Recently, a colleague inquired if I needed the stack of mail that was accumulating in my office to be forwarded to my home address. You see, much like the rest of the corporate world, I’ve been working from home, specifically my dining room, since mid-March 2020.
For B2B marketers, working remote has presented a very specific set of challenges, among them, “How do we get in front of new customers? The question is, how do B2B marketers leverage data to find new customers at home?
Email. Despite the belief that email acquisition doesn’t work, email may be leveraged to support an effective acquisition campaign. The secret is to leverage it as one tactic in a more comprehensive strategy – this doesn’t change with leads working remotely. Given the channels ability to get in front of a customer, wherever they work, email has potential to support your marketing efforts now more than ever.
Direct Mail. The obvious concern with direct mail in the time of COVID-19 is that no one is at their business address. The misnomer is that most businesses are still getting mail. Invoices, payments (paper checks), formal notifications are all still being sent and received. Additionally, by nature, not all businesses are able to be performed remotely. Direct mail has the potential to be successful…for the shrewd marketers that take the aforementioned into consideration and target effectively.
Digital Targeting. For the purposes of this blog, digital targeting = display ad serves. Given that most work is performed on a computer, digital targeting is still a viable tactic for your acquisition campaign. Target & re-target to increase the frequency of your brands message. Internet traffic has jumped considerably in the Pandemic meaning that there is likely more opportunity to get your message in front of your target…use it!
For one-to-one channels, such as email, direct mail & digital targeting there are also opportunities to extend reach considerably through cross-linking consumer and business databases. Leveraging cross-links has the ability to grow your outreach volume by 2 – 3X.
Social Media (LinkedIn). The ability to DM (sending a private message via social media) can be very effective if utilized properly. Since remote work lends itself to less “in-person” distractions more and more business professionals are turning to social media for updates and opinions. If you’ve not done so already, now may be a good time to start.
Content Marketing. Perhaps I’m a bit biased given that I am writing this blog, but content marketing is a great way to start a conversation with new potential clients. It gives them an idea of you and your brand and is significantly less invasive than a cold call. If content is gated, it even has the ability to capture additional detail about the potential customer prior to the first “formal” contact.
Things ARE very different in the time of COVID-19 but they don’t have to be bad. Socrates is credited with saying, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” As marketers and strategists, let’s build something new.
