There’s a whole lot to love about hybrid and fully remote work. This new way of working has allowed for increased organizational agility and enabled companies to hire talent worldwide, all while maintaining or even increasing employee productivity.
While initially billed by many enterprises as a temporary safety precaution to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, remote and hybrid offices don’t appear to be going anywhere. In fact, in a recent study from PwC, almost 80% of executives said they expected their employees would work at least part of the time remotely into the future. Maintaining these policies benefits leadership and is also a generally popular move amongst workers, who value the flexibility to work and live wherever they wish.
While remote and hybrid work policies have been a win for executives and employees alike, the “new normal” has left at least one group in a tough position: B2B marketers.
When the office isn’t an office anymore
It used to be that you could learn a lot about a prospect based on where they were working. B2B marketers would look for clusters of engagement with their content in a set geographic area — such as an office space. In this traditional office setting, IP Address intelligence can reveal the business behind the engagement. From there, they could work backward to stitch together engagements and determine which businesses may be interested in their products or services. Other research trends that marketers could learn through this technique included the web pages most commonly clicked on in an area or the types of content most frequently engaged with. All of this gave marketers a decent idea of who they were speaking to and what their needs might be.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to spot these trends this way when employees aren’t working in one place.
Muddying the intent picture
Remote and hybrid working has dispersed the kinds of intent signals many B2B marketers have grown accustomed to. Rather than working on a single network in a limited area, employees are more likely to be dispersed across home offices, coffee shops, and any other number of innovative locations leveraged through work-from-home policies. A remote company of 100 may work on 100 different networks in 100 different places. Even when companies elect to maintain their office spaces and offer a hybrid setup, gathering intent data is still challenging. When there once may have been hundreds of employees in one space, now only certain teams or a handful of individuals may come into the office. If the team collaborating in person that day isn’t the same one making purchasing decisions, then a strong lead may have just passed through your fingers.
In short, if you’ve been dependent on location-based or network-based intent signals, the past couple of years have probably been a rude awakening. Luckily, a more effective way is to gain intent-based first-party insights from companies that have embraced the hybrid way of working. It’s called Contentgine.
Ready for a big change
While many vendors are scrambling to find new ways to offer insights, Contentgine built their intent solution with the known constraints of hybrid working at the heart of its logic. We gather first-party intent insights based on downloads from our extensive content library and offer insights at both the contact and account-level — detail that traditional intent tactics often can’t provide. So whether your prospects are huddled around a desk in their office or sharing solution ideas virtually from thousands of miles apart, we’re able to identify engagement and create detailed leads using diverse signals across multiple locations and contacts.
Intent data is still a powerful tool for B2B marketers. It just needs to be gathered in new ways. Thanks to our innovative approach, Contentgine stands to be totally unaffected by the ongoing shift to remote and hybrid working.
Contact us for more information about how we create the best first-party leads in the business.
