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What Does ‘Marketing Strategy’ Really Mean?

September 3, 2019 No Comments

By Shannon Prage

John Wanamaker, marketing pioneer of the 19th century, is famously quoted to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Though this statement was made more than 100 years ago, I believe it still rings true for many business-to-business technology companies.

As the founder and president of a B2B marketing firm, I know that unlike Wanamaker, modern companies have advanced marketing automation and analytics platforms at their fingertips. But these platforms alone can’t build a solid strategy. They need input.

Why Marketing Strategy Matters

In the quest to automate marketing journeys with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it’s easy to overlook the essential element that defines your product or service’s value to the market.

“Marketing strategy” is a loose term few fully understand. It’s not the same as marketing planning or a go-to-market strategy. Let’s define the terms:

• A marketing strategy details a company’s long-term marketing goals and objectives.

• Marketing planning aims to achieve marketing strategy goals with tactical activities and campaigns.

• A go-to-market strategy is the value proposition launched to potential customers. It’s often attached to a company, product or service launch.

The challenge most companies run into, especially in the B2B technology space, is failing to create marketing strategies that are supported by qualitative and quantitative research.

Anyone can write a marketing strategy, but if it’s lacking a clear value proposition based on customer research and buyer personas, it’s unlikely to move your business forward.

Elements Of An Effective Marketing Strategy

The most successful marketing strategies contain three core elements: deep customer knowledge, distinct branding and messaging, and market analysis.

Let’s dig deeper.

1. Understand your customers.

This sounds simple. You probably already have some idea of who your ideal customers are. But do you really know them?

Assuming, rather than asking questions, is where many marketing organizations run into trouble. Quality customer research takes time and needs to be updated a least once per year.

To truly know your customers, you must understand:

• What they want.

• What pains them.

• Where they’re searching for in a solution.

• How to reach them (i.e., content, social media, email, website, etc.).

These dynamics change, and without proper feedback loops, you could miss out on important shifts and opportunities within the marketplace.

At many of the companies we work with, time and resources get in the way of creating and updating effective buyer personas. If companies have them at all, they’re often a few years old and at the bottom of someone’s priority list to update. The companies we see generating the greatest return on investment commit to refreshing customer research and buyer personas annually.

If you are performing the customer research yourself, this yearly refresh may take the form of a nice sample size of interviews with your newest customers to evaluate and restudy their buying patterns. The findings should be captured and collected in a consistent way and shared across your teams so they can be operationalized.

2. Know your brand and messaging.

Clearly defined brands are remembered. Think of Apple or IBM: Their iconic branding didn’t pop up overnight. It was clearly defined, consistently presented and intelligently refreshed over time.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can use that data to build a strong brand and value proposition that attracts the right audience. Your value proposition is directly tied to the benefit(s) you offer customers and what sets you apart from your competitors. We find that studying buying patterns and asking the right questions about value and differentiation can give you direct insight into how a customer values and speaks about what sets you apart. Then the heavy work becomes storyboarding it and integrating it across your brand and messaging.

3. Keep tabs on your market position.

Anyone can say they’re No. 1 in a product or service category, but can they back it up? Making grand proclamations without supporting data can set your organization up for disappointment. To stay relevant:

• Routinely review competitor strategies.

• Compare your positioning to competitors.

• Identify what makes your organization special.

• Focus on your unique differentiators in messaging.

• Copyright key phrases and language that’s essential to your brand.

• Call out competitors that “borrow” your messaging.

How To Execute Your Marketing Strategy

Once you understand your customers and have clear branding and messaging and a way to track your market position, you’re ready to go to market. A strong go-to-market strategy should:

• Be multifaceted.

• Tell your story.

• Be scalable.

• Focus on customers.

The Bottom Line: Research First — Or Accept Mediocre Results

Before investing a dime on any marketing program or content creation, get to know your ideal target customer first. Skipping this essential first step will mean throwing thousands of dollars down the drain.

The companies we see achieving the highest returns on marketing investments spend time on intensive customer and market research to fully understand their customers and prospects before creating a single program or advertisement to try to catch their attention.

The research tools and resources exist to generate holistic buyer personas that will empower your marketing team to craft more powerful and effective campaigns and messages.

It’s simple, really: Either invest the extra time and effort on customer and market research upfront or pay the price later in conversations.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Shannon Prager

Shannon Prager is President of Leadit Marketing, a marketing and demand gen agency focused on B2B tech and professional services companies. Read Shannon Prager’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Voice and Tone: An Integral Part of Your Email Marketing Strategy

September 2, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from www.squareup.com

Voice and tone determine what you say to customers, and how to say it.

Hitting the right voice and tone in emails ensures that you can reach your customers in a meaningful and authentic way. It may seem tricky at first, but we promise it’s easy once you get the basics down.

What is the difference between voice and tone?

Simply put, voice is what you say to your customers (the message) and tone is how you say it (the attitude with which you state your message).

Think of voice as the personality of your email –– how do you want to come across to your customers? Your voice should remain consistent throughout your messaging. To find your voice, think about the values of your company and what message you want to share with your audience.

Tone, on the other hand, is the attitude of what you’re saying in your email. And just like your attitude can change, so can your tone. Your tone can be whimsical, serious, or even funny — if that’s the attitude you’re trying to convey.

Finding your voice and tone

So now that you know what voice and tone are, how do you find them? That’s a great question. It depends on your goals for your email marketing strategy and overall brand.

