This summer we kicked off a celebration of all things customer engagement with the B2B Engagement Fest, a webinar series designed to help you maximise customer engagement. Looking at how prospects and clients interact with your brand is a critical part of developing a successful marketing strategy - particularly in a time when so much of the buying cycle is customer-led.

We brought together bestselling author and digital media expert Mitch Joel, Mathew Sweezey, the Principle of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, and Kyle Coleman, the Sr. Product Manager at Salesforce to share their knowledge and industry insights.

Mitch Joel: Algorhythm and the pulse of creativity, data, and the future of brands

Disruption is everywhere, but “don’t confuse disruption with destruction”. Disruption is the way that new ideas become new startups over night, and the way that seemingly impossible visions can be realised as quickly as tried and true favourites can disappear. B2B Marketers have been working hard to keep their heads above water in the midst of an environment that is full of disruption, but the type of technology and the way that you implement it can be the defining factor in how your brand is perceived in a culture where permanence is giving way to transience and flexibility. 

Mitch summarises his methods for succeeding in the age of disruption in three key points: 

Transformation, he argues, is the first step. We now have access to a smorgasbord of information, so simply creating more content isn’t the answer. Instead, adding value, establishing greater efficiency and developing methods that can immediately deliver a usable experience to the buyer have become the key elements of successful content.

Innovation is the second step. Mitch points to B2C brands like Uber and AirBnB who have capitalised on consumers’ desire to have on-demand access instead of ownership. In the B2B space, innovation means looking for opportunities like these to provide the customer with an additional convenience, or an extra efficiency. Look beyond the sale to how your products can be amended or combined to create experiences that go above and beyond to fulfill buyers’ needs, and ease their pain points. 

Transact, the third step, refers to closely examining where and how your customers interact with your content, and valuing each of those interactions as a transaction. The idea is that wherever your clients and prospects devote the most time and attention to your content is where you need to be. You may have a foolproof Facebook strategy, but if your whitepapers are generating the most traffic and form-fills, then that’s where the majority of your focus should go. 

Watch Mitch’s complete webinar presentation for all these insights, and more. 

Mathew Sweezey: How to rock B2B engagement in the age of the customer

Every day, the prospects who receive your content will also receive content from a hundred other sources, so how do you help your brand stand out in a world where information is overflowing? Creating engaging content breaks down into four key elements: 

Availability: Giving prospects a wide selection when it comes to content is - believe it or not, a good way draw them in. It allows them to choose for themselves based on their specific needs and interests.  

Personal: People choose to engage with what they’re interested in, or has specific significance to them personally. 

Authentic: Authenticity is one of the most important factors when driving engagement because prospects will choose the most authentic of the available options when it comes to choosing content to consume.

Purposeful: Content that helps increase engagement should help prospects fulfill their purpose, whether that’s learning more about your product, or finding inspiration.

Automating engagement

So how do you build these elements into each piece of content at the scale of all of your communications with clients and prospects? The answer is Lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is automated engagement, and makes it possible to create personal, authentic, purposeful content for each and every client and prospect. 

Watch Mathew Sweezey’s complete webinar presentation to see how you can rock your B2B engagements. 

Kyle Coleman: Discover the power of Salesforce Engagement Studio: Build. Visualise. Improve.

Engagement Studio is Pardot’s next-generation lead nurturing functionality. It gives you the power to create campaigns that reach the right person at the right stage in their buying cycle. 

It’s easy to create complex campaigns: You don’t need to be (or know) a programmer to create Engagement Studio campaigns, you just need to know your buyers. Through their interactions with your content, you can offer your clients and prospects the cadence of communication that best fits their needs. 

You’re in control of your campaigns: Stay in control of your campaigns and accurately qualify leads with more insight than ever into your lead data with information such as click through rates, and the percent open rate for a particular email are all overlaid directly onto your campaign canvas. 

Boost your confidence with testing: Manually sending test versions of each email is time consuming, and attempting to figure out each possible step a recipient might take is nearly impossible. Engagement Studio tackles this by offering a simple one-click button to test the logic of your campaign. 

Watch Kyle Coleman’s complete webinar presentation to uncover the power behind Pardot Engagement Studio.

I really hope you can find some time to enjoy these thought provoking presentations - as a marketer myself, I was super impressed with the content and can't wait to put what I've learnt in to practice right away.