2020 started with an unprecedented chain of events causing a drastic shift in consumer behaviors.
While digital has become a new reality, B2C (Business-to-Customer) and B2B (Business-to-Business) have suddenly evolved into B2P (Business-to-People) – addressing the fact that the prospect on the other end is a human.
Amidst the unforeseen challenges and volatile market, the safest bet is being human-centric in all your marketing and sales efforts.
In this article, we will discuss the best enterprise marketing strategies to help you find more leads and close more deals.
But first, let us look at what has changed due to the pandemic.
How has the pandemic affected enterprise marketing?
The industries that have been severely impacted by the pandemic include travel, transportation, construction, manufacturing, real estate, and advertising. On the other hand, media, finance, food, and healthcare sectors have reported positive growth.
Even after the lockdown ended, about 70-80% of B2B buyers and sellers prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over in-person interactions.
The fact is – self-serve portals have added speed and convenience for both buyers and sellers. Thus, digital marketing has become a direct route to sales.
The anticipated enterprise marketing challenges in 2024
The nurturing stage in enterprise sales involves constant communication and knowledge sharing via e-books, whitepapers, webinars, case studies, and more. In terms of enterprise marketing, evolving trends are digitally-enabled strategies. Marketers are focusing more on live streaming of expert sessions, interactive product demos, and virtual meet-ups.
Content challenges
Digital content consumption is on the rise, and customers are struggling in the deluge of information. A study conducted by DoubleVerify across Germany, France, Spain, the UK, and the US reveals that the average duration of online content consumption has almost doubled (7 hours daily) since the onset of the pandemic.
To satisfy the demand for new and innovative content, marketers struggle to produce a large volume of quality content in a comparatively short duration.
Advertising challenges
Enterprise marketers realize that both PPC campaigns and organic search are essential for short-term and long-term gains. While PPC brings in immediate ROI, it is expensive as compared to organic inbound strategies. In 2022, 44% of consumers tried new brands after seeing a relevant ad.
The rising competition with the new players in the market and their competitive offering at lower pricing is diluting the revenues. Moreover, apart from the messaging, consumers are also considering where did they see the ad. For instance, 55% of consumers are less likely to purchase from a brand that is advertised alongside fake news.
Digital marketing challenges
Apart from the above challenges, sales and marketing teams face additional pressure in nurturing the leads they drive from their digital marketing campaigns.
Because of the longer sales cycle, sales and marketing teams may lose track of the active lead and eventually miss the opportunity. Moreover, omnichannel communication is rapidly evolving. So, there is more than one communication channel that the sales rep needs to be in-sync with for all customer communications. The companies that don’t have a marketing automation system in place have a threat of losing the interest of their customers.
Enterprise Marketing in 2024: Best Practices for Lead Generation and Marketing Campaigns
Enterprises have a very high lifetime value. Once they recognize your services, cross-selling and upselling become easier. Getting the foot in the door is the primary challenge.
The foremost thing you can do to deliver better experiences to your buyers is to align your internal processes. Here are the crucial things to keep in mind.
- Make sure your sales and marketing teams are in sync.
- Invest in marketing automation tools to automate lead capture through many sources.
- Use CRM software to keep a tab on the activities of your enterprise lead and nurture it from time to time.
- Use workflow automation to trigger emails, reminder notifications, and activity alert to identify the best time for correspondence.
- Train your teams and audit their performance from time to time.
Employees waste about 15% of their work total time in finding information. Businesses having over 500 employees could be losing about $5 million per year due to inefficient communication systems.
You can overcome the communication challenges with collaboration tools like CRM software.
5 Enterprise marketing campaigns that tend to bring better ROI in 2024
The way people interact with digital media is changing rapidly. Until last year people were betting high on the video content, and suddenly voice interfaces came into the picture.
Adobe’s survey of the US consumers reveals that 46% of respondents use voice search for checking the news and 35% for research/confirming information.
Thus making your campaigns interactive and adaptable to trends will give your marketing a boost. In terms of generating leads, the following strategies are going to bring results.
Webinar: leveraging digital marketing to boost customer acquisition and engagement
#1 Webinars
73% of B2B marketers say that webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads.
On average, a B2B webinar brings about 260 registrations from relevant industries. Of these, 20-40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads. People attend webinars to address the business challenge and seek solutions to their problems. It helps them get opinions from the industry experts.
You can use also create a poll during the webinar to gauge customer sentiments towards market trends, prevailing challenges, and your product-fitment.
Also read: How to set-up a webinar that generates leads?
#2 Live streaming
While webinars require prior registrations, live streaming allows customers to attend the session if they’re free and available. It creates active engagement. So far, B2C firms have used live streaming. But B2B firms are also leveraging this interactive media to bond with customers, share knowledge, and more.
For instance, in 2019, LinkedIn announced LinkedIn Live for users in the US to enable live conferences, product announcements, Q&A sessions, and other office hours events. By mid-2020, the feature became available to almost all LinkedIn users.