If you’re new to email marketing and need help settling on your tone and voice, we recommend writing three different emails to express the same message — let’s say to offer a coupon for ten percent off a purchase. Write the email in three different voices to your ideal customer with what you would say to them about this coupon.

Once you’ve written three emails in three different voices, see which one resonates most with you. Which email sounds most like you and represents your brand the most authentically? Have it? Great – that’s your voice.

Now, let’s move to tone. Do you want your emails to feel silly, heartfelt, or maybe even objective in your emails? Again, test out a few different email by taking the email that you wrote to find your voice and now try out a few different tones with that message. How does that feel? Are you presenting your audience with the right attitude?

After you’ve settled on your tone, take note of your voice and tone with a few words that can act as your North Star when you’re writing your email. For instance, perhaps your voice is conversational, and your tone is funny. Write this information down and keep it next to you when you’re writing your marketing emails -— it will help you stay consistent in both voice and tone, which is incredibly important in marketing.

Using voice and tone in email marketing

This brings us to our next point: consistency. Once you’re comfortable (dare we say even excited?) about your voice and tone, it’s important that you stick with it. That’s not to say you can’t crack a joke here and there even if you have gone with a more formal tone, but for the majority of your emails, they should sound the same.

The more consistent you are with voice and tone, the more recognizable your brand will be to customers who receive your email. That consistency helps your email stand out from all of the other messages in their inbox.

Think of it this way: Your audience should be able to tell it’s your email even if they couldn’t see your shop’s name in the email — that’s how distinct you want your voice to be. So whether you’re writing a welcome or happy birthday email, you should let your North Star guide you.

Sourced from www.squareup.com

In News

How PepsiCo is ‘unlocking’ the potential of the healthy drinks market

August 30, 2019 No Comments

By Imogen Watson

As high fat and sugar drinks fall out of favour, PepsiCo UK is banking on premium and health-conscious consumers to drive demand for healthier options on the market.

With investors increasingly reluctant to commit to soft drink and energy stocks, The Drum spoke with PepsiCo UK’s top marketer to learn why it is scaling its sugar-free options in order to diversify their portfolios (or protect their market share).

“The big growth that we’ve observed across our beverage brands has been around no sugar” explained Natalie Redford, marketing director of PepsiCo UK. “We’re really unlocking what that means.” This shift is being seen around the globe.

“I think it’s the new norm,” Redford said. “Guilt-free, but not compromising. It’s proven really successful for us in the UK.”

And while the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ups its focus on cutting down high fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS) advertising, Redford said PepsiCo UK has responded to Government consultation relating to further advertising restrictions for products high in fat, salt and sugar.

“The great thing about the beverages and brands that I look after in my portfolio, and the ones that we advertise are no-sugar beverages that fall outside of the HFSS category,” Redford said.

Of all carbonated brands included in her UK portfolio, Pepsi Max tops the sugar-free market for cola, and 7up Free leads the lemon and lime.

PepsiCo UK is channelling this healthier alternative approach through its advertising.

In a first of its kind event for the 7up Free brand, this weekend, PepsiCo UK has launched a pop-up shop to commemorate the return of its chilled-out 90s mascot, Fido Dido.

“We wanted to use the ‘free’ in 7up Free to mean more than just no sugar,” Redford said. “We wanted to use the free to make a more ’emotional connection’ with our customers.”

With this thought in mind, Fido Dido House is an ‘anti-pop-up.’ While people normally ‘do do do,’ PepsiCo UK created an experience that allowed people to opt-out of the frenzy of hectic life, to feel free to just ‘be.’

Premiumisation

It claimed consumers are demanding more premium products; PepsiCo UK is increasing investment in this space.

In 2017, PepsiCo first launched Lifewtr - a premium water bottle brand – in North America in a bid to rival Coca-Cola’s Jennifer Aniston-endorsed Smartwater.

Serving as a canvas to showcase emerging artists’ work, the brand caters to the need for healthier alternatives to carbonated, sugary drinks, while supporting arts and culture. Now, Lifewtr has launched in the UK market as Arto Lifewtr.

Redford spoke how “premiumisation is definitely a trend that [PepsiCo] is going exercise more of in the next five years and it’s happening at every level.”

She puts it down to the breadth and depth as a company that means PepsiCo can play across those segments and foresees this will be a general direction for the brand as it steps out from the more mainstream drinks industry.

“We’re thinking how our brand can be served in a more premium way,” Redford detailed. “Whether that be a premium experience or a premium product.”

While moving towards healthier options is undoubtedly a strategic move for PepsiCo, it isn’t always an easy one. It’s main competitor Coca-Cola has to axe its Life brand, after-sales slumped in the UK, whereby the product accounted for less than 1% of its trademark sales.

Feature Image Credit: PepsiCo

By Imogen Watson

Sourced from The Drum

In News

The Sad Tyranny of an Inbound-Only Approach to Winning Clients

August 27, 2019 No Comments

By Anthony Iannarino

Each of us is a prisoner to our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our interpretation of reality, as well as what we believe is good and right and true. Our interpretation can constrain our thoughts, and those thoughts can restrict our actions, even when other people have different beliefs, ones that increase their choices instead of limiting them. Those constraints can be a form of self-imposed tyranny.

