Over the past five years, marketers have been presented with a plethora of new digital marketing channels. Even though it has been a challenge to quickly adapt and learn new skills to utilise these channels, it has benefited us all – both buyer and seller.
The turning point has come, no longer can we look at these new digital routes in isolation. These new platforms have become mainstream; the challenge now is to utilise the right digital channel, by customer preference, along the buying cycle. We must rewrite strategic integration.
This is forecast as the real strategic challenge for the marketer in 2012. Businesses cannot just sit back, blindly broadcasting on all channels, without consideration. The opportunity is to smartly customise to individual customer needs and tastes. Marketing integration with a level of automation has never been more complicated, yet so essential, as now.
To ensure you meet these digital demands and accelerate to your peak performance, join us on the 9 November, for the B2B Marketing Conference 2011. You cannot afford to overlook the future.
What you’ll go away with, once you’ve attended the B2B Marketing Conference:
A revised and focused review of marketing vision & strategy for 2012:
- The conference is geared around providing insight of how marketing should respond to the changing economic climate; with varied strategic routes that should be embraced to pre-empt change
- Clear insight will be given, as to how strategic marketing goals should be re-written, to ensure business is ‘ready for action’, to be first to benefit from any market up-swing
- With lead generation being a core focus over the past years, brands have suffered from being too aligned to just sales and marketing messages. The brand needs to be brought to the forefront, we’ll look into different strategies that can be embraced
A review on digital platforms and applications – tech overload or tech underwhelmed?
- With what has seemed like an epidemic of recently launched technology solutions, the conference will examine what platforms need to be invested in, to suit marketing objectives against different market profiles
- Practical guidance and insight into the latest digital trends and technologies you could be exploiting in 2012
An honest overview of what marketing looks like after 3 years of cuts & downturn - what it must do to get fit-for-purpose again for the future
- Over the past few years we have seen reduced budgets, training cuts, huge technology driven changes – have marketers de-skilled as a result?
- Lead generation, lead generation, lead generation... marketers team’s want and need to be delivering more than just quick wins, we’ll reveal where training and the skill gaps are and how to influence company culture
How a fully functioning marketing department can influence companywide and at board level
- How to fully integrate within the business objectives, product development and sales cycles – more action, less talk
- A look at internal marketing communications and how to increase awareness, transparency and internal support
- Back the “long idea” and own the message – how sophisticated content marketing strategies support both brand and lead generation simultaneously, while putting marketing at the heart of a business
Interact and engage with other practitioners and leading thinkers in B2B marketing
- Challenge each other’s preconceptions on how marketing works and where it need to be
- Get inspiration to reignite your marketing efforts, share experiences and case studies
- Fine-tune your marketing in order to operate at optimal efficiency and maximise your budget
- Get inspiration from the leading thinkers in B2B marketing to reignite your marketing efforts
- Network and share solutions and success stories with your peers at the prestigious British Library in central London
Who should attend
Senior marketers and practitioners including: marketing directors, heads of marketing, VPs of marketing, marketing managers and executives and those involved with planning and the development of marketing strategy.
9.00 – 9.30am
Registration
9.30 – 9.45am
Welcome and introduction
Joel Harrison, editor, B2B Marketing
9.45 – 10.25am
Devise your strategy for success
Ian Symes, marketing director - UK & Ireland, Cisco
In order to achieve peak performance marketing, it is essential to have a plan. And not just any old plan: it needs to be robust, dynamic, realistic and aligned with corporate objectives – in other words, a masterplan. Ian will call on his vast experience of strategic marketing providing key insights on excellence in strategic marketing planning, and actionable learning points. This session will cover:
- Setting aims and objectives
- Engaging and aligning with wider organisational thinking
- Understanding measurement and ROI
- Tactical thinking and learning from past experiences
10.25 – 11.05am
Social engineering: Case study – how Psion rebuilt its brand around a user community
Jonathan Brayshaw, global leader, digital communications and social business, Psion
Jonathan Brayshaw will examine how Psion fundamentally re-engineered its brand and marketing to become a social organisation, engaging with its audience via a new community-led approach, leveraging an integrated approach to content marketing.
This session looks in detail at Psion's approach, from strategy development to ongoing delivery, examines obstacles and barriers faced along the way, and provides practical advice and guidance for B2B brands seeking to adopt a community –led approach.
