By Nuno Periquito
Head of Marketing
AnubisNetworks
The relationship between marketing and sales has always been a difficult one. Although both teams strive to accomplish the same goal, the way each department gets there differs and, many times, there is unnecessary friction, which adds zero value to the company’s bottom line.
Fortunately, the next chapter in the relationship between marketing and sales has every reason to be different, with hopefully more cooperation already underway. The reason behind this anticipated change isn’t altruistic in nature--it’s clearly more a question of survival.
For every market and for every account, there is a fierce competition which is no longer just local. If you combine this increased territory with a more educated customer on a global scale, there is no other way to be successful than to have marketing and sales strongly aligned and working together.
On the marketing side, I see a clear movement where actions count more than words and marketing is in a position to support sales, not with fancy trade show booths or public relations, but with qualified leads and sales opportunities.
It all begins with strong content which must be innovative and relevant. Many marketers focus too much on technology. They are present in as much social media as possible, and use a plethora of platforms, but they do not necessarily having anything significant to say in all these different mediums. In a sense, what they are doing is amplifying the company´s silence.
Content, on the other hand, is developed once and it can be deployed many times, with the necessary adjustments, since writing a post for Facebook is not quite the same as doing a blog post on the corporate website or a LinkedIn entry.
Instead of flooding prospects and customers with emails, notifications and texts, there is another, better way that is based on developing content and making it available to your audience when they are ready to consume it, in a format that is relevant to them. Don’t get me wrong, outbound marketing is still important and relevant, especially for some businesses, but there is a new king in town and inbound marketing, particularly for B2B, is becoming the new norm.
For each stage of the buying cycle, marketing can make a difference by engaging prospects and clients and communicating segmented value propositions not “1 to 1” but “1 to many,” educating the audience and allowing sales reps to spend less time prospecting, (which they hate) and more time, closing deals.
In this way, marketing works at the “top of the funnel” by setting the stage and bringing in leads. It doesn’t stay there and moves down through lead nurturing and qualification programs so when sales steps in they already know what the customer or prospect has read, what he or she is interested in, and instead of wasting precious time presenting the company and the product, sales can learn more about what type of challenge is driving this person to action and can focus on the right solution.
Because there was work done beforehand, sales can now work more deals, and since the leads are already qualified, they can be more effective in closing deals.
Digital has revolutionized the way marketers work today. It brought down geographical barriers and opened up markets on a global scale, enabling and facilitating contacting target groups in a simpler, more efficient and less costly way.
No longer are marketers solely measured on the size of their budget but, more importantly, on how they use the budget to create value to the organization and support sales. Marketing is now in a position to deliver qualified leads and also get feedback and insight about what type of pain your product is trying to address, who your customers are, as well as explaining why your product is better.
Saying that the future holds a symbiotic relationship between marketing and sales or that the modern company will only have one team may be a bit farfetched for the time being, but it’s unquestionable that the way forward is to have marketing and sales aligned with a joint mission, creating value. Those who master this new game will be the real winners…the rest will be a footnote in history.
Nuno Periquito is a seasoned marketing executive with over 15 years of experience in B2B marketing, innovation, and technology. He has established an established track record of accelerating opportunities through the sales pipeline and driving demand through event management, demand generation programs and campaigns. He is a collaborative leader with proven success in managing multinational teams and working cross-functionally throughout the organization.
By Maeve O’Malley
EMEA Marketing Manager
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The wheels are turning, and we see our customer sitting comfortably in the driver’s seat, as we marketers struggle to grasp the speed of change and the evolving needs of these customers.
To succeed today, an organization requires a mix of traditional and agile marketing, a focus on breaking down barriers within the organization, a process for listening to the customer, the ability to respond in real-time, and tools that allow true engagement. Yes, all of these are the core competencies needed to build an effective digital marketing strategy!
How can a brand turn the ever-changing customer roadblocks into opportunities, and enable an effective digital marketing strategy?