For the last decade, since Web 2.0 and the advent of the social channels, there has been a significant push towards Inbound Marketing. The ability to create and share content to share with your prospective clients changed marketing, eliminating the need for a budget, an agency, or most importantly, permission to publish. For the better part of this period, salespeople, sales leaders, and sales organizations have been sold the idea that Inbound is more effective than Outbound, with the loudest voices suggesting that outbound and cold outreach is no longer necessary. They have also suggested that salespeople and sales organizations that employ an outbound approach will soon be out of business, that no one will work with people companies that use cold outreach.

Inbound-only is not a strategy that any salesperson or sales organization should consider. The result is an opportunity-starved sales force, and on that is reliant on others.

100 Pieces of Content

Recently, a well-known social media marketer suggested that people create 100 pieces of content, a strategy this individual executes perfectly, with help from a large team and a massive investment of both time and money. The inbound-only proponents applauded the idea as an excellent idea. While it might be helpful for an individual working to develop a well-recognized brand, and a terrible idea for salespeople, and one that would be impossible to execute.

Imagine a sales force of 200 salespeople. Each salesperson creates a single blog post each week. First, someone is going to have to approve the content, another person will have to edit the content, marketing will have to vet the content, and in many industries, legal will have to consent to the publication. There is no reason for a sales force to create 10,400 pieces of content a year, and there is no marketing professional who approves a strategy that would create confusion and chaos.

Let’s set aside this extreme misinterpretation of a strategy for personal brand building as a sales strategy, and look at the real problem with an inbound-only approach.

Passivity and Waiting

Nothing about selling lends itself to passivity or waiting. The idea that one must sit patiently, waiting for content to bring them leads and opportunities might be one of the most debilitating and destructive beliefs to take hold in some organizations. The idea that content will cause people to beat a path to your door is every salesperson’s dream; what could be easier than merely taking orders? What could be better?

There is a reason we use the word “hunter” to describe salespeople. It signifies one that has to go out work to be able to feed themselves. We ‘don’t describe salespeople as fishermen or fisherwomen; the idea that someone would put a line in the water and wait for a bite, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how hungry they might be is a non-starter.

For many reasons, there is no waiting in sales. Unlike most other areas of business, salespeople have a quota, a time-bound goal. With each day that slips by without the salesperson creating new opportunities, the deadline gets closer. Waiting is a dangerous strategy and a choice that isn’t available to salespeople or companies that intend to grow.

A Detrimental Reliance on Others

Some people with sales titles believe that inbound should replace outbound, that it is marketing’s responsibility to bring them leads. When salespeople complain about leads not being qualified, what they are suggesting is that marketing should bring them “opportunities,” a prospect that is “ready-to-buy.” Marketing has its metrics and goals, and “new opportunities” ‘isn’t likely to be found among them. The idea that a salesperson should rely on marketing is to misunderstand the difference in the roles and goals.

Not only does an inbound-only approach cause one to rely on marketing, but it also requires them to rely heavily on luck (even though Luck loves a hustler and ignores non-hustlers). Inbound requires your dream client to open their browser, navigate to a search engine, and type it some keyword that an algorithm directs to your website. You have to rely on your client searching, the algorithm to deliver them to you, and the content to cause them to reach out to you proactively.

A Sad Form of Tyranny

The idea that your results are not within your control or influence is an unhealthy belief, and especially harmful for salespeople. Having to wait for someone else to proactively reach out to them before being able to engage with a person or company who would benefit from their help is to accept that you have no agency, that you are nothing more than a victim of circumstances beyond your control.

There is no question that inbound marketing is important, that it should be done and done well, and that it is a powerful form of marketing that can and does help sales organizations. But inbound is ancillary to an effective outbound approach, one that includes cold outreach. Outbound is greater than Inbound.

By Anthony Iannarino

Sourced from IANNARINO

In News

Think Tank: Changing Marketing Tactics When Temps Rise

August 27, 2019 No Comments

By Kyle Flaherty

Kyle Flaherty, chief marketing officer at Zaius, offers insights into engaging consumers when the summer heats up.

Unless your target audience lives somewhere lucky enough to experience hot weather year-round, your customers’ behavior is bound to change as the temperature rises and vacation auto-responders go up this summer.

Whether you’re a swimsuit brand gearing up for your busiest buying season or a ski brand making it through a slow buying season, seasonal buying can have a huge impact on revenue.

But many business owners may not realize the impact the summer months will have on their customer behavior: from increased vacation time to summer hours to more time on mobile than at their desks. And as your buyers’ behaviors change, your marketing must as well.

So how do you shift your marketing to effectively reach your customers during the summer months? Your marketing team has the answer at their fingertips.

Historical customer behavior helps you understand how this season typically shifts your business and come up with interactions to create an ideal customer experience. It takes a little forethought, sure, but it’s not too late to adjust your marketing strategy to reach your buyers effectively as the temperatures rise.

Analyze last summer’s buying habits

The key to great marketing is simple: know your buyers. The more you know about how your buyers behave, the better you can tailor your marketing to their preferences and habits. This applies to all of your marketing activities, but can be especially powerful during seasonal ebbs and flows in your business.

For example, if you look at your customer data from last summer in detail, you may notice that your most popular line of products slightly underperformed, while another line did fantastically well in comparison. You may also notice that your share of site traffic from mobile jumped 15 percent overall and your best channel for promotion was Instagram.

These examples are all speculation, but by digging deep into your own customer data, you can find out what holds true for your business. With that data in hand, you can adjust your overall marketing strategy to take advantage of your buyers’ behavior and reach them where they are this summer.

