B2B Barometer Wave 6 is now live! Both client and agency-side marketers are feeling positive about business over the coming year, and say marketing priorities will focus around generating more and better quality leads. Click on infographic for access to full report, slides and background to the survey.
Do you have the right (write?) stuff? Looking forward to a lively B2B conference debate on hiring or honing marketing skills, IDM B2B Council member Andrew Buckley, VP for Product Management at Amex, asks what are the essential skills for the new business marketing frontier…?
- Originally posted on Linked In by Simon Knight, Sales & Marketing Channel Marketer, Dun and Bradstreet
Shane Redding Hon F IDM: My top tip is take your biggest business issue - whether it is the need to acquire more profitable customers, or how to get existing customers spending more, and ask how insight can help you solve the problem. Good insight teams (internal or external) will relish the challenge, be aligned more closely with the business issues and should deliver insight that you can then test. Secondly - BEWARE before you do any insight ask yourself simply is your data good enough? If you don’t know the answer in terms of data quality and coverage then before wasting any money on insight, audit your data, clean it up and then your analysis will be built on a solid foundation and can deliver great results!
Debbie Williams F IDM: A focused and structured approach to both data quality and relevant data insight is the cornerstone to any successful marketing. With the growth of BIG data, it is key to start with a few core data fields for insight and segmentation purposes and build your level of sophistication with data over time. Otherwise, it could become an overwhelming task and then, due to the perceived complexities, it may be repeatedly put lower down on the list of marketing priorities.
Lawrence Mitchell M IDM: The best starting point is to focus on the outcomes and work backwards from there, resisting the tempation (as hard as it is!) to try to do everything or get so bogged down in detail that the original benefit is forgotten. Currently, a great deal of my focus has been on data flow between marketing automation and CRM systems to better understand and build a new business pipeline; improve data quality and internal processes. This has been and will continue to be an enormous task, but is key to our growth plans. In terms of advice, I think it’s important to be clear that it’s never going to be perfect; use technology to automate more manual processes where you can and, as Shane suggested, invest in good skills (either internal or external) who can help you undersand and interpret what’s happening.
Global marketing; Local thinking Join IDM B2B Council members, led by Richard Robinson, Industry Head for B2B at Google for a live Twitter #CommsChat that explores one of the IDM B2B conference’s main themes: how and why you should consider international cultural differences in your global marketing.
Our B2B conference warm-up event on 19 April was all about enabling your B2B business for social media. The audience at IBM Forum London heard how IBM became a socially enabled business, how Juniper Networks has empowered employees to leverage social media’s full potential and, via OgilvyAction’s Global Head of Digital, learned how brands are reappraising their role in their customers’ lives. Here’s what everyone was saying on the night on the #socialskills hashtag.
19 Apr Tony Hodgson @tonyhodgson
We’re now in a post-digital era - like the post-war era. Will the “cold war” of the post-digital era be consumers v brands? #socialskills
19 Apr Bryan Foss @BryanFoss
#socialskills: QRcodes are more to B2B than a weblink. Ask Carol of Pitney Bowes for some real B2B examples. Sign up for your low-cost trial
RT @DnB_Simon Thanks @theidm for great #socialskills B2B knowledge evening. Some great content. Time for a beer and a chat now :-) <-Agreed!
19 Apr Joe Edwards @BrandJoe
Images r interestin in social because they talk 2 t lazy side of t brain system1 & generate more dopamine’s over text content #socialskills
Understanding cultural differences in global research
Blog post by B2B conference speaker, Nick Hague, MD of research specialists B2B International. Nick points to some key considerations when looking at global markets. There’s also a pre-conference Twitter Comms Chat on the topic of Global markets; Local thinking on Monday 30 April at 8pm. Log in to Twitter and follow the #CommsChat tag)