With 75% of B2B buyers now using social media to research vendors, social media has given the customer a voice and visibility like never seen before. Companies need to focus on how to be social and how social media can help deliver results.
Analytics is the cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy, so don’t let big data stress your marketing department. It will allow you to learn more about your customer, identify growth opportunities and target your ideal customers, thus focusing your marketing. Personalization, is a key way to get closer to your customer, and it is only possible with marketing analytics.
Understanding your customer and their needs and their wants allows you to deliver targeted communications and build a credible relationship with them. Ideally over time, you become their trusted advisor.
Once you know your customer, a good content strategy with consistent, authentic content is crucial. Your communications should direct customers to relevant and targeted information, allow you to engage real time and measure and achieve business results.
Hand in hand with a good content strategy is a strong, organic SEO strategy. Use both strong content and an informed SEO strategy to create visibility and a consistent, steady amount of traffic to your website.
Planning the Customer Journey
In today’s fast-paced world, where technology and the customer continue to evolve in unpredictable ways, the customer journey can be unpredictable too. Your brand’s multi-channel strategy should showcase your brand personality and allow you to measure these various channels, both online and offline. All of the touchpoints along the journey should be streamlined and connected, to allow for a good customer experience across all devices.
It bears repeating that analytics allows you to identify customer needs at different points along their buyer’s journey and therefore allows you to deliver the right “snackable” content at the right time. The current rise in interactive content such as quizzes and games shows how quickly the journey can change direction. Whether you’re an SMB or a large enterprise, video should be high on the list of digital marketing strategy priorities. Video and mobile create the highest engagement and emotions between people and the brand.
Of key importance along the journey is delivering a differentiated customer experience at each stage and across any device. This may pose some challenges for some marketers, but exploring your journey is vital for any business.
With so much emphasis on social platforms and social engagement, companies must not forget about the importance of their company website, which can offer a reliable base along the customer’s journey. This is where the main engagement happens, such as a purchase, the download of a whitepaper, contacting a company representative or even live chat. All are examples of meaningful engagement with the customer.
Lagging or Overtaking the Competition
Benchmarking against your competitors is key to the success of your digital marketing strategy. You must place particular emphasis on the digital marketing strategies most likely to deliver results. Listening to the market through social media can help you understand the market and what your share of voice is in the marketplace; however primary research is key to understanding where you stand in comparison to your competitors and other industries. This will help you focus on innovation and remain ahead of the curve.
The Speedometer
Many businesses are not sure what they want from their social platforms. They are uncertain how to measure and place trust that these platforms will deliver the KPI’s they need for lead generation.
The difficulty is measuring the success of digital marketing. What can your social channels deliver in terms of KPI’s? Organizations need to focus less on the ‘vanity metrics’ and more on the more ‘meaningful metrics.’ A lot of the marketing budget is spent on getting people to a company’s branded channels, however the most important metric to focus on is engagement.
The Journey to Success
Overall, organizations need to take their own road to success and build their own unique strategy based on their particular needs. In the end, all marketers share a common goal, to enhance the customer experience by improving efficiency and removing inconsistencies along the customer journey.
But the real key to success is to remember that you are not developing a “digital marketing strategy,” you are merely developing a “marketing strategy” in this digital world. There is no one-size-fits-all and no magic recipe to ensure digital marketing success.
Maeve has over 16 years of experience in the IT sector and currently leads the Digital Marketing Project Management Office for Hewlett Packard Enterprise across Europe, Middle East and Africa, also known as EMEA.
She is a passionate digital marketing leader with experience driving Social Listening, Digital Strategy, Influencers Programmes and Demand Generation activities to build new business across the countries in EMEA.