Adjust your promotion mix

The same promotions that you use throughout the year may not resonate as well for buyers during the summer. Many of your buyers are likely on their mobile devices more frequently in the summer because they’re outside — whether by the pool or on the beach. If your customer data tells you this is true for your audience, it’s a huge opportunity to increase your investment in social ads and pull back on other channels.

In the summer, your brand should likely:

decrease investment in search ads;
increase investment in social ads,
and explore traditional ads like magazines or billboards in areas with summer tourism.

These are just a few examples, but you should run a number of A/B tests to assess whether changing up your promotions during the summer results in better conversion rates for your ads. Again, your business is unique and so are your buyers — so test everything!

Promote summer-friendly products

Going back to your customer data, you can see what products and brands perform the best during the summer months. Depending on your business and what you sell, the products that perform best may be obvious, or completely surprising.

For example, it only makes sense that if your business sells ski equipment, the summer may be a bit slow no matter what line of products you promote, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative. For example, a ski brand could have a mega-hyped summer sale to clear out excess inventory and drive revenue during slower months. But brands shouldn’t just send the same sale message to everyone — send personalized product recommendation campaigns to your buyers to drive higher conversion rates on the sale.

In comparison, a swimsuit brand should significantly increase its paid marketing spend for its busiest season. Using segment sync and lookalike campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, the team could identify similar buyers to their most loyal customers and make the most of their campaign spend during the most profitable season.

Either way your business shifts, you should use customer data to power your summer marketing campaigns and make sure your business adjusts to the season. Don’t get stuck with underperforming marketing campaigns this summer — be proactive and drive real revenue for your brand.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock / i like photo

Kyle Flaherty is chief marketing officer at Zaius.

By Kyle Flaherty

Sourced from WWD

In News

Seven step guide to turbo charge growth

August 23, 2019 No Comments

By Olivia Atkins

It can be difficult for SMEs to remain competitive today, but AdRoll’s new report ‘The Ultimate Guide to Growth’ provides a detailed step-by-step guide to help small to mid-sized businesses, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs to accelerate their growth. The robust report is split into seven categories with each providing case studies and takeaway lessons.

Identifying audiences

The report stresses the importance of marketers to first determine their ideal customer, knowing this then allows them to accurately target them. It cites various characteristics to look out for when compiling customer profiles and suggests that marketers should also tap into customer geographics and work on understanding their online behavioural habits. Empathising with their customers’ needs will help marketers to capitalise on their audience’s activity.

Understanding competitors

While getting to know your customers is important, the report also urges marketers to understand how their competitors operate, so that they can have a strong understanding of their positioning in the market. Marketers should conduct research and analysis on their competitors to work out where marketplace opportunities and threats lie, as well as keep a close eye on their opponent’s messaging.

Know your USP

Key differentiators set companies apart, so identifying these – no matter how big or small they are – is vital. The guide advises marketers to focus on your key attributes but encourages them to avoid concentrating on replicable differentiators such as new technologies or competitive prices as these can easily be beaten by competitors.

Marketing strategy creation

Marketing strategies should act as a roadmap for growing businesses with clear steps as to how to reach and engage new and existing customers. Working out the company’s value proposition will help. Marketers should consider where their customers are struggling and how they can help relieve their pain through the services they offer. They should then develop messaging to reflect this strategy, set attainable goals and create a realistic marketing budget to ensure that progress can be tracked.

Using marketing tactics

The marketing strategy set out earlier in the guide will provide marketers with clear business goals and budgets. Working out actionable tactics and which marketing channels to push marketing messages out on is essential. The report suggests looking at AdRoll’s digital advertising tactics and offers marketers the opportunity to sync up their e-commerce website with their growth platform to attract new visitors and convert existing prospects.

Creating content assets

Marketers should work out which type of content asset will suit their strategy best; the report provides pros and cons of using visual, written and ad content formats, with advice on how best to combine content assets to save on time and avoid duplication. The guide reminds marketers that ad sizes and formats also vary according to each platform, so messages need to be punchy and to the point for them to be effective.

Implementing and testing

Testing is one of the most important steps in the digital marketing growth journey. The report suggests that ads don’t need to be perfect before going live and encourages marketers to experiment with different renditions of ads to see how audiences respond. Various techniques for testing are listed, ensuring that marketers can get the most out of the experiments they do on ads, so that they know what to look out for.

Measurement

The guide advises marketers to build quantifiable KPIs and metrics that correspond to the business strategy and goals outlined earlier. Marketers should look at various analytics tools and work out which would best suit their business, but the report urges them to continue testing tactics to ensure that processes and information are consistently refined throughout the journey. Attribution models can also help marketers to gain better insight into consumer purchase habits.

Feature Image Credit: The Ultimate Guide to Growth report, with AdRoll

By Olivia Atkins

Sourced from The Drum

In News

What this global B2B marketing chief has to say about transformation

August 22, 2019 No Comments

By Nadia Cameron

HCL EVP of sales and marketing shares how he’s worked to transform the IT service company’s brand, marketing and collaboration approach.

Marketing can’t just be about classical marketing principles today, it has to have a higher-level purpose and be the glue adhering an organisation together, HCL’s Arthur Filip believes.

“You have to fill in the gaps and be the lubrication between a lot of different engine parts,” the global EVP of sales and marketing of the technology services behemoth says. “We’ve really adopted this mentality in our team.

“We don’t just do all the things expected of us; we also get involved in many other areas to support and keep the company moving in the right direction.”

