure you pay attention to your most engaged customers over your least engaged customers in these times of uncertainty.
Short term planning:
Instead of creating long term marketing plans, it would be wise to use short-term marketing plans that work for now. Make your B2B demand generation all about relevance and short-term planning and nurturing for now. This isn’t the time for long-term strategic planning because you may have to go back to the drawing board and redo some of it later. Hence it’s best to resort to short term goals and planning that can be achieved successfully instead.
The current crisis has changed the world and the way people are doing business. The new-normal is all about adaptability and making it work with new strategies, giving a new direction to the B2B market. Demand Generation is in demand as it gives you the flexibility, the agility to strategize, to nurture and to win customers. All it takes to thrive is to reconfigure your existing strategies and fine-tune your plans aligning them with the present trends in the market and the customer journey too!
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