Beyond the MQL: How to Accelerate B2B Results

B2B marketers spend a lot of time creating and marketing content across all types of channels to generate marketing qualified leads. This normally consists of offering eBooks or whitepapers in return for lead capture, interfacing with potential clients on social media, or further establishing their brand within the sector in which they operate.

Unfortunately, while a lot of B2B content can be made SEO friendly, it doesn’t necessarily end up on target against a business’s ideal customer base. Even when your B2B content marketing does reach the right target, it’s likely that they’ll still need to be nurtured with more content over time in order to make them see the value of your proposition.

While a long-term content strategy is admirable and definitely has a place in the marketing mix, it can also be slow to reach high-quality leads and slower to convert them. This low conversion rate is almost seen as part and parcel of content marketing, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

If your business has put significant time, money and other resources into developing great content to outline your proposition, you don’t want that to go to waste.

Thankfully, there is a way to extend the shelf-life of your content and repurpose it into new formats in order to accelerate your B2B results with better leads and higher conversion rates. Here it is:

Enter virtual events

Virtual events are incredibly effective in making your marketing budget go further, faster because they put your content in front of a dedicated and prequalified enterprise audience, with the power to make decisions in their organizations.

The virtual event has become even more important in recent months. If it wasn’t enough that many businesses had to close their physical offices, live, in-person events have also been cancelled, and there’s no telling when it will be safe for large groups of people to gather inside again, which means that many businesses are left with B2B content that has nowhere to call home.

B2B marketers have a choice. You can write off these cancelled events as a lost opportunity, or you can take your content online by partnering with virtual event providers to accelerate your B2B results and see explosive returns from your content.

Virtual events are great for reaching customers of the ideal profile because event participants attend with a deliberate purpose, whether they’re searching for a new solution to an everyday business challenge or a new provider. This takes away one of the most significant challenges for high-level executives and directors, according to a GDS and IFP survey, and means that your content will reach a highly engaged audience. With this approach, you can walk away from a virtual event with a small number of high-potential leads rather than a sea of barely-engaged prospects.

Plus, those that attend virtual events tend to be in C-suite or senior, decision-making roles. Not only are you reaching your ideal customer, but that customer has the power to make things move quickly.

With this in mind, it’s vital for B2B marketers to prioritize live events if you want to accelerate returns from your content. Even when the world returns to some sort of ‘new’ normal after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, virtual events are likely to remain a staple of demand generation and B2B marketing because they cost less to organize and have a potentially unlimited audience.

Where do you start?

You could set up and host your own virtual event. If you’re going to do this, you’ll need to identify your audience and solidify the purpose of the event, whether that’s a specific number of conversions or a successful product launch.

Once you’ve got your targets set, you can begin to put your live event together with different pieces of content and interactive forums. You can use on demand video content, live-streamed sessions & presentations and interactive discussion forums/panels to give your event variety and ensure your audience has a chance to get involved and become more engaged.

You might already have your content ready to go. The tricky part is finding the best tools and technology to present it all, and where you’re going to place it. You could have all of this built into your website, but that takes time and resources. There are also some platforms online that are aimed at making it easier to build your own event from scratch, but these don’t help when it comes to promoting and delivering your events to the right audience.

If you’re just getting started with virtual events, your best bet might be to find and partner with a specialist virtual events provider that has an established, senior audience. Obviously, having a ready-made audience is ideal and removes a lot of the hassle in terms of promotion and demand generation pre-event. Just as importantly, however, by partnering up to host or sponsor a virtual event, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve got experts on your side to set the whole thing up. A GDS and IFP survey of over 200 high-level executives and directors found that 60% saw sponsored virtual events as being highly effective in driving highly qualified leads.

What this means is that you can focus on optimizing your content so it achieves the best results when you deliver it.

In the current market, those in B2B marketing can ill-afford to miss out on the benefits that hosting or sponsoring a virtual event can generate. Adapting to ongoing circumstances has always been pivotal to the success of a business, and right now virtual events are the quickest and most effective way to connect with an ideal audience.