Getting there meant working closely with the CEO, and putting a hand in strategy through to tactics with each major HCL business leader.

“I have specific managers day-to-day interfacing with these leaders and I interface with them formally and informally,” Filip tells CMO. “We know these business leaders don’t care about eyeballs onsite either, or MQLs. It’s about revenue and satisfaction growing, if they can attract more customers in the market, if partners want to work more with us, and if customers want to testify on their behalf. I’m constantly reminding the team that’s our goal.”

Filip joined HCL in 2016 initially as VP of sales, and was tasked with a sales transformation remit. Nearly 18 months ago, he also took on the marketing leadership position. The role comes off the back of more than 25 years in the information technology space, working in sales, strategy and business unit leadership positions for the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Filip says his approach was always going to be to transform by putting the customer first. “I came in working for the CEO to lead the company’s sales transformation effort. I was an instigator and spark plug but it took all leaders coming together to do that,” he explains.

“We were doing a good job but what we’d realised was that with our biggest customers, where the relationships are just so large and complex, we needed to be even more bespoke and put in more red carpet treatment for those clients.

“At the same time, we’re constantly attracting new clients and it’s a different sales model and motion. We had to think about care and feeding of the sales force, more delineation between sales motions, and how to get granular in our thinking not only about every country, but cities and industry segments.”

Filip focused on honing the new business team and client partner model, and says he’s worked to create a super-class of relationship leaders globally. As leader of the marketing function, he’s since instigated a transformation aimed at taking advantage of HCL’s global footprint while also making sure it’s sympathetic and respond to local cultures and market needs.

“We are very woven into all the sales and business units, from strategy and brand down to how we work with clients on a daily basis, conduct events, marcomms and run analytics throughout the company,” he says of marketing. “My aim was to bring our great marketing leaders together to orchestrate as a team, looking at both global and local challenges we had.”

One of these hurdles was functional break-ups and discrete ways of doing things. “People had their own sciences and crafts to practice, whether it was our internal digital agency, brand team, content team,” Filip says.

“A lot of my focus has been to eliminate stovepipes, and to get the leadership team to take on each other’s challenges. We changed a lot of in-house metrics so we sink or swim together, along with the sales team and rest of the company.”

The biggest change has been around what ‘success’ is with HCL’s customers and in turn, their customers.

“It’s manifested exponentially in how people are working together and teaming together to orchestrate strategy through to specific campaigns,” Filip says.

Filip is also a big believer in getting teams around the table and solving it together. “It was painting the case for everyone –bring all talent together and we can look at the overall experience we can create for customers, and the type of data, analytics and view forward we can bring to the company,” he says.

Marketing strategy

HCL’s big emphasis is on its ecosystem, and Filip and the team have been overseeing internal and external celebrations marking the company’s milestones in different regions. The ‘global to local’ initiative includes celebrating 20 years in the A/NZ region, 30 years in the US and 10 years in the Nordics.

Another emphasis is on telling the stories of how HCL has worked with customers over its 42-year history.

“There are so many human stories where we helped clients be successful in so many communities,” Filip says. “Figuring out how to bring some common denominators together and our heritage, which is not just one country but people from 144 nations, for more of a common story and purpose, is key.”

This has to be a two-way street, rather than corporate reigning down on the local market, Filip says. “It’s an opportunity to both learn and share together and take best practices from different countries, cultural elements and customers to weave into our global brand,” he says.

“We have been known as a strong tech company and innovator, and a world-leading engineering services company, with very strong IT services. We’re the fastest growing company among the top 10 largest tech services companies globally, for eight quarters globally. Customers are buying into the value proposition; it’s now about bringing the whole story together.”

Corporate social responsibility plays a big part here. HCL has always focused on helping all types of people disadvantaged in life. As well as allowing its 137,000 employees to work with platforms they choose to further that cause, and sizeable investments into innovation labs and teams, HCL runs a number of diversity-oriented programs. One of these is Women Lead Australia, a one-to-one mentoring initiative now in its third edition this year.

“Diversity, from boardroom down, has become a key thing for HCL and we know the industry has to get better at this,” Filip says of the ICT sector. “It’s about very disciplined programs – from metrics, to every executive to specific hardcore board-driven programs – and we’ve made good progress. But we’re hungry for more.”

AI and B2B customer power

Filip also acknowledges HCL’s customer base is getting broader and more complex as every enterprise becomes reliant on digital and technology.

“Today, in every relationship it’s still primarily the CIO, or the chief digital officer, we’re dealing with, but the CMO, sales, line-of-business heads and CEOs are also getting involved, especially in strategic decisions. It’s really a collective fabric and that is how we’re trying to enhance our relationships,” he says. “Our goal is to bring our experience into bear to help marry the business problems with the technologies.”

Alongside strategy and partnerships with world-leading tech providers, this increasingly sees HCL tapping into the power of artificial intelligence (AI) via internal R&D, algorithms, partnerships and proprietary methodologies. HCL also partners with 20 companies on overall customer journey as well as how it thinks about markets to not only predict but run and govern its business.

“AI gives you specific technology through partners but also the power to create things you can’t see yet,” Filip says. “We’ve used basic AI to take care of repetitive tasks, speed up different parts of the customer journey. We’re now brainstorming with in-house labs on how we totally redefine how marketing is conducted within the organisation.”

A big area of focus is helping customers better predict their journey with their customers. “The better we get at that, the stronger our marketing is and the more value for the rest of the business,” he says.

