Many of our B2B clients are rethinking their marketing strategy to compensate for the projected closing of many, if not all, the shows they were planning to attend. Often these shows have been the basis of projections for meeting projections. They are also frequently the single most costly part of a B2B marketing budget.

Coronavirus is forcing a new look at marketing.
In the light of Coronavirus show closings, marketing support needs to refocus to create a similar flow of high potential leads so that salespeople can meet their goals without attending shows. This is a perfect time for marketing to bridge the chasm to sales and to establish a working relationship with those who are eager for support through this trade show crisis. As an agency, we are offering to help our clients with the critical planning that should take place immediately to restructure programs and budgets to support the sales force.

Budgets can be redirected.
The good news is that the budgets for show support are substantial, and redirecting a small amount of the show spend can be used to identify and qualify leads with the new marketing tools we have at our disposal. These tools include the collaboration of marketing and sales teams to discover members of the buying committees including decision makers, influencers, users, technical specifiers, and to use our marketing to identify champions willing to help us.

Marketing automation can support a higher level of lead qualification.
We can also use our marketing automation tools to measure engagement, intent, stage of the buyer’s journey, and we can follow the life of a lead from the time a prospect visits a website to the time that prospect turns into a customer. Further, we will have enough information about that customer’s journey to help us understand what was most successful and what was less effective. Dimensional direct mail is the heart of a successful high-impact ABM program and the budget to support it should be available now. A program targeting high-potential accounts and reaching the key buying decision makers and influencers could easily fill your funnel.

If you don’t have a marketing automation platform, use ours.
We are SharpSpring partners, and we can implement an ABM program from our platform or yours—we’re impartial. If you want to see how it works, we’d be happy to demonstrate. It’s the future.

This is the time for marketing to be proactive.
There’s a lot of gloom and doom because of the pandemic we are facing. Marketers who take charge of the situation will be those who a year from now will still have their jobs intact. An Account-Based Marketing program with high-impact mail has affects not only the success of a sales follow-up but also generates awareness for months (and sometimes years) to come. That makes the sales job much easier—in these worrisome times that’s a very good thing.