Leading Digital Marketing Success for Post-Covid-19 Success

For most organizations, doing business during the pandemic was unpredictable. They mainly employed short-term strategies to stay afloat. 

But as businesses resume operations, it’s becoming imperative to identify digital marketing that attracts more businesses and retains it for the long term

In this article, we’ll discuss sales outreach strategies that may help you find more success post-Covid 19.

1. Optimize Customer Experiences

Lockdowns and isolations sent most of us online and we all realized how impactful human contact is. During this period and moving past the pandemic, consumers connected more with brands that provided quality customer experiences and support.

Exceptional customer experiences are critical to maintaining an excellent reputation that pulls in customers and keeps them. This, in turn, boosts growth.

To improve your customers’ experiences, consider the following

• Build customer-centric brands. Every touch point is an opportunity to build existing and potential customers’ perceptions and overall experiences. Let your staff know that quality consumer experiences are intentional then empower them to solve problems and build customer relationships.
• Educate your customers. Reps can be pushy (they have quotas to meet) which puts off buyers. Brands should aim to turn their teams into advisors—people who can provide new insights, explore prospects’ problems in-depth, and offer honest and worthwhile recommendations.
• Facilitate real-time connections. In addition to improving response/delivery times, consider adding live chat for real-time communications, cold calling, and monitoring your social accounts for customer queries.

2. Create Thought Leadership Content

Ads can generate traffic, social media posts can make your organization more personable, and in-person events are great for building rapport.

But it’s thought leadership content that showcases your expertise. The one thing that positively impacts your digital marketing efforts.

Buyers today like to self-search and by offering thought leadership content, you’re putting yourself in their line of view as a knowledgeable and reliable source.

To make your strategy effective

• Work on your unique value proposition. Having direct hands-on experience and being aware of the latest developments will help build credibility.
• Identify your core audience. Define which accounts will bring in the highest value then identify their most pressing concerns and address them in your thought leadership strategy. 
• Choose a distribution vehicle. How do you want to share your content? Through podcasting, blogging? Webinars? Ideally, the best platform is one that aligns with your target market’s content consumption preferences and habits.

3. Educational Webinars

Like thought leadership content, educational webinars aim at providing content that’s both educational and valuable to those in your target market. 

Most B2B buyers are concerned about solving their problems and will gravitate toward brands that explore their troubles in depth and provide authentic solutions.

Educational content is a secret weapon that marketers can use to broaden reach, build credibility, and nurture relationships.

How do you build educational content?

• Host expert interview series. Invite industry experts, including those within your organization to share their insights into the challenges customers face. It adds value to your webinar and provides opportunities for you to introduce your services as valuable solutions to these challenges.
• Q&A Educational webinars. Prepare a set of questions beforehand to tackle in the webinar and toward the end include a live session. Doing so allows you to build personal connections with individual audiences who ask related questions or raise other industry-based issues.
• Case study webinars. Share customer success stories that detail the problems, solutions, and outcomes experienced. You can even throw in statistics and percentages (whether in growth or savings) or invite the customer to share their overall experience.

4. Make Cold Calls

Undoubtedly cold calling is nerve-racking. You’re reaching out to unresponsive contacts and know there’s a possibility of being rejected. It’s definitely not something that even experienced reps look forward to.

However, being one of the few direct human-to-human connection builders, cold calling helps initiate 1:1 conversations that lead to further engagement.

If you lack the manpower, you can outsource this strategy to a lead generation agency that’s better equipped and prepared for it.

For those who choose to handle things in-house, here are tips to help handle rejection

• Go in with the right mental attitude. A positive approach where you’re open and respectful empowers your conversation. Don’t force your listener through your pitch when they’ve said no. Confidently thank the prospect and let them know you’re available to engage when they are ready.
• Analyze the rejections you receive. At what moment do people shut you down? Is it the moment you introduce yourself, during the conversation, or do they just decline at the end? It can help you refine your script—to strengthen your position statement, or add value in the middle or improve your close.
• Employ discovery questions to determine the reason for the ‘no’. Approach nos as a way to gain information. If the prospect isn’t rude or irritated, you can request them to share why they are turning down your offer. They may have a similar service in place, not have funds, or don’t consider the challenge urgent. 
• Where possible, have more than one offer. Familiarize yourself with all the products/services your company offers. Rather than fixate on just one solution and force it on the prospect, you can serve up the one that matches their needs. 

5. A/B Testing

Post-pandemic, marketing teams will do well to test more than one version of something to determine what works best. 

Through A/B testing, you can compare copy (text or video), keywords, power words, color, background, or formatting, etc to understand their effect on your desired audience. 

The data you gather allows you to understand user behavior and optimize your marketing assets to maximize ROI.

Best practices include

• Use your analytical tools to collect info. How many people view or interact with your web pages, ads, or landing pages? What percentage of subscribers/followers respond to emails/social media content? How much time is spent on your site and specific pages?
• Identify the different areas that require improvement. Sort through your data to identify improvement areas then create goals aka improve click throughs, sign-ups, etc.
• Create a hypothesis for the test. Come up with ideas of what may happen if you make certain changes to your digital marketing materials. For example, “We believe [X] might happen if we change [Y].”
• Create variations. Depending on the variable you’re testing, create two variations based off your hypothesis but only change one element at a time. So, if it’s CTA placement then change only that, otherwise, you won’t be able to pinpoint what brought about the improved reception.
• Run your test and measure the results. For greater accuracy, run the tests as similarly as possible i.e., send them out at the same time, on the same day and over the same duration.
• Once you’ve received a certain sample size, track performance to assess if your hypothesis was right or needs re-tuning.