Filip also agrees B2B marketers have the biggest ground to catch up on personalisation and says it’s clear enterprises relationships are far more one-to-one than many would previously have credited.

“Having just a relationship with a CIO or 2-3 procurement people, you’ll never be successful. In a very large organisation, there could be 2000 people you need to interact with to truly get a pulse on things and understand what truly makes them successful,” he points out. “If you don’t have those relationships, points of view, data elements around it and the technology to support it, I don’t know how many can remain successful in the next couple of years.”

Helping make this a reality is teams like digital, content and thought leadership along with external communications all working together with common purpose on accounts, Filip says.

“People do now speak in terms of the account, how we help crack the code in the account plan, and create an ecosystem experience that brings together the local community, government players, education players, business partners and we all solve a problem together,” he says. “It’s been a part of our culture; now we’re really doing it from a marketing perspective.”

In terms of ongoing priorities, Filip highlights HCL’s four core pillars of innovation, education, diversity, and CSR and sustainability.

“You’ll see us weave in everything from arts and sports, and the EQ side into our business,” he says. “One of our philosophies is human potential maximised and you’ll see that in campaigns, because that is what we stand for.”

By Nadia Cameron

Sourced from CMO from IDG

In News

6 Outdated Marketing Tactics You Need to Leave in the Past (Where They Belong)

August 20, 2019 No Comments

By Aimee Tariq

Promotional-only social media, paper-based marketing and poorly produced videos are on the “no-no” list. And who can forget that “Domino’s Forever” campaign?

Marketing is complex. With seemingly endless techniques, how do you reach and resonate with your audience? First things first: You need to know what you shouldn’t do. Last year, “Domino’s Forever” was a campaign created by a Russian Domino’s franchise. If customers tattooed the Domino’s logo on their skin, they were told, they’d get 100 free pizzas yearly for 100 years.

Initially, that strategy worked big-time: Although it may sound strange to us, hundreds of customers jumped in and started getting those tattoos. Yet, even as images of their freshly inked images flowed in, Domino’s imposed restrictions on its offer. Suddenly, the tattoos had a size limit; and only 350 newly tattooed people qualified for the reward. As you might guess, people were outraged.

Bad move, because customers who feel wronged don’t soon forget.

There’s science behind that statement: According to reporting in the Washington Post, “Research shows that memories for negative experiences are more vivid than those for positive experiences …” And those Domino’s customers certainly chalked up a negative experience.

So, if you’re the marketer, remember: It’s hard to make a good impression on a customer but really easy to make a bad impression, especially when it comes to marketing. Here are some moves not to make in marketing that date back to the past and shouldn’t still be with us in the present.

1. Trying to serve people en masse

Every person is unique, and you need to cater to that fact. Gone are the days of blanket personalization. According to a 2017 State of Personalization report by Segment, almost half of customers surveyed said they would likely be repeat buyers because of a personalized shopping experience.

If you’re not already collecting data on your customers and using it to target specific demographics through your marketing efforts, it’s time to start. Doing the bare minimum, like addressing a customer by his or her first name when you send a promotional email, simply isn’t enough anymore.

2. Putting ink on paper

What happens with most of the mail that comes to your house? What if a company, religious group or other organization drops off a brochure at your residence … do you read it? Chances are, you don’t.

That’s why experts are moving away from brochures and other paper-marketing techniques. Print marketing is expensive, time-consuming and often ineffective. Digital, on the other hand, can be fast, effective and cost-efficient.

3. Committing video production faux pas

Have you seen This Is a Generic Brand Video by Dissolve? If not, it’s worth watching. The video provides insight into the types of video marketing that don’t add up to much. Videos with stock content, vague business words and optimistic background music are outdated and overproduced.

“As percentages go, 91 percent of customers have watched a video about a product or service they care about,” Rohan Sheth, founder and CEO of GrowRev Digital, wrote in a blog post. If nine out of ten of your customers watch your videos, they need to get real value out of the content they see. Otherwise, they’ll stop viewing and start taking their business elsewhere.

4. Creating promotional-only social media

It’s easy to lose customers because of social media, especially if you use it only to advertise. Sure, marketing on social media is successful: According to Sprout Social, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from the companies they follow on social media. But making money should never be your sole purpose on the app.

After all, customers abandon brands that are overly promotional on social media. Before you think about social as an advertisement, consider how you can use it to drive engagement and strengthen your brand’s following.

5. Moving away from email

Some think email marketing is dead, but the jury is still out. According to a blog post by Keala Kanae, co-founder and CEO of AWOL Academy, “As a business owner at the current times, don’t let the social media frenzy trick you … email marketing isn’t dead … Undoubtedly, marketing your services or products by email can be a quick, manageable and cost-effective method of reaching new clients and keeping the existing ones.”

For example, think of Dell’s MarketingSherpa Email project. Thanks to a GIF-focused campaign, the company increased its revenue by 109 percent. Over email, Dell sent animated images that enticed viewers and led them down the sales funnel.

6. Failing to go beyond the basics

When it comes to analytics, the more the merrier. You’re probably already using some analytics to review your marketing efforts, but there are likely many techniques and metrics you’re not yet putting to good use.

Digital marketing is constantly changing, which means there are more analytics you can put into your marketing strategy than ever before. You may believe that the measures you’re currently using are fine, but they can likely be much better.

The more you study analytics and put them to use, the better your ROI will become.

Another thing: Don’t let outright marketing mistakes happen.

