B2B Marketing’s Danielle Howe caught up with Cat Howard, UK and Ireland marketing director at Atos and B2B marketer of the year, to find out her top tips for marketing success
How to align your marketing and business strategies
How can you ensure your marketing strategy aligns with your business strategy?
First of all, make sure there is a business strategy, and that you’re clear on it and what it means – if there isn’t one, particularly if you are in a specific division of an organisation, then support your business in creating one with the relevant stakeholders involved, which you can do by running/facilitating workshops. Your marketing strategy should then be using similar language to your business strategy and have clearly aligned objectives and goals that match.
What steps can you take to interpret your company’s strategy and turn it into strategic marketing goals?
Taking the time to really understand it, what the objectives are, what the key initiatives are and the focus areas or concern areas of the wider executive board. Spend time talking to the different executives so you have a complete view on your company’s strategy including your CFO, your COO, your HR director – not just your CEO and sales director. You can then work your marketing strategy from there. For example, if the company’s overall strategy is to increase short-term revenue, then the marketing strategy should reflect this with tactical campaigns built around propositions with a short buying cycle that you can put a clear revenue metric around that you can also measure and show progress against each month.
What have you done at Atos to ensure marketing’s strategy and objectives are aligned with the rest of the business?
When I joined the organisation two and a half years ago, I spent the first six months really understanding the business at all levels, undertaking one-to-one meetings across our executive board, our sales team and with clients. This helped me to break down our marketing strategy into five main areas where I believed marketing could add real value to the organisation, showing this in a sales funnel-type chart so that everyone was clear on what marketing was there to do. These areas included brand awareness, driving new sales pipeline, supporting existing sales pipeline, closing orders/deals and driving client loyalty.
How to build a strong and consistent brand
What do you think are the hallmarks of a strong B2B brand?
I think there are multiple things that give a B2B brand a strong place in the market. Three key things for me include:
- Knowing what the brand stands for and why the organisation exists
- Being relevant/resonating with its clients/prospects and wider audience across all channels to market
- Having some creativity/fun around it – most memorable and exciting brands to me have this (eg. Virgin, Adobe).
What practical steps have you taken at Atos to ensure customers’ and prospects’ experience of your brand is consistent?
I would love to say that every client or prospect’s experience of our brand is consistent, but it’s not and we are very much on that journey, particularly as our organisation continues to globalise. One of the main steps we have taken within marketing is to try and integrate and join-up our different marketing platforms and touchpoints that clients and prospects have with us, personalising the messaging where we can. For example, now if someone receives an email from us, then the messaging used is the same as what we have on our website and social media platforms. We still have a long way to go on this journey, so advice from others who think they have this perfected is greatly appreciated!
How to take a more customer-centric approach
What do you do at Atos to better understand and fulfil your customers’ needs?
One of the initiatives that we implemented last year within marketing was a client insight team. We now have a service available that looks in detail at our contacts within our client and prospect organisations to really understand what their issues and business challenges are. This information is available to our client facing teams in real-time, allowing them and us to interact in a completely personalised way, which in turn helps to then tailor our propositions/solutions to that organisation.
This year we are also focusing on driving research around our customers’ clients, which we are then filtering back to our customers through multiple channels – it gives us an edge and shows to our customers that we really understand their business and their customers.
Do you think it’s marketing’s responsibility to make sure the organisation is customer-centric? What can you do to ensure it’s something the whole company prioritises?
Yes, I do, but I also think its everyone’s responsibility within the organisation. I think marketing can provide the systems, the tools, the insight and the messaging, but ultimately an individual will respond to the person engaging with them directly the most. To ensure the whole company prioritises this, you should have your own client insight to talk about and provide to those that you speak with across the organisation, which is one of the reasons why we set up a client insight team.
How to prove marketing’s contribution
How would you describe success at measurement in marketing?
It depends what your company wants to achieve, but for me success at measurement in marketing is being clear on what percentage or monetary value in growth marketing has added. Ultimately most businesses are about growth in some way, so marketing should be the same.
What kind of metrics have you focused on at Atos and how do you translate these into a language the board will understand?
Each of the areas mentioned above (brand awareness, driving new sales pipeline, supporting existing sales pipeline, closing orders/deals and driving client loyalty) had a measurable objective against it which reflected the business language and showed how marketing was contributing – this has been key to our success to date. In the subsequent 18 months, when I see the CFO I am able to engage clearly with him, because I know he is interested most in closed orders/deals and new programmes, so I focus in on these areas in particular. We still measure against each of these areas now, and because we can show the business results through our marketing strategy, we have been able to secure additional budget to deliver a number of new programmes and initiatives.
