Alongside our online monthly discussions with fantastic guest speakers, the FINITE Podcast, Slack & FINITE Times, once a month we also host an informal FINITE Forum catch-up call for members.

This is a chance for FINITE members to talk through some of their challenges & thoughts around B2B tech marketing currently, and get the opinion of their peers. It’s also a great opportunity to meet other FINITE members in a more personal, relaxed setting!

This morning, we hosted our 4th call and it was great to see some new & familiar faces, with members joining from London, Israel, Helsinki and Stockholm with lots interesting challenges & useful content covered!

Here are some of the key things that our members talked through this time: 

As COVID-19 emerged and sent many of us into lockdown, webinars were positioned as the perfect digital counterpart for in-person events. Yet within a month we were talking about zoom fatigue (or at least having a Google to find out what it is and if we have it…) 

Seeing the vast amounts of Webinars, our member Emma Westley set herself ‘The 30 Day Webinar Challenge’, to find out what the good, the bad and the ugly looked like in its virtual form.

Emma shared some of her take aways with FINITE members:

The bad: some of the poorer webinars had poor and lazy build up and follow up, speculating that probably this is because some of us are using webinar tools and letting those do most of the work. A lack of a personalised build-up and followup could be what is resulting in lower numbers. 
The good: many of the better webinars used personalised build up, (particularly short videos!) were short (30-40min) used polls & questions to engage their viewers. 

Emma also highlighted, which I think many of us will agree with, that there is lots of space for different types of presentation/virtual event software, it may just need some time before we see all sorts of exciting software pop up.

Maybe Mmhmm is just the beginning.. 

The conversation them moved to questions around how you can engage & delight your current customers, and how to create a virtual space where you customers feel comfortable enough to discuss their challenges, share opinions, but also find the sessions themselves useful.

A formalised approach to this could be a Customer Advisory Board – something that April Dunford & Alex Price discussed in this FINITE Podcast episode.

We then pivoted to look at marketing strategies for products that your customers are not yet aware of as a better, possible solution to their challenge. This tied into conversations around how to clearly understand and define your clients, but also how and where to position you solution as the better, cheaper alternative.

As frequently is the case with our informal discussion, we had some conversation around sales & marketing alignment, particularly when marketing teams end up effectively competing for the SDR’s time with the sales teams. We had a few great solutions to aligning sales & marketing at this webinar, in particular the MDR function suggestion from our member Karla was an interesting one. 

Another solution to getting sales engaged in marketing is to do content with them. It is the sales teams & their insights that should be providing the ‘bullets’ to your marketing ammunition. This cooperation & sales enga`gement in marketing content can be achieved in a number of ways:

  • Interviews with sales
  • Including sales people in your content & articles
  • Making sales reps grace the front cover of your marketing campaigns!

We also had a niche question around the challenges of marketing in the German market. Particularly dealing with higher advertising costs and more stringent GDPR rules – the solutions around which are yet to be identified. So if you’re reading this and have some experience, do give me a shout!

Again, thanks to all the members that joined this discussion! If you missed out & are keen to join the next one it will be on the 10th of September at 15.00! 

Details on how to register will come to your inbox, or if you are already a member, just drop me a note on [email protected]

FINITE membership is free, so if youre a B2B tech marketer, head here to apply!