Customers may forgive, but they don’t forget; just ask H&M. Last year, the retailer published a photo of an African American child wearing a hoodie that read, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” The reaction on social media was swift and angry.

And, though the advertisement was posted in one country, it quickly gained traction around the world. Afterwards, H&M hired a “diversity leader” to try to disprove accusations that the company was at worst racist and at best oblivious.

Needless to say, making it in today’s business world is hard enough without bad marketing. Although outdated marketing tactics won’t always be detrimental to your brand, they certainly won’t help, either. Luckily, with a sound marketing plan, up-to-date tactics and some creativity, you can give customers what they want and improve your bottom line simultaneously.

Feature Image Credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images

By Aimee Tariq

Founder and CEO of A Life With Health

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Going From Impossible to Inevitable: A Case Study on Inbound Marketing

August 16, 2019 No Comments

By Brandon Redlinger

Startups are hard. In fact, in the beginning, it can seem nearly impossible. But startups are exciting. There’s nothing like the prospect of building something that can change the world. That will keep you going, and when you reach a certain point, your success goes from impossible to inevitable.

Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin know a thing or two about this. They’ve both been successful operators, but both consult countless companies, and they’ve written a book whose title says it all: From Impossible to Inevitable.

Aaron recently swung by the Engagio office, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a quick vlog. Aaron and Jason just released a revised and updated version of their book, which contains a lot of new ideas and all new case studies. So, we decided to chat about one of those case studies – how inbound has changed in the last 10 years. Yes, it’s the story of how Jon Miller did inbound in the early days at Marketo versus how we’re doing it at Engagio.

Here’s my conversation with Aaron. Enjoy!

(Watch on YouTube)

TRANSCRIPT:

– Alright, it’s Aaron Ross here, with Brandon Redlinger, who’s Director of Growth at Engagio. Brandon, thanks for hosting me here.

– Absolutely

– I came in off the plane I was like yeah, I’ll come by, let’s do a video.

– Let’s do a video!

– Why not And I couldn’t say no.

– Yeah

– I couldn’t say no.

– Okay

– So, this time for this updated book from Impossible to Inevitable, I can’t even say it sometimes, second edition. There’s a bunch of great new case studies in sections, like it is a pretty massive update. One of them is from my friend Jon Miller founder, CEO of Engagio. And I thought it was really interesting, because he was the original co-founder of Marketo. And so, this section here talks about the difference in 10 years between when Marketo was founded, and today with Engagio. So, I got one of the tips that I liked a lot, and I realize you’re just kind of like a foil for me to hear to talk, So one of the tips I liked, that Jon had to share was 10 years ago, and you can put up a blog post, and he said he could get it on the highly ranked keywords

– Show up on Google

– on page one, you know Jon Miller writes a post and BOOM!

– Boom!

– Then marketing comes flooding in, right.

– Yup

– All the leads come flooding in. So today he’s been working for three years to get on range for Account Based Marketing, he can’t even get on the first three pages or 10 pages. So two things, he said it’s really important to take an accountant-based approach, kinda mixing content marketing, with outbound prospecting, Account Based Marketing. You’re taking ideas, you’re taking to people, and that was much more a spears approach with marketing. And that was, in the book he he goes to these four tiers, so when you have tier one accounts, these big strategic accounts, you know Wales, like the true Wales, how do you treat them, verus tier two where you got the big companies versus tier three which means like mid-market, and tier four which is small business. So, I don’t know if in those different tiers that you guys use and talk about, love to hear maybe like a tip, if I’m trying to target the big enterprise, not like the, lets say the bigger companies.

– What’s a common mistake that you see companies make, whether their customers or not on Engagio? It’s account based marketing

– Yes, absolutely! So I think we run into this all the time.

– I’m putting him on the spot by the way

– Happy to take this on. People choose too many accounts, then when they take on

– That’s a good one

– Too much, and then they don’t have the resources or they don’t have the time, or the budget, or the people, to properly actually go after… ’cause your top tier accounts

– Top, top tiers

– Top, top tier, right

– Yeah

– We don’t have certain budget, we don’t have certain time, certain resources

– Okay, how many accounts, okay pick a number, how many accounts do you think is too many?

– For tier one?

– For tier one, the biggest ones, and then, ’cause you’re gonna guess too many. Like what would you say?

– Don’t go more than five.

– Five, right, five or fewer.

– We do not, I don’t think we have a rep right now that has five. That’s the most we allow, and I don’t think they do it. There are people, they say, I can do five, I can do five, they know what what their resources are, they know the SLAs they have to hit, they know what they need to do. But like a lot of people are like, oh I can easily do five, I can easily do it. And then

– Yup at the end of the day they’re like, you’re like hey, were you able to touch this account? What happened with this account? And like I just didn’t get around to it.

– Yep there’s no shame in saying, ah maybe I’ll do four, maybe I’ll do three.

– Yeah, like it’s not more, is not better.

– Exactly

– So in page 74, they go through the different tiers here, right. Tier one, two, three, or four. And that was something interesting, that at the top level five, and actually per if I remember, per account they might spend $60,000.00 per account, per one company.

– Yep

– Obviously, if you have money to spend.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Yeah, and anyway, tier two you could do more companies if it’s small, that was a really interesting when we talked about it with Jon, and so that was like when I was really excited to get into the book, so.

– A lot of good stuff in there

– Yeah

– So..

– Go pick it up now, it is the Bible in Silicon Valley for growth.