When it comes to the B2B segment, live streaming on LinkedIn is more rewarding than other social media channels.
#3 Email marketing
Emails have been the most popular medium to engage with B2B clients for decades. The trend is not changing anytime soon. There are over 3.6 billion active email users. Moreover, 73% of millennials prefer communication from businesses via email.
However, marketers need to be thoughtful while sending out emails because it can directly impact brand reputation. One of the simplest ways to send targeted and personalized emails is to segment prospects/leads/customers. Segmented email campaigns can increase revenues by 760%.
Today’s successful marketers use email automation tools (it comes with the CRM suite) to list recipients into different buckets, send automated emails and resources based on their interaction with your previous emails.
Also read:
- Email Marketing Best Practices I Learnt After Sending 2,049,567 Emails
- Email marketing funnel
- Benefits of email marketing software
- Important email marketing metrics
#4 Virtual conferences and CXO meet-ups
The primary goal of a virtual conference is lead and demand generation. However, event companies also ensure networking, brand awareness, and relationship-building for delegates and attendees.
There are several virtual conference tools in the market. The best deal would be to invest in the system that integrates with your CRM – to eliminate the need for monitoring registrants, updating them with the event schedule, etc. from an altogether different platform. To make your virtual conference a success, keep the following things handy:
- Registration details
- Content management system – to refer to the resources and information if required
- Email marketing tool
- Appointment management tool
- Onsite engagement tools
- Attendees tracking
- Survey questionnaire
- Brochure and other digital marketing collateral
#5 Business-specific content (whitepapers, solution documents, case studies)
Business case studies and whitepapers are the best way to prove your mettle towards a specific business challenge.
A typical enterprise sales journey involves awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Case studies and whitepapers help a great deal during the consideration and decision stages. Nearly 80% of business decision-makers rely more on the information from an article than an ad.
It may take a little more time to curate such content, but it is worth it as it will bring in qualified leads. Also, by collaborating with your tech and sales teams, you can bring in some valuable insights to the plate.
At the core of all these innovative marketing campaigns lies the techniques which marketers follow for ages. For instance, to promote your webinar, you’ll need PPC, social media, and email marketing strategies.
The point is – the traditional marketing techniques form the foundation of new and interactive media campaigns. If you’re trying these strategies for the first time, then there’ll be a lot of learning. Somethings might work while somethings may not. Thus, you must keep analytics in place to measure and understand the effectiveness of your campaigns.
“LeadSquared has all of the necessary functionalities at a fraction of the cost. We have a 10% reduction in bounce rate for emails now, and our drip campaigns have resulted in a 50% quicker movement of sales prospects through the funnel!“
Robert Evans, Marketing Manager, VIKTRE Career LLC
How to effectively measure the success of your marketing efforts?
Data is key to smart marketing decisions. Marketing managers around the globe are responding to changes in consumer behavior based on data-driven insights.
But to create a composite picture, you‘ll also need to sync with sales and product teams to understand and convey the product-market fit, quality of leads, and conversion rates.
It is possible if you connect all your internal systems. For instance, you can invest in a CRM solution that integrates with your email system, webinar suites, telephony system, diallers, etc.
Sales and Marketing CRM effectively connects and communicates with all other platforms such as sales, analytics, support, allocations, etc. It also provides extensive data from all the integrated platforms and offers a logical narrative to the overall statistics.
This internal data will also give insights into account-based marketing strategies to identify the right accounts you plan to target.
Concluding remarks
While analyzing data is crucial, building an accurate database is even more necessary.
The best solution is to align all the processes together that influence your marketing endeavors. Here are the ideas you can implement.
- Use marketing and sales CRM: sales, support, marketing, and third party marketing processes and platforms should seamlessly interact with each other. You can use this comprehensive information from all sources for future marketing undertakings.
- Know your enterprise customer’s goals: study your customer’s business behavior. Who and how are they targeting. Their preferred demographics. What marketing channels are they comfortable using. How does their marketing campaigns impact their lead generation and ROI? Align your messaging with their business goals.
- Build relationships: in enterprise marketing, direct relationships matter. Omnichannel marketing such as SMS, Emails, PPC, etc. yield immediate ROI in the B2C but seldom work for B2B Enterprises. Involve your whole company, social connections, and even existing customers in your enterprise marketing strategies. You can also leverage the opportunity of acquiring referral enterprise accounts.
- Customer Experience: include business-specific content such as whitepapers, case studies, webinars, informative videos, etc. on your websites. You can also take a step further and design landing pages accordingly.
- Integrate all platforms and automate workflows: integrating all the tools, especially ERP and CRM, can streamline your marketing efforts. Also, automated workflows reduce the chances of missing follow-ups with leads.
If want to take your enterprise marketing to the next level, we have just the right marketing automation suite for you.
