The pressure to make deals close, especially as the year comes to an end, is real. But what’s a marketer to do when prospects fail to progress? According to research by SiriusDecisions, an integrated webinar strategy is one of the best ways to make deals move.
Too often, teams turn to automation to try and nudge opportunities without working through if a contact needs to be nudged in the first place. It’s a spray-and-pray marketing strategy disguised in an algorithm, and it doesn’t deliver the necessary results. To get deals across the finish line, marketers need to move beyond clicks and views and start to empathize with audiences.
Empathy demands close listening, and the best way for marketers to listen today — outside of directly calling and talking with prospects — is understanding what messages connect and why. Automation cannot find these insights on its own and must take a backseat to genuine engagement. In a digital context, this means marketers need to do more than watch audience clicks and views and interact with attendees as they consume content and ask questions. Generating these meaningful interactions means gaining better insights into what they need from a solution — giving marketing and sales the fuel they need to push opportunities along.
Collecting Insights
Collecting insights is more complicated than slapping a UTM code on a link. Often, collection requires tracking a range of accounts in a vertical and how they engage with interactive content. Here, using the right tool is critical. Does it monitor downloaded resources? Questions asked? Often they visited a website or digital events? These sorts of insights are essential for identifying opportunities, especially fast-moving prospects looking to make a quick deal.
The insights gained from user engagements can also help unstick stalled deals. Marketers and sales teams can provide slow-moving prospects with additional content based on their interests or alert them to upcoming events or articles by subject matter experts they respect. Additionally, organizations can put together highly-targeted, self-serve nurture tracks with the use on on-demand content.
The Right Content Meets a Better Channel
On-demand content hubs are particularly powerful tools for stuck opportunities. Such hubs allow you to re-engage and refocus prospects on your best, most relevant content based on industry and persona. They also enable prospects self-discover content and engage with the organization in a way they prefer. On-demand hubs also provide an opportunity for marketers to create self-qualifying triggers that move highly-engaged prospects from a nurture track to an active demand track.
Live events, too, are great for motivating and re-engaging stuck prospects. Live events give them the opportunity to interact with SMEs, ask questions and download new content specific to the event.
Fueling Reports
Time is of the essence, which means sales teams needs as much information on newly engaged and re-engaged prospects that are ready to take the next step. That’s why it’s essential for organizations to build engagement profiles – summaries of prospect or account interactions with a brand. With engagement profiles, marketing can get specific behavior reports across live, on-demand and personalized content experiences for either individual prospects, or cumulative reports on accounts, and deliver them to sales for the final push.
End-of-year pushes are never easy. But using engagement-based marketing to push stalled pipeline across the finish line can resurface promising leads and make fast-moving campaigns much more comfortable.
To learn more about how webinars and on-demand gateways help you accelerate pipeline, download this research from SiriusDecisions.