By Ricky Coussins
Managing Partner
Coussins Associates Marketing Consultancy
“We are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring. Our technologies are racing ahead
but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.” These words, somewhat prophetically stated by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their 2011 book, Race Against The Machine, were never more appropriately quoted and brought home than at Digital Marketing Europe: A Frost and Sullivan’s Executive MindXchange, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in late January. The event theme was “Digital Transformation: Leading Marketing’s Revolution.”
So what did we learn about how to catch up with all the technology? In order of appearance, here are my personal top 10 take-aways from the event:
- Customers Make Un-Intermediated Buying Choices
Our keynote speaker on Day 1 – Simon Hall – former Chief Marketing Officer of Dell UK, noted that 50 to 70% of the purchaser’s decision is complete before they ever engage the vendor. The funnel of Awareness, Consideration, Preference Formation and Purchase is no longer controlled by sales. This means that our communications have to be influencing the decision everywhere before any intermediation takes place.
- Build Personas From the Individual Customer Upwards
Acer’s Global Digital Marketing Director - Francesco Federico - suggested that we should build personas from an individual customer upwards, finding similar audiences to individuals rather than aggregating from the top down starting with the macro – we have ‘n’ customers in this predetermined segment.
- Digital Does Not Belong To The Marketing Department
From our Day 1 panel session came the point that Digital, and, by implication, Digital Marketing, does not fit in boxes. It traverses many parts of the organization – it drives the e-commerce and IT agenda, touches operations, customer service and back office functions as well as that of marketing. That means digital marketers have to collaborate with many different parts of the organization that, traditionally, they have had little or no relationship with. Building relationships across the organization is now a priority.
- Digital Isn’t Free
As one of the panelists pointed out, digital isn’t free as some C- level managers would like to think. Doing it well involves considerable investment.
- Market Digital Marketing
A key concept that echoed through many of the presentations and discussions was the importance of marketing digital marketing to our own organization. Aligning individuals and departments, selling the concepts, processes and the investment needed to our C-level colleagues should form a key part of the digital marketing leader’s work. Especially as almost all C-level managers are not from the digital generation.
- People Buy Emotionally
On Day 2 our keynote speaker - Monika Schulze, Global Head of Marketing at Zurich Insurance Group, reminded us that most people make decisions based on emotion. She pointed out that we can use story-telling techniques to tell longer and powerfully emotional stories in the digital space. As long as the story connects to the brand and is a positive one, this approach can be highly persuasive.
- The Buyers Journey Is Iterative
Lucio Furlani, Vice President, Marketing, EMEA, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, pointed out that we need to understand that the buyer’s journey is no longer linear but iterative and that we need to plan our content for each of the points of iteration in the journey.
- We Are All B2P Marketers
Lucio, in addressing the topic of why B2Bs should sit up and take notice of consumer trends, also made the point that he does not do B2B or B2C but B2P – Business To People.
- We Need To Have A Content Strategy
Giuseppe Caltabiano, Vice President, Marketing Integration at Schneider Electric noted that in most organizations, there are too many ‘digital publishers’ and too much unplanned and unconnected content origination. It is therefore key to have a comprehensively developed content strategy and that strategy should define the channels to be used – the channel strategy, rather than letting the channel define the content.
- Customer Digital Behavior Is Changing Faster Than Our Ability To Adapt
Finally, Luisella Giani, Head of Digital Strategy, Axalta Coating Systems, made the point that we must understand that the world of digital marketing is fast changing. We need organizations that can see these changes and are willing to rapidly adapt to them in order to keep up.
Of course, over the two day event, there were many more take-aways than the 10 I have selected to discuss here! But, even if some of them are already familiar to you, I hope the above provided you with a few insights and gave you a sense of the ideas and applications discussed at the event. To say the event was stimulating and thought provoking is an understatement. It was a key opportunity to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the “race against the machine” that is the ever changing world of digital marketing.
Ricky Coussins career in marketing began in the early 1970s when he worked for the multinational conglomerate Litton Industries. He later joined Xerox where he worked in sales and then marketing with a responsibility for exploring the potential of new products.