– Yep, it’s on Amazon, or from impossible.com

– Awesome, thanks Aaron!

– Yeah, thanks.

By Brandon Redlinger

Brandon Redlinger is the Director of Growth at Engagio, the Account Based Marketing and Sales platform that enables teams to measure account engagement and orchestrate human connections at scale. He is passionate about the intersection between tech and psychology, especially as it applies to growing businesses. You can follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Sourced from Engagio

In News

6 foolproof content creation tips to boost your marketing strategy

August 16, 2019 No Comments

By Dave Brown

Buzzwords like ‘content marketing’, ‘content creation strategy’, and ‘content is king’ mean a lot more to businesses today than they did a few years ago.

In the modern, fast-paced, and highly competitive corporate stratosphere, content marketing has become more than just a technique to gain a competitive edge – it’s become a necessity.

Today, if you want to gain leads and see those leads converting into

Today, if you want to gain leads and see those leads converting into customers, build a relationship with your audience, and present a consistently good image of your business, you need to put in place the bricks of a strong content marketing strategy.

With all ventures aiming for the coveted prize, the competition in content marketing is harder now than ever. The only way to stay ahead of the competition is by giving content marketing the attention it deserves and by ensuring that your content remains unparalleled in all aspects.

So how can you leverage your content to tap into authentic growth?

Let’s dive in to explore a few sure-fire content creation tips and tricks you need to follow.

Stimulate curiosity in the audience

Perhaps the best tip for lead conversions is to combine top-quality content with a premium offer or a bonus that aligns with the topic.

Successful businesses with top-notch content marketing strategy use downloadable checklists and guides, exclusive videos, and detailed analysis reports to push their audience to subscribe to their emails or newsletter. You can use one of two ways to achieve this objective – hire in-house writers or consider a content writing service.

But wait, there’s more!

Ah, caught you!

You can clearly see how powerful this curiosity-piquing trick can be for your content creation strategy.

Well, there’s actually one more crucial point. Make sure that you offer some serious value to your audience before asking them for a favor. Otherwise, you’ll lose their trust!

The safest way to go about this is by splitting your piece of information into half and sharing the first half only, asking the audience to subscribe or click on a link to get access to the remaining half.

Serialize your content

Lengthy, expansive, and never-ending content isn’t just challenging for you to create but is also hard for your audience to digest.

While it’s true that lengthier pieces of content tend to garner more interest of the audience, there are ways to make them more comprehensible and easily digestible for the readers without compromising on their value.

One such trick is to distribute your content into serials. This will additionally allow you to integrate call-to-actions and other conversion points within the content.

To begin with, consider choosing an engaging topic that meets the interest criteria of your target audience, and break it up into a series of content. You may make the most of this technique by offering the serialized content to your email subscribers only.

Do you know what’s the best part of content serialization is? You don’t need to come up with heaps of content in one go – you’ll have at least a week before the next piece of content has to go!

Repackage your content

Immaculate content creation is that which involves thinking outside the box.

One of the biggest reasons why many businesses fall short on the content marketing front is that they see a piece of content as just that. Your content can offer a myriad of opportunities only if you’re smart enough to realize it.

You can repurpose and recycle your ideas to create fresh, valuable, and interesting content each time in so many ways. To put this point across effectively, I’ll present you with some examples:

To promote an eBook, you may recreate one of its chapters into a blog post and utilize the but-wait-there’s-more technique
You may use your package quotes as tweets
You may create a series of blog posts using the content of a webinar

No matter how you decide to recycle your content, just make sure that it doesn’t lose its value and isn’t straightaway plagiarized.

Go over the top

Hundreds and thousands of people create and publish content but not every piece is of a great standard. In fact, most of it is of bad quality. And you can use this to your advantage. Should you ask how, you must have seen how something that’s of superior quality stands out from the crowd instantly.

Your content should be able to do the same!

Sounds like a great idea, right?

But how does one produce content that surpasses every other piece on the internet?

Here’s a rule of thumb to follow: find content that is worthy to be linked, come up with something better and unique, and present it to the right audience.

Although this type of content involves hard-core research and requires a lot of time, effort, and dedication, it’ll help you yield amazing results for much longer.

Make summary posts of big content pieces

Want to set your existing content up for some brownie points?

Consider making a list of the things that your audience will learn from a longer piece of content and use it to create a summary post for a multi-distribution platform, such as LinkedIn. Content, video, and amount of users are a few reasons why LinkedIn is on the rise. Get in early to take full advantage of this platform.

The digestible shorter piece should offer valuable insights into your main longer post. You’ll be surprised how this simple trick will boost traffic rate for you!

Use your predictive eye

Another way to create quality content is by predicting which topics will be popular amongst and well-received by the audience.

This doesn’t mean you’ll have to sit in front of a crystal ball and try to look into the future but by simply being aware of what your competitors are doing that seems to work wonders for them.

Again, you shouldn’t be aiming to copy exactly what they’re doing rather just to use it to your own advantage.

Look for topics and types of content that have done well in the past for similar businesses in the industry, keep track of the keywords that are working best for your competitors, and use learned knowledge to create kick-ass content for your own business.

If you’re ready to step in the corporate stratosphere, make sure that you create your content with the audience and your company’s growth in mind. The key is to deliver content that provides value to your audience while generating value and saving investment for your business at the same time.

With these content creation tips in mind, there’s no reason why your work won’t stand out from the crowd.

By Dave Brown

Sourced from TNW