In September of last year, Gartner said that by 2025, 80% of sales interactions would happen in digital channels. This is because 33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience — a preference that climbs to 44% for millennials.
Putting your prospects at the center of your digital experience strategy is the key to driving pipeline and revenue in this new, digital-first world. In this blog, we provide insights into how you can build connections with your audiences, drive engagement and generate the actionable insights you need to turn prospects into customers.
In this digital world, marketers need to be prepared to deliver engaging multi-touch experiences through every channel our prospects visit. Engaging digital experiences are fully branded, completely immersive and interactive, with lots of different content delivered in various ways. We’re no longer going to be delivering one piece of content at a time (i.e. an eBook one month, a video the next, etc.) We’ll need to surround them with content in many different ways and ensure that every digital experience is approachable and human.
So, what are these experiences? It’s nothing crazy new that you’ve never heard about. It’s about leveraging the technology and marketing that we already use but rethinking them and recasting them in different ways whether it’s:
- Interactive web pages
- Live webinars
- On-demand webinars
- Curated content hubs
- Interactive landing pages
- Virtual environments and conferences
This is our new reality and the way we use these technologies needs to change. Using webinars as an example, it’s not really about the webinar — it’s about the experience. And that experience can be anything, but that experience should be something that is completely immersive and has all of these qualities: interacting with you, engaging with you, taking in content, watching the presenter, but also downloading content, clicking through to other pages, signing up for other events/webinars, clicking CTAs, signing up for free trials/demos, asking for consultations — a different kind of experience.
These tools we’ve been relying on for so long, we tend to think of in old school ways. A lot of marketers still think of webinars as talking PowerPoint presentations. That’s archaic thinking in the same way that we think of a virtual conference as a cheap replica of physical experience. The fact of the matter is that virtual conference technologies have come such a long way — they’re not just presentations that we can stream.
Related Post: Keys to Creating Great Webinar Content
Webinars and virtual conferences have become multidimensional experiences where you can leverage keynote rooms, breakout sessions, networking rooms, etc. There is lots of content being delivered in lots of different ways, in lots of different places. We’re discovering so much more about the people that participate in these experiences because we’re engaging with them differently and getting more data on the backend.
How these experiences have become so much more immersive is really transformative. It’s not just inbound, it’s outbound too.
If you think of what our outbound marketing has become via automation, the idea of spamming our audiences into submission or that they’ll eventually react if we send them enough emails isn’t going to work anymore. Even our outbound marketing is being transformed into engaging digital experiences. We see companies getting really creative by putting together hyper-targeted landing pages which are curated for a unique audience. Maybe you’re segmenting your audience and sending out a targeted landing page with a video, curated content, a small message, and a few CTAs (i.e. would you like to download this document or sign up for this event, free consultation, etc.) and literally delivering the experience right to somebody’s digital doorstep. Everything can be experiential, even our promotions.
People are taking in content from everywhere (in whatever format they like) so while you can’t control that journey, you can make it easier on your prospects to make their decisions. By shifting your focus to delivering interactive, engaging and conversational experiences rather than just sticking to your content schedule, you’re able to build connections with your audiences and drive engagement like never before.