The goal of b-to-b marketing is to educate and engage audiences. Our marketing actions aren’t ever purely for entertainment. WIth that in mind, the way that we set up engagement must be as thoughtful as the content that we are developing for experiences. Oftentimes, companies default to the same engagement techniques, regardless of the experience or the audience.
Engagement is what captures attention and keeps audiences within an experience. Contextualized experiences improve audiences outcomes– and aligning the appropriate engagement technique to the stage of the journey that the experience is designed for will improve results. Audiences are more likely to engage when it is aligned with the content and experience design.
Sales, Customer Success and Marketing Alignment
Engagement aligned to the journey will allow sales, CS and marketing to unify on the follow-up actions. With a unified view of the experience and goals, the behavioral data will further signal intent.
Improved Audience Experience
Audiences are more likely to engage in an experience that is immersive and contextualized. Well-constructed engagement improves audience satisfaction.
1. Understand the Buyer or Customer Journey
The first step is to understand more about the stage of the buyer or customer journey you are designing an experience for. This information can be found by working with portfolio marketing and housed within core marketing materials, like personas and also documented within buyer and customer journey maps.
Sample information could include:
• What questions are the audiences looking to answer?
• What information do they need?
• What are their interaction preferences?
Having an understanding of this will help to inform the marketer about the type of engagement techniques to use.
2. Sales and Customer Success Alignment
An important factor in driving more understanding about customers and prospects will be to discuss with sales and customer success what information would be helpful to learn from customers and prospects. This is helpful information that can be integrated into marketing’s understanding of the content for the experience. By designing experiences with the output or results in mind, marketing and customer success are more likely to act on the data provided to them.
3. Align to Experiences
When you’ve set up an experience then understand which stage of the journey you are trying to impact.
For an early stage educational webinar, the most appropriate way to engage the audience may be with Q&A and polling. This is especially useful when you have an external speaker that is on the webinar and could be sharing thought leadership or data. Engaging the audience by allowing them to submit questions to the thought leader can be very powerful, especially if they otherwise may not have access to this person, like an industry analyst. Polling can be very powerful to understand the maturity or level of understanding of a potential prospect as well. This can be deployed after data is shared then using a poll question to find out if the audience members are above or below the average that was shared.
For customers, engagement can look very different during digital experiences. During an experience where product roadmap information is being shared, feedback can be provided through a survey. Additionally, emoji reactions can be used to gather feedback about what features are most popular or anticipated.
4. Act on Engagement Data
Not every engagement action deserves a response, but the behavior data should be cataloged. This will allow sales and customer success to be as informed as possible when engaging customers and prospects.
For the engagement signals that are prioritized for actions, having playbooks prepared for teams to act on the data is critical. Since you’ve worked with sales and customer success before the experience, they will know that this will be delivered to them. For example, simply sharing with a sales team member that one of their prospects asked a question might not lead to action from the sales team member. Instead, be more prescriptive- based on the question that this person asked, it is recommended that content related to this topic be shared.
Inputs
• Personas
• Buyer’s Journey Maps
• Customer’s Journey Maps
Outputs
• Poll Responses
• Survey Responses
• Questions Asked
• Emoji Reactions
Teams that prioritize aligning engagement into experiences will see more engaged audiences during their events. Additionally, there will be more actionable data for their sales and customer success teams to be able to act on. First-party data is critical for the success of b-to-b marketers and being able to use engagement to capture more of these signals will set your team up for success.