In the early 1980’s he moved to British Telecom where he was Head of Packaged Software Products in their Systems House Business. He later moved into the Mobile Communications division as a Networks Marketing Manager. Ricky started his marketing consultancy, Coussins Associates, in 1989. They supply outsourced marketing services across the whole spectrum of the strategic and tactical marketing mix, including digital marketing communications.
By Manuel Dieguez
Digital & IT Business Partner
Back in 1956, noted marketer Wendell R. Smith described market segmentation as a “rational and more precise adjustment of product and marketing effort to consumer or user requirements.” Since then, market segmentation has helped to reduce market complexity by dividing each large, heterogenous market into smaller markets composed of distinct groups of buyers with homogenous needs, characteristics or behaviors.
Companies can increase their responsiveness to elements of the marketing mix by being more precise in identifying unmet customer needs for each market segment. Most of these segments are usually defined by:
- Geography, which consists of dividing a market into different geographical units, such as nations, states, regions, cities or neighborhoods.
- Demography, which consists of dividing a market into groups based on demographic variables such as age, sex, income, occupation, education, religion, race and nationality.
- Culture and psychology, which consists of dividing a market into different groups based on social class, lifestyle or personality characteristics.
- Behavior, which consists of dividing a market into groups based on consumer knowledge, attitude, use or response to a product.
In addition to these categories, we could add an internal segmentation based upon “customer potential.” For example, variables that did not increase marketing efficacy (it didn’t help us to better understand customers’ needs and requirements) but it did help us to prioritize company resources and increase marketing efficiency.
Digital changes everything…or doesn’t it?
Yet, despite the importance of good market segmentation, many companies still struggle to adapt their strategies to the digital world, continuing to use geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral market segmentation approaches based on past data, behavioral assumptions and small sample sizes. One frequently sees them struggling to fit their customers into pre-defined, segmented classifications that are no longer relevant or that, in reality, do not exist.
For these companies, the good news is that most of the traditional segments may still apply, although segmentations based on geography or customer potential are losing significance. The bad news is that they will have to radically change how and when these segments are defined and how they evolve.
So, how do current marketing trends affect market segmentation techniques? Let’s look at the impact of the key trends of 2016:
- Content Marketing. Content is still king, but the royal family is more diverse than ever. Instruments like content curation, content co-creation, social media marketing, SEO and SEM, signal that customers are not the passive content consumers that they used to be. They will search for their own sources of content, assess the value and compare it with the content from your competitors. They may also promote, criticize and even modify or create your content.
Segmentation impact: Your content and your content platforms are products of your company. Design your own marketing mix to effectively compete in the segments for which they have been created, while giving the customer the ability to tailor their own content experience and choose freely: Don’t fence your customers into one “content segment”.
- Big Data. What can we do with all the rich data obtained from customer interactions and their behaviors? With traditional behavioral segmentation, customers could be tagged based upon similar customers who had performed a specific behavior in the past. With digital tools and big data, modeling approaches can predict for each customer the likelihood of performing a behavior in the future. This shift will not only help you to better understand customer’s needs and their probable future actions, but will also increase the efficacy of your segmentation.
Segmentation impact: Look for compelling segmentation models that integrate customer preferences, behaviors and needs, AND also predict future customer behaviors. Redefine and create new segments as the data evolves: Obtain insights to cluster your customers into segments based upon predicted behaviors.
- Marketing Automation. There are plenty of marketing tools out there to help you to more effectively market on multiple channels, and to automate repetitive tasks. They will help you to personalize your interactions and, in some cases, will tempt you to create micro-segments, or even unipersonal segments.
Segmentation impact: Regardless of the level of your marketing efforts (mass marketing, segment marketing, niche marketing or micro marketing), your product, content or interaction should feel relevant and valuable to your customers. Remember that “relevance” is always more powerful than “personal”: Personalize, but don’t creep your customers out.
