TLDR:
Businesses are becoming increasingly focused on the quality of leads and accounts, not quantity. In addition, businesses shouldn’t gate their content—customers should easily be able to interact with brands.
The way B2B marketing used to be done was simply to get those form fills completed and have prospects sign up after consuming one interesting offer after another. Such offers may have included a range of compelling content from newsletters to eBooks and webinars. The goal was to determine who to target, create a CTA, and structure an entire campaign based on that CTA.
Not so with ABM, which is a new way to conduct B2B marketing. Specifically, both the marketing and sales teams work together to target strategic accounts in order to turn them from prospects to customers.
Research from Demand Gen. Report indicates that B2B marketers are becoming more focused in their efforts, including incorporating ABM campaigns. For example, 2/3 of marketers are honing in on their collective focus for ABM campaigns; they want to make them more precise and exacting.
But while the approach of ABM is new, the way to execute that approach isn’t. For all things new to B2B marketing ABM brings to the table, most marketers are still chained by their love of form-fills and lancing pages.
It’s high-time B2B marketers do away with those old tactics, especially when consumers and businesses alike have little time or patience. It’s generally advised that marketers don’t try the patience of either; it will not end well, in all likelihood.
B2B marketers need to think hard about whether their engagement strategy actually needs a form. Messaging is hot right now, and real-time interaction is the solution for the impatient prospect tied for time. Chatbots are a great way to satisfy this need, especially if marketers have business across the globe. Chatbot coding can capture leads and inquiries from customers even if marketers are away, sleeping, or otherwise unavailable.
In essence, marketers don’t want to be shaking down prospects for the requisite information to complete a landing page just so they can progress to the next level in the marketing funnel. Most revenue teams carry-out multiple marketing methodologies and philosophies anyway. Therefore, it’s a good time to experiment with approaches that may work better.
Original article from DemandGen Report on 17 April 2019.