11.05 – 11.30am
Coffee break
11.30 – 12.10
Knowledge is power – skills and specialisms for today’s marketers
Steve Kemish, director, Cyance
In order to succeed in 2012, B2B marketers face a significant challenge in terms of their skills and knowledge base. Not only must they be able to manage multiple message streams simultaneously and seamlessly, but they must also be able to understand, absorb and (where necessary) integrate a bewildering and constantly changing kalidescope of communication channels data sources. Steve Kemish, one of B2B Marketing’s own training facilitators, examines the key skills and specialisms that practitioners will require in their armoury to meet the obstacles ahead, and will provide practical guidance on how to broaden your expertise, or move outside your comfort zone, where necessary. This session will cover:
- How to evaluate your skillset and diagnose deficiencies
- Finding the right resources – plugging gaps in expertise
- Learning on the job – an iterative approach to professional development
- Ongoing evolution – planning for the future and making yourself marketable.
12.10 – 12.50pm
Challenging convention – thinking different to succeed
Scot McKee, managing director, Birddog
Whilst B2B marketers must be sure to get the fundamentals right, at the same time they also must not be afraid to challenge convention and do things differently where required – even breaking the rules. The proliferation and rapid evolution of digital channels means marketers are blessed with an overwhelming array of engagement options – arguably the biggest challenge is to understand what is a genuine opportunity to innovate and differentiate, and what constitutes a reckless gamble with scarce marketing resources. This session will cover:
- Key opportunities to innovate
- Balancing new ideas and fundamental disciplines
- How to justify, sell and communicate new ideas internally
- Building new relationships with customers and prospects.
12.50 – 14.00pm
Lunch
14.00 – 14.30pm
Breakout session 1
Breakout options:
Tips & Tricks for Succeeding with B2B Demand Generation - hosted by Mary Miller, global director of marketing, MardevDM2
Attend this interactive session to learn what’s working and what’s not in B2B demand generation. This session will cover real-world examples of end-to-end campaigns, critical elements to measure, and the benefits of lead scoring to accelerate sales.
Key learning points:
- Trends in demand generation
- Implementation steps and examples
- What to measure and how
Integrated data - getting the best from information for B2B marketing - hosted by Dan White, regional sales director, Bureau van Dijk
Dan White will discuss the relevance of external data and how integrating it with your CRM can make you more efficient. How simple is a data integration process, what are the benefits and what results can you expect? What can you expect from external data sources and how can they complement and enhance your own data. Dan will show you how you can:
- Find new prospects
- Create targeted lists
- Automatically enrich and refresh your own data
Business Goes Social - hosted by Ben Dansie, CEO and Rob Hurst, social media manager, Omobono
This session focuses on making social media work in B2B - ensuring your brand connects with the right audience, in the right space, in the right way.
- How effective is social media in the B2B marketing toolkit?
- What is best-practice?
- Should you have a social media marketing strategy?
- What are the tools and technologies you should be using to engage your audience?
With a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit highlighting that “the winning differentiator is no longer the product or the price, but the level of engagement – the degree to which a company has success in creating a long-term relationship with the customer” – it becomes clear how important it is for B2B marketers to access all channels to increase engagement with customers.
14.35 – 15.05pm
Breakout session 2
Breakout options:
Marketing automation - hosted by Richard Evans, director of marketing EMEA, Silverpop
Get a first-ever inside look at five key lead nurturing programmes that have helped marketing automation company Silverpop drive their own lead generation efforts and automate follow up to over 50% of inbound leads with no additional staff or budget needed.
Meeting the challenges of the new ePrivacy laws - hosted by Stephen Groom, head of marketing and privacy law, Osborne Clarke
Since it became part of UK law in May 2011, the EU "ePrivacy" Directive 2009/136/EC has caused shockwaves across the digital marketing community. What are the key points in the new laws for B2B marketers? Do they cover more than just cookies? Is it possible to make sense of what the regulators are saying about how to comply? And what strategies should marketers be deploying to stay out of the courts? Get the answers to these and other important questions during this session.
Analysing: because you’re expected to have all the answers - hosted by Claire Barker, head of marketing – business information, Lexis Nexis
The role of a B2B marketer has significantly changed. All marketers know that their jobs are now part art, part science. The tactical marketer has been replaced by the analytical marketer. Put simply, marketers are expected to have all the answers – from predicting changes in the marketplace to insight on clients and competitors. With so much information now available, marketers have the power to take more control over the revenue process and generate dollars from today’s campaigns. How is this possible? It’s all about understanding and exploiting your unique position in your markets by gaining valuable insight and advice on your customers and prospects. And then turning your insight and advice into campaigns that change people’s minds and incite action. This session will offer practical guidance and insight into the technologies and information that you should be exploiting.
