5 Must Haves for A Digital-First Sales & Marketing Approach in 2022

Over the last two years, we’ve gone through a lot of changes both personally and professionally. As we head into 2022, and prepare for the new variant Omicron, companies have to adjust their go-to-market approach for a digital-first marketing and sales.  

COVID restrictions and lack of in person events, sales, and interactions required all companies pivot to the digital-first world. Consumer companies are great at this since 99% of their marketing mix is digital-first. However, only 8% of B2B companies rated their digital-first sales and marketing efforts as excellent in 2021. More improvements are still needed in order to excel with this approach. And if you don't know how, then just look at your favorite consumer company and see what it’s doing (i.e. investing in relevant and emotionally captivating messaging + stories, strong website that ties to a marketing automation or a customer data platform for real-time and behavior-triggered email campaigns, as well as top of investment in paid + organic social).   

Effective Marketing for Digital-First Sales in B2B

The role of sales representatives have evolved over the years—from prioritizing customer-facing obligations and in-person selling to a digitally focused approach that involves more collaboration with marketing groups. Sales and marketing teams must reach higher potential customers and speak to more people to succeed.

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Here are a few important ways to attract and engage with the right audience, and at the same time convert or retain your sales and marketing efforts through digital channels:

1. Entice audiences with an engagement hub

Now is the perfect time to develop always-on experiences that create lasting benefits for your prospects and customers and generate more leads and sales. In fact, more than 70% of decision-makers prefer remote interactions. When there is no option for face-to-face interaction, you need to find an enticing way to promote your products or services in a digital-first marketing motion. 

It is crucial to humanize content to keep buyers’ interest. 

1. Email is the most common and ROI favorable channel, generating $40 ROI per $1 invested. Companies leverage this channel for every type of behavior-triggered interaction from nurture campaigns, to shopping cart abandonment, to thought leadership, to customer advocacy and loyalty campaigns, to re-engagement campaigns to that closed lost pipeline from 2011 (Here is a guide with 5 tips to increase email engagement today with very minimal investment).
2. Videos offer an unmatched experience of learning and personality that simply written content can’t. As industries grow, make sure to create ways that can attract the attention of people and at the same time let them engage easily with what you offer. 
3. You may rely on an engagement hub for a detailed and creative marketing approach. This helps you create, manage, and publish all your upcoming, live, and on-demand webinars along with your multimedia assets and provide your audience with a single digital content platform.
   

2. Produce stand-out webinars

When the pandemic started in 2020, webinars were put into the spotlight. These played a crucial role in visions of a digital-first world since they are easy to stand up - a $20 Zoom link is all you need to create a landing page to promote your webinar, schedule it, send reminder emails to registrants as well as post-webinar emails to no-shows and attendees. The increase in webinars replaced face-to-face interactions and helped businesses engage with their diverse, global audiences. 

While it is true that the pandemic created limited sales and marketing options, this also led to discovering new ones that offer more advantages for different types of businesses. You can integrate pre-recorded content to lessen the pressure of presenting in a webinar and add more tools, such as discussion boards, Q&A, and group chats to focus on audience engagement.

3. Create personalized experiences

Since many companies now turn to digital experiences, personalization is equally significant to reach and engage customers. Create personalized content experiences to help you produce the best content, accelerate buyer journeys, and achieve real-time campaign insights. Through this, you can easily make content that targets unique industries, individual accounts, and buyer’s stages. 

With the help of personalized experiences, you provide an accessible and comprehensive online venue for your audience. This virtual setting presents no barriers to interaction among attendees as well as lets them ask more questions than they would have during live events. More so, this transforms a limited face-to-face event into a virtual experience that can reach a larger, global audience. The leap towards a digital-first future is absolutely worth it.

B2B Marketing Platforms for Effective Marketing in a Digital-First World

Marketing to businesses is way different from marketing to an individual consumer. There are a lot of things to work on before developing an effective marketing strategy. It takes time, effort, creative minds, resourcefulness, channel decisions, and budget to come up with a proper B2B marketing plan. Nevertheless, various platforms help every marketer to achieve effective marketing in a digital-first world.

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To get your B2B marketing strategy off the ground, follow these simple tips below:

1. Build a great website

Often overlooked, your website is the first place where prospects, customers, investors and your community see and interact with your brand (here is a quickie on Top 10 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid). Therefore, it should make a good impression. A website needs to look good, be functional and easy to navigate, and provide relevant, high-quality information. However, it is never easy to build a great website. If you need help creating your own, you can count on Webflow, Squarespace, and the like. These offer quality services to build and launch your website.

2. Run B2B marketing campaigns

With the right marketing campaign, you can get your message across to your target audience easily. Moreover, you can drive traffic, awareness, and lead to your business. This covers knowing and reaching your audience, creating useful content to be posted on your website and social media accounts for SEO purposes, nailing the design, nurturing and communicating with your leads, and tracking the overall campaign. Through this B2B campaign, you can improve your organic search rankings as well as build a rapport with your prospects and partners.

3. Use various marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation platforms, like Hubspot and Pardot, automate and allow you to send emails at scale to the right segmented audience at the right time. These platforms recently expanded their capabilities beyond email marketing and into automating social media posts, ABM marketing and even integrating with ad campaigns (having trouble choosing? Read this quick article on how to think about your martech stack). Not only is it very efficient, but it provides a personalized experience for your audiences. 

More B2B brands have recognized the value of digital sales and marketing over the years. With an effective marketing strategy, you can bring success to your business. So, are you ready to embrace the digital-first world? And if not then schedule a free consultation and we can help you out.