Marketing in quarantine: How can Tech companies stay relevant in a world in lockdown with marketing automation

Most companies in the technology sector evolve in a very competitive environment, and leads generated by Marketing represent more than 50% of the opportunities signed by sales representatives. This represents a considerable financial windfall that is important to maximise by implementing automatic and sophisticated processes to achieve the objectives set for the company. In these conditions, implementing a marketing automation platform is a no brainer. 

But once this choice has been made, what are the priorities in the execution of this strategy, what are the key points not to be missed? To answer this question, we need to understand why it has become so important to take the digital turn. 

1. Relevant and personalised content everywhere and all the time :

Interactions with prospects have become 100% virtual and the need for engagement has never been more relevant. Companies and decision-makers are taking more time to analyse and compare different vendors, so technology companies need to expose as much content as possible that will allow buyers to make their choice. The more personalised and relevant the experience, the higher the conversion rate will be. 

A marketing automation platform that includes web personalisation features can help you discover content and choose among all the available assets, which are the most relevant according to each of your audiences. 

Your prospects and customers expect you to understand them, to anticipate their expectations by offering fresh and adapted content. 

2. Webinars are a must and this is not going to change any time soon:

In today’s lockdown environment, most of your customers probably work from home and all marketing events have become entirely virtual. 

Whether it is to demonstrate your solution (demo are key CTA), share feedback or a point of view on a specific area of your market, there are many reasons to have a more “real” interaction with your prospects through these famous webinars. All technology companies use this means to recruit new prospects or simply to stay engaged with their installed base. 

With marketing automation, you can deploy a campaign fully integrated with your webinar hosting platform that manages invitations, reminders, participation and follow-up in the space of a few clicks. 

3. A long-term relationship that allows you to build trust:

In a B2B environment, the act of buying itself does not usually take long, but the process that leads to it can take months or even years depending on your offer and the complexity of your buying cycle. It is therefore essential to align your content strategy with your sales cycle and to ensure that your prospects, like your customers, maintain a long-term relationship with your company. 

A first strategy consists of analysing your content production. What content do you have at your disposal (white paper, thought leadership, demo videos, etc)? How often do you publish new content? What channels do your people use to consume this content? Once you have defined all these variables, marketing automation helps you build multi-channel nurturing programs that correspond to your sales channel and show the most relevant content to each of your prospects. With just a few clicks you can execute your web personalisation strategy and build a strong and personalised relationship with your audience. 

Don’t forget to consider how you want to react to each interaction and how to score your prospects. 

4. Account-Based Marketing or how to focus your marketing and sales efforts on your target audience:

Implementing an ABM strategy often requires a certain level of maturity (number of years on the market) and volume of data (number of contacts in the database), but it is one of the main areas of development for many technology companies. By identifying a “typical” customer, you will be able to identify the most relevant segments for your offer and implement cross-channel campaigns to help your sales teams. 

A marketing automation platform like Marketo Engage can enable you to execute your strategy quicker thanks to its segmentation, artificial intelligence and reporting functionalities while remaining fully aligned with your sales teams. 

5. Measuring the success of your actions

It is a never-ending question, what is the real impact of your marketing actions on your pipeline? To answer this, it is important to be able to correctly attribute the first contact with your prospect to the right campaign. Marketo Engage, and especially Bizible, offer solutions to trace the origin of a prospect thanks to its multi-touch attribution model.  

In most cases, companies in the technology sector choose to implement a personalised attribution model that corresponds to their sales cycle. From the first contact to the closing of the deal, they can track the allocation and weight of their actions. 

Finally, most companies in the technology sector generally have a more complex IT stack so our integrations help to scale the investment, get the most qualified leads to sales, track and measure the impact of marketing on sales… 

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