15.10 – 15.40pm
Breakout session 3
Breakout options:
Online PR - what, why and how? – hosted by Paul Miller, head of digital at Cision
From blogs to Facebook pages to Twitter feeds, there's a lot of talk about your brand online – and a lot of different people doing the talking. The challenges aren’t just in identifying and reaching out to key influencers, nor merely monitoring, measuring and interpreting the activity. They’re also in working out who’s talking to whom and who owns what; in short, who does online PR.
This workshop will take a closer look at:
- What do we mean by online PR?
- Why you need an integrated approach
- How to determine influencers relevant for your clients and brands
- Best practices for listening and engaging with influencers
- Taking it to the next level – linking engagement with business objectives and measuring ROI
Analysing who and where your social audience are hosted by Marc Keating, head of digital, IAS b2b marketing
IAS has been successfully using social media for its clients for the last 4 years. Marc will be defining where social media fits into your marketing strategy and will then take you through the process the agency uses to implement social media activity, focusing on how to segment your audience and then how to find your audience within the fragmented social ecosystem that exists. Marc will finish with a case study for Corus Colors (rebranded as Tata Steel), which details how Corus used social media channels as part of an integrated campaign to help the brand own the category of “Building refurbishment” at the height of one of the biggest recessions within the building and construction industry.
Content marketing to your sales funnel hosted by Richard Brenkley, managing director, Coast Digital
During this session Richard will discuss the various advantages of and challenges facing the B2B marketer when delivering content marketing to their sales funnel. The session will investigate:
- How bringing sales and marketing together allows you to put marketing in the driving seat.
- With so much content out there, things are becoming cloudy and saturated – so how do you stand out?
- The importance of understanding the psychographic (needs and mentality of buyers) rather than demographic (size of company, job title and so on).
- Mapping content to the buying cycle – how does this affect the sales funnel?
- Finding your audience online – where are they and what do they want to consume?
- What types of content work well, when and where?
- How to distribute your content? – email, social, etc
15.40 – 16.00pm
Break
16.00 – 16.30pm
Acceleration of Everything
Richard Robinson, industry leader, Google
Technology is leading to the accelerating change in consumer and business behaviour. We are at the beginning of this transformation but it will continue to accelerate. Speed is the forgotten ‘killer app’, and it will increasingly be a competitive advantage to move faster in the future. The presentation will investigate some of the key themes driving this change, demonstrate how businesses are reacting to it and provide insight into the building blocks businesses need to put in place today to take advantage of the opportunity this provides.
16.30 – 17.20pm
Panel discussion: How to succeed
Ten minute testimonials from leading B2B marketers from companies both large and small on key lessons from their career, followed by a panel discussion around practical strategies for success.
Andrew Fitzgerald, global technology services marketing leader, IBM
Annabel Pritchard, London 2012 sponsorship director, Deloitte
Simon Banoub, head of marketing, Opta
Tom Perry, marketing director EMEA, Shoretel
17.20pm
Summary and close
Joel Harrison, editor, B2B Marketing
17.30 - 19.00pm
Networking drinks
“Worth every penny”
Dawn Hollingworth, associate director communications, Ernst and Young
“Fantastic agenda! Loved the panel debate too! Great learning and very engaging.”
Melanie Oakley, marketing manager, Vanson Bourne
“A very inspiring event with quality speakers and audience. The B2B Conference is a great opportunity to hear and share the latest B2B marketing strategies. I definitely recommend it.”
Zoe Maolmhaadhog, global marketing manager, Mardev DM2
“The event was great, some interesting speakers and definitely took away some actionable items for my own marketing plans.”
Marie Moynihan, marketing manager, Newsweaver
“Overall, the day was an excellent experience, well organised with a good mix of speakers from larger and smaller organisations. There were no sales pitch type presentations, something I always hate when paying money to attend an event. I left with some really good ideas to take back to my own company and from a personal development point of view; a great event which represented good value.”
Jen Sorensen, digital marketing specialist, GOSS
“It was interesting to hear speakers from such prestigious organisations as IBM and AMEX, along with inimitable and much quoted Professor Merlin Stone talk about the importance of using good content as part of your marketing campaigns – and embracing the change that Social Media can bring”
Elizabeth McMahon, marketing manager, PracticeWEB
