Think Like a Virus: B2B Marketing Strategy in the WFH World
Global quarantine has forced businesses to go remote and digital, says Dmitri Lisitski, Co-founder and CEO of Influ2. Many business practices that have been adopted today will also remain after the pandemic is over. We looked at recently emerged digital strategies that work in the “work-from-home” world.
Welcome to our new reality: people are requested to shelter in place, grocery stores are empty, flights are impossible, events and sales meetings are cancelled, and business leaders are frightened by the risk of the upcoming recession no one expected a month ago.
I believe many things will return to normal sooner than we expect, but some could change forever. Handshakes could become a medieval tradition, we will learn to sneeze into our elbows, and the way we do business will change dramatically.
Just think about it. The vast majority of businesses will be forced to work remotely for at least several months. We don’t talk about a “work from home” day, we speak about weeks from home.
Managers will learn how to do their jobs without people coming to their office. Salespeople will need to deliver on their quotas without personal meetings. What used to be inside sales will become “sales as usual.” Customers will appreciate remote vendors, learn how to trust people, and make decisions over zoom calls.
Customers will also find ways of discovering new ideas without attending events. Yes, many will miss great swag, and we will probably continue to gather for one or two of the most entertaining events in the future. But the essence of sharing experiences and learning new ideas will digitalize faster than we expected.
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Businesses will be forced to go remote and digital, and many of the practices we’re learning today will stay forever. Wall Street already recognized this fact: Zoom.us stock surged while the whole market has seen a sharp drop.
Digitalizing future
One thing to realize is that digital marketing becomes THE ONLY channel in the next few months, and THE MAIN channel forever. This is a wake-up call for marketers, since, according to Demand Gen Report’s survey in January 2020, 53% of US B2B marketers consider in-person events and trade shows an effective channel for driving conversion!
So, what will your marketing strategy look like in this forcibly digitized future? I believe the blood of the digital world is Ideas. A great idea can spread across the internet in a matter of hours, be it a meme, a hit song, or a political scandal.
But wait, we’ve heard this before: “Ideas rule the world, and content is king.” I am pretty sure you already have a decent content strategy in place. But, as it becomes the core of your marketing strategy, we really have to re-invent it to make it truly effective—let’s do it together.
Why is spreading ideas so hard, and can it become more effective? Let me draw a painful but accurate analogy. While memes and political news are viral like the flu, B2B content behaves like a miserable fungus, with virality close to zero.
One factor is that not every B2B marketer is a Hemingway—not all our stories are that engaging. But the topics we talk about would put even Mr. Hemingway to shame: we have to build a great story around networking equipment, a collaboration tool, or a business process automation solution.
Yes, these topics are relevant and useful for your customers. After all, it’s their job, they like it, they are professionals, and, needless to say, their decisions can cost or save significant amounts of corporate budgets. But there is a huge gap between a relevant article and a hilarious meme—these are completely different levels of virality.
Because your heavy B2B content probably won’t spread itself among your narrow target audience in a virus-like manner, you have to think about how to deliver it more efficiently. So, what options do you have?
Time to Rediscover Ads
Whether you recognize it or not, if you use content marketing you natively employ SEO as the main delivery method. What can we say about SEO? It’s barely scalable. You can’t quickly double the number of engagements from organic traffic. Syndication and earned media can boost your engagements, but their scalability is also limited.
Learn more: In People-Based Marketing Campaigns, the Customer Is the Star
For enterprise B2B, there is an even bigger problem. A large chunk of your inbound traffic is naturally unqualified. You can’t go after Fortune 500 clients using content marketing in a scalable fashion.
Now, let’s think about paid media. Full disclaimer: yes, I am on a mission to make ads great again, so there is a bias here. But come on, let’s think together: ads evolved dramatically over the last couple of years, and they have become a very efficient delivery mechanism for heavy B2B content.
A decade ago, buying ads for B2B meant a boost of no-conversion, useless traffic. However, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even Snap now offer much more comprehensive and precise toolkits. They can really boost engagement, even for extremely niche products about very niche topics with very narrow audiences.
Now you can go after CxOs of companies with between 500 and 5000 people based in the Bay Area to present your idea to them. I’ve witnessed articles—half of which consisted of acronyms—still getting huge click-through rates and loads of engagement, simply because they were super-relevant to their target audience.
In the B2B advertising universe, I am a big fan of person-based ads, of course. You can cherry-pick your audience and deliver your super-niche content to the people you choose by name.
Even with a moderate 0.3% CTR and reasonably engaging content, you can expect 50 engaged MQLs from a person-based ad campaign that targets 5000 people. And every engagement is a qualified A-rated lead since you picked the audience.So, as the next couple of summits are cancelled, and we have time to think while sheltering at home, maybe it’s a good opportunity to reconsider our digital strategies to make them really work in a rapidly digitizing world. The key focus? Fishing for fresh content ideas and researching new delivery mechanisms that will spread your content to the people YOU want.
