Splendid Group's Ronit Jackson reckons you absolutely can. 

You may not be consciously thinking about it as you move through your world, but a User Experience frames every product and service that we buy and consume on a daily basis. How you feel about walking through a flagship retail store or supermarket, or when you're clicking to buy something online or checking in at the airport kiosk (remember that?), is the end product of a User Experience process. 

From a business perspective, its important to recognise that your customers will feel (often strongly) a certain way about your brand, regardless of whether or not these experiences are intentionally designed. User Experience (UX) Design is conscious effort to improve how your customers interact with your business by removing friction and building customer trust, which can translate to lead generation, loyalty and profitability. 

That's all well and good in the obvious arenas of a physical store or online commerce, but what about the true battlefield of B2B Technology marketing: lead generation? Can better UX improve your lead quality and conversion rates?

Your business has a Twitter account, a LinkedIn company page, Facebook page, and a YouTube channel. You have a social scheduling in place and publishing tool like Hootsuite or through HubSpot. You're creating a calendar, filling it with high quality B2B technology content like whitepapers and case studies. Your brand's customer journey is optimised for conversion and you’re ready for the leads to roll in.

Marketing is becoming an increasingly stressful endeavour as marketers are tasked with doing more with less. True marketers, have access to an ever-increasing array of channels for engagement, marketing tools to deploy campaigns, and data to provide insights. Yet the opportunities offered by these digital advancements are usually  accompanied by shrinking budgets and smaller teams. This leads to limited effectiveness, which can, in turn, reduce marketing budgets further - a vicious catch-22.  

The most effective circuit-breaker is for marketers to demonstrate their value back to the business. A key opportunity resides in tighter relationships with sales. By working in partnership, marketing can deliver more value to sales, leading to better results and revenue – and virtuous relationship circle between marketing and sales. 

But how to get this circle spinning? Here are five key ways marketing and sales can work together to optimise lead generation campaigns. 

Engaging attendees at a face-to-face conference is hard enough, let alone in a virtual environment where distractions, and opportunities to multitask, abound.  

When was the last time you gave an online session all of your focus? Resisting the temptation to get through a busy workload – while also tuning into a webinar – is difficult.  

In fact, according to a recent LinkedIn survey, a whopping 92% of people admit to multi-tasking while on a video call.

So when you’re organising a virtual event, what can you do to keep people engaged? Here are our top tips:  

One of the big positives to emerge from a virtual event is the level of data it can make available to us as marketers. With the right tools and metrics in place, it’s possible for an event host to capture a great deal of information from a virtual or hybrid event, and in particular, its attendees: where they signed in from, how long they stayed, which sessions they attended, whether they interacted with any content or asked any questions, and much, much more.  

The way we engage with and sell to buyers has changed. The disconnectedness many are feeling due to Covid-19 is leading organisations to put real, human needs at the centre of their sales and marketing activities – offering immersive experiences where buyers are accompanied by a seller rather than funnelled to one.  

This strategy, known as Account Based Marketing, or ABM is gaining traction, due to four key factors: 

The last 18 months or so have completely changed the game for event planners and marketers around the world. With travel off the cards for some time, most businesses have had to very quickly embrace new, virtual event models - with 93% of event organisers to invest in virtual events for the foreseeable future. 

A lot can change in just 12 months. Remote working is now a norm for most Australian workplaces, as are video calls. During the pandemic, Microsoft Teams grew by 894% and it now has over 115 million users.

Here at Splendid, we’ve always operated virtually. Online meetings have been a core part of our business from the outset. While we’re always happy to meet our clients face-to-face, we do the vast majority of our communication and collaboration remotely. As such, over the years, we’ve learnt a lot about how to get the most from virtual sessions.  

Recently, Tim decided to share his top tips and insights with the rest of us in a virtual session with the oh-so-enticing title: ‘The great big meeting about meetings’. Ironically, not every aspect of the meeting went to plan! Here’s a quick re-cap of some of Tim’s key points (and some unanticipated hilarity):

Around a month ago, Tayla Agostinis started at Splendid in a project operations role. Everything about Tayla’s joining and ‘on-boarding’ process was fairly standard, with one exception… her direct boss lives in Tokyo, and they’ve never actually met face-to-face! Here, Tayla shares her thoughts about this process, what it’s been like, and why she’s so excited to be part of the Splendid team.  

We live in a fast-paced and information-rich world. To find the answer to a question or learn more about a particular topic, we simply need to pick up a device and enter a few basic questions.

However, an abundance of information isn’t always a good thing. Firstly, there’s the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff – of determining which information is actually factual and can be relied upon. And secondly, there’s the ever-increasing issue of information overload – of not being able to make decisions, or being slow to do so, because of the sheer volume of information we have at hand.