Engaging with prospects in an age of digital fatigue

Your potential customers are suffering from too many Zoom calls and you still can’t buy them a coffee at a trade show. So what’s the solution?

It’s been almost a year since the first lockdowns were implemented around the world, forcing people to conduct their lives and their business online.

The availability of services such as Zoom, Microsoft’s Teams and others has enabled work life to continue. But it has come at a cost.

London’s South Bank University was one institution that looked at the impact of digital fatigue in employees. It found that remote working generally leads to increased tiredness or “Zoom fatigue” for employees and longer recovery times compared with onsite office work.

Moreover, it added that video calling over Zoom and other platforms is more tiring to deal with than other forms of digital communication (such as emails, texts, or chats), as video calls require higher levels of self-control and regulation of emotion.

This move online has been particularly disruptive for those in B2B marketing, where building meaningful relationships with prospects is key. At a time when trade shows and other face-to-face networking events aren’t available, how is that achieved?

Most marketing departments have sought to replace face-to-face events in their go-to-market strategies with online replacements such as hosting their own webinars and virtual roundtables, or attending third-party virtual events.

The results are often been mixed, underlining the fact that, while the shift to virtual events has been necessary, it has not been easy, nor is it sustainable.

A survey by El Advisory published in November found that selecting the right platforms and formats for proprietary activities had been the biggest challenge in the move to virtual events – 39 per cent of respondents citing this as a ‘high priority’.

This was closely followed by another key challenge: the ability to networking and generate meaningful leads in virtual environments.

This situation can create a perfect storm: businesses having to rely on unsuitable digital channels to generate leads by reaching out to potential end-customers suffering from digital fatigue. It’s hardly a recipe for success.

This is where marketers need expert help. eContact Services has been supporting its clients on virtual events for many years, and understands how to leverage events to drive business objectives.

One of the first questions our clients ask us is whether to attend a third-party virtual event or ‘go it alone’.

Online events organisers are coming up with innovative ways to replicate the trade show experience, but no-one has yet really figured out how to do online networking effectively. As a result, many third-party events can offer little beyond sponsorship packages.

This has served to loosen the grip of the big events organisers, prompting many companies to host their own events in a bid to connect directly with their customers and prospects. In this instance, hiring the services of a specialist company that can identify and target the right audiences and drive them to your event should be a key investment.

Our approach to getting the right people to your event is the same as our approach to delivering qualified sales leads for our clients: we draw on our deep experience and knowledge of our sector – which includes a database of more than 150,000 telco contacts.

For 20+ years, our core service is QUALFIED lead generation, arranging one-to-one meetings and conference calls with the key people in target accounts, taking the pressure of your sales teams to start ‘cold calling’ potential prospects.

Even in the age of Covid we continue to provide the ‘human touch’ via our telemarketing approach.

And in the age of digital fatigue, that’s been more important than ever.