So, let’s go back to the beginning of marketing segmentation, 60 years ago, when Wendell R. Smith published his seminal article. He would probably be surprised by the endurance of what he described as “a brief and temporary phenomenon.” And, most likely, he would be amazed by the possibilities that lie ahead.
Manuel Dieguez is an experienced leader in the technology and pharmaceutical industries. He has a Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering and a CIO Pocket MBA from Boston University School of Management. Throughout his career, he has led product and process transformations across multiple functions and geographies. He is passionate about digital transformation, digital marketing and behavioral influences, and is an avid follower of technology trends and their impact on society.
Manuel may be found on LinkedIn at https://es.linkedin.com/in/dieguezmanuel and Twitter at @manueldieguez
By David Romero
Chief Marketing Officer
Altitude Software
Done. You´ve got it. You’ve just been hired by one of the most important B2B companies in the world. You’re the new Marketing Director. You can even picture your future business cards.
Then comes your first day…and your first dose of reality. The most digital piece of equipment in sight is the calculator. So, your first challenge: How do you implement a digital strategy in a B2B ecosystem and, of course, how do you succeed?
Let´s do it. First things first. Do not try to change everything immediately. It won´t happen. Let´s make a plan. It should look like this:
- Assessment. You know the market, you know your product, you know your sales forces and you know the competition, your ears are open… Ready to start. To start designing a good digital strategy you need to settle your pillars. Moreover, prioritize them: website, social media channels, apps…
- Strategy. OK, you have your media. Let´s position the company. Now you need to work on the content, the most important thing. Some tips: Before creating any content, define your target “personas”. The only way to deliver your message is by knowing your target. Content creation means understanding the audience. Follow the trends as you create new trends; best ideas happen from the unexpected. Do not forget when creating content that it should be discoverable on the internet and easy to consume.
- Implementation. So we have…what, where, why and to whom. Let´s go for it. Having a responsive website, full of SEO-friendly content and with a straightforward e-commerce (if necessary) is a MUST today.
- Go beyond this. In order to be “visible” on the internet, why don´t you work on a blog? This is the right place to deliver your content; it will help you with organic positioning and you will save a lot of money on Google AdWords. It will also help you to position your company as a thought leader; building a reputation should always be one of your top priorities. If by chance you happen to leave some call to actions in there you will see how conversions increase…
- Make content accessible. Entry blogs are always welcome, but if you have a look at your website analytics you will see how mobile readers are pushing hard. So, infographics, multimedia and interactive content should be an important piece of your content strategy.
- Get social. What is a website in 2016 without a social flavor? To be social is not only about using Twitter or LinkedIn icons and sharing content …. You must allow comments, allow visitor recommendations, likes and more …it will help you to hear from your customers or prospects. From time to time, online surveys (please, “super short” surveys) will also help your social media strategy. Make it viral. Today’s social media is a worldwide showcase, a virtual playground for your messages…and the place where you can interact with your community.
- Select the appropriate channels… there are no rules. I just recommend that you focus. There´s no point in opening all social media channels and then not using them. LinkedIn always sounds interesting for B2B environments….but it’s not your only option. Of course, Twitter would help, Facebook and Instagram as well…but why aren’t you using Vine? Short videos breathe fresh air into your old fashioned strategy! Remember, let´s follow trends and let’s create new ones!
- Measure. Adjust. Perform. (Repeat) This is what it´s all about… The game has just started. Review everything from the beginning; you will find missing pieces, redundancies, and, hopefully, a new point of view.
David is the Chief Marketing Officer of Altitude Software. He leads and oversees the company’s global integrated marketing activities, with a special focus on lead and pipeline generation, both online and offline. David has almost 20 years of marketing management experience, specifically in the B2B Information Technology industry. He was previously Head of Marketing for Businesses at ONO, a leading Telco in Spain. He began his career at Jazztel, and had marketing management roles at Sage and Polycom.
