Our participation in the BMC Webinar Series: how the Coronavirus crisis affects business marketing
Marco Perotti
Founder at Accelerate
This month I took part in the Business Marketing Club (BMC)’s weekly CV19 webinar, about how the Coronavirus Crisis Affects Business Marketing.
It is a UK-based weekly webinar series that brings together business marketers to share experiences on how they are responding to one of the world’s worst crisis in history.
This is a write up on my contribution as a panelist where I share how CV19 has impacted Accelera as a business and what our clients are doing to navigate through these turbulent times.
You can listen the full recording and read a summary below.
We started with a quick poll to gauge an understanding of the impact of intent data use in business. The results were positive –
11% have seen a significant increase in use
32% have increased use
58% saw no change
0% decreased
While the majority of respondents saw no change in use of Intent Data, the remaining 42% have seen an increased use of it and none have decreased it, which is an important stat. Overall, these results show that Intent Data has been an important initiative to navigate through these difficult months.
How did it affect us as a business?
The Corona Crisis has, unfortunately, hit us just after our first year of business, which was a challenge in itself, but thankfully we have been lucky enough to continue to drive new business, particularly as the use of intent data has become a key tool to ensure a decrease in cold marketing.
Our goal of helping B2B tech companies make Intent Data more actionable – executing campaigns for them, or providing consultancy for the best way to action intent – revealed to be an incredibly useful proposition to hold as companies needed to maximise investments in the tools they had, including intent data.
The proof it’s been working? Well, we survived and our clients continue to see success with Intent Data.
What is working with our clients
Constantly aligning marketing to the changes in customer priorities
Layering intent data into the marketing mix to make it more efficient and align it with customer priorities, it is proving healthy for the pipeline.
Marketing teams probably experienced it when mentioning topics like digital transformation and remote working in their campaigns back in April and May, when the #1 customer priority was to implement digital transformation plans that would normally take 5 years, in a matter of weeks.
Those who acted quickly and changed their communication to suit those times, captured a good portion of leads that is probably still feeding the pipeline now.
That was, however, a relatively easy strategy to implement because everyone was aware of those changes. Topics like digital transformation are now almost outdated.
We recommend that once per month or even by weekly, you gain regular insights into your customers’ priorities and use intent data to capture leads who are actively researching those topic areas. It is like replicating April-May’s tactic, but more regularly.
One of the ways to achieve this is to get insights from publishers and/or webinar platforms. Within the B2B tech space, these two essentially own the audience of tech vendors. They have the ability to track specific keywords, topics, content trends and competitive insights that marketing and sales teams need to survive or even thrive in this current climate.
Adapting to changes in buying behaviour
Persona-based targeting has become increasingly difficult in recent times and we can say that because of the outbound campaigns we run via e-mail, phone and LinkedIn.
We noted there is a constant shift in the way people are responding to communication. For example, in the past 2-3 weeks (beginning of July when this article has been written), it has become almost impossible to get hold of senior people. This is so different than April, when senior staff were directly involved in doing project research and making quick decisions, hence more approachable and reachable.
Marketing and Sales teams need to be open to the fact their usual targeted personas methods are now changing.
My advice is to change your strategy to suit the changing times and implement targeting via intent, which allows you to it based on what people are interested in, not who they are.
