It's now become clear that office-based businesses across the world will need to temporarily enable remote from-home working to ensure operations can continue. While many organisations are geared up for partial remote working and have been practising it for years, for most, a fully-remote workforce is a new concept, and one that needs to be supported in ways that are perhaps not prepared for.

We've put together some high-level tips for brands looking to support their newly remote teams, and how they can ensure sales, marketing and internal comms teams can continue to deliver with limited collaboration.

How can you continue to drive new B2B business given the current global climate?

While some marketing channels such as events and maybe even direct mail or telemarketing may be less viable for the near future, there are a number of digital initiatives that your business could focus on to ensure your remote sales teams are supported, and so that you can continue to engage with your marketing prospects and pipeline.

Support your remote sales teams with content across the funnel

There’s now little room for doubt that if businesses can’t enable remote workers, job functions could be restricted. Supporting your sales teams with high-value content across the funnel is going to be even more critical for success, especially if both the salesperson and their prospects are working remotely.

• Ensure your product marketing is up to date
• Provide detailed product value propositions, presentations and battlecards
• Don’t forget your partners! Offer additional support across the channel in terms of co-branded content to offset potential resource limitations
• Make sure your content is responsive and optimised for mobile devices and smaller screens
• Offer digital demos and videos to highlight complex or keynote product features
• Package campaign materials so that your remote workers can access everything they need in a quick and easy way

Consider short-term paid media marketing campaigns

While SEO-driven inbound marketing can be slow to build up traffic, paid media marketing is an excellent quick-start tactic to drive SERPs traffic to your sites. Consider setting up or increasing the volume of short-term paid media campaigns across Google’s Search and Display networks to increase your prominence online when other channels are less effective. Additionally, you can bolster this with increased engagement across social channels – organic or paid.

Create digital events and experiences

Dell recently announced they were virtualising their upcoming Dell World conference rather than completely cancelling in light of the bearing Covid-19 is having on the world. While a digital conference may not have as much impact as a physical event, it offsets some of the initial cost and allows the organisation to continue to share their planned content and announcements.

Here are a few alternatives to physical events that your sales and marketing teams could utilise:

• Utilise webinars to engage with high volumes of prospects. Bonus: break up the webinar into a series of promotional videos to make your budget go further.
• Create interactive content experiences such as assessments and cost calculators to show value, and acquire additional information from your prospects when face-to-face isn’t possible
• Start sending out regular company newsletters to keep prospects up to date with key announcements and product updates.

Build automated marketing campaigns to reduce campaign admin requirements

Setting up campaign workflows utilising tools such as Hubspot, Marketo and Eloqua enable brands to create always-on campaigns that require minimal engagement once launched. Automated campaigns are an excellent tool to increase the lifecycle of content assets while continuing to nurture your prospects into qualified leads, ready to be passed over to your sales teams.

Although your teams may be more far apart physically over the coming weeks, now’s the time for sales and marketing teams to align and work closely to support wider business functions. Digital content is an excellent way to generate and convert leads, especially when face-to-face engagement isn’t an option.