In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Karin Aviles, Head of Demand Generation and Field Marketing at Centrica Business Solutions, which offers sustainable energy alternatives for businesses. Karin discusses how her team’s lead generation strategies have shifted during COVID-19. You’ll learn:

 

* Lead generation without face-to-face events forces companies to explore new ways to reach their target audience.

* With tighter budgets, marketing teams should look for ways to optimize their ROI through paid media channels.

* People’s behaviors have drastically changed over the past few months, so it’s important to keep tabs on these trends and follow your customer.

 

 

 

Face-to-face interactions are traditionally an integral part of lead generation. A handshake, an elevator pitch, a conversation, an exchange of business cards.

But in the wake of COVID-19, marketing teams no longer have this advantage.

In January, if you’d asked Aviles to list her top lead-gen strategies for the year, she would’ve rattled off an impressive list of in-person events and trade shows.

But in March of 2020, that all changed. As we know all too well, the world shut down, and events were canceled. Karin’s marketing strategy was essentially torpedoed.

“We’ve had to shift our marketing strategy quite a bit,” Karin says. “It definitely wasn’t something we did overnight per se, but we have had to move pretty quickly to make some changes.”

So what exactly changed? And what does the future of lead generation look like? Karin joined the AMP Up Your Digital Marketing podcast to discuss how her marketing team has shifted in the wake of COVID-19.

Lead Generation and COVID-19: Pivoting Your Marketing Strategy

What happens when a large portion of your marketing strategy disintegrates? Karin, like many marketers, has been forced to pivot. And she doesn’t suspect this will be a short-term pivot, either. 

“I think what has happened and transpired through COVID is going to change everything about how we work going forward,” she says. “So I don’t think we come out of COVID, and everything goes back to the way it used to be.”

In light of COVID-19, here are a few steps Karin and her team have taken to preserve lead generation without face-to-face events.

1. Host Events Digitally

As soon as events began getting canceled in March, Karin quickly started thinking about how to host them digitally. Whereas she’d initially planned to host approximately one webinar a quarter, she decided to amp that up. Now, her team has been doing about five each quarter.

“It’s really just taking those dollars we had planned on investing in something face-to-face and bringing it online,” she says.

She’s been pleasantly surprised with how engaged virtual attendees have been — probably because they’re at home and don’t have as many distractions in their lives. They’re asking questions and sticking around until the end of the sessions.

And because Centrica already uses the online events platform Webex, making the move to this digital format hasn’t cost them anything extra.

2. Optimize Your Paid Traffic Channels

During this time, Karin has been safe-guarding her budget,