If Deb Nelson were a painter, she’d be post-impressionist Paul Cezanne. He was the bridge between the traditional 19th century and the radical 20th century, explains Nelson, HP technology group’s senior vice president of marketing. Being a bridge like Cezanne is what a marketing leader has to do today, she continues. The whole world is moving from traditional to digital marketing tools, creating entirely new ways to interact with our audiences, package our content and get feedback. We are building a bridge from the old to the new, she concludes.
With her challenging role marketing to tech-savvy decision-makers in the full gamut of businesses, Nelson works hard to stay on the vanguard of this shift. There’s constantly a changing competitive landscape, she says, stressing how fast-paced the hi-tech business is.
She has been in her current position in the technology group for three of her 20 years at HP, and uses her experience to communicate the company’s enterprise business to both SMEs and the global 1000 the revenue of which constitutes a considerable 47 per cent of HP’s overall income. Some of the industries she communicates with include the public sector and healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, communications, media and entertainment.
Going where the customers are
A core offering of the technology group is HP’s corporate software solutions a field where the company ranks sixth globally. As a result, Nelson finds her primary audience is the IT department, namely the CIO and his or her staff an audience both on a technical and management level.
Nelson’s approach is calculated from one primary consideration looking where the customers are. Senior decision-makers are most influenced by what they read online and via word-of-mouth, she’s learned. She has found that, by nature, her technical audience is very active in online forums and social media, so she’s made it imperative that HP has an expert presence in these spaces to fend questions and create dialogue.
Aggressively leveraging social media is a core priority for Nelson, who acknowledges that being a leader in this space is important given the industry. I think social media is excellent and has really ratcheted up what we’re able to do as far as a real dialogue with customers, because it’s very much two-way, she says, elaborating that her primary angle is to pull users with good content. The currency of social media is great content, she says. If you have the content there, customers will come.
Her department uses tracking and analytics tools to discover where conversations about the brand are taking place, and makes a special effort to keep a line of communication open with key industry bloggers. Twitter is an especially effective tool for tracking analysts, Nelson has found. Another approach, considering HP’s significant technical audience, is understanding the use of technical forums, and linking up HP experts to respond to customers’ queries as well as stimulate conversation around the products. Vivit an independent HP software users’ community and Connect an HP user group are two platforms that Nelson has made great use of over the years.
The reason these forums are so popular, Nelson observes, is the high quality of the content found there.
We can understand hot topics around our customers, which can influence what we’re going to build into products, she says. Nelson points out another important consideration for social media responding to customers as soon as possible if they’ve had a bad experience.
Influencing the influencers
Influencers play a major role in her marketing strategy.
We definitely spend time with the industry analysts because they’re a very important source of information for our customers, she explains, highlighting the importance of making sure they have a full understanding of the company’s products and offers. She describes this as ‘influencing the influencers’. For her specific offerings, influencers include the likes of Forrester and IDC.
Key to this, says Nelson, is knowing which influencers are most highly regarded in each field for example, if HP is putting out a storage product, it would need to know which bloggers etc. are considered thought-leaders on the matter. These individuals are targeted very specifically in a range of ways, from in-person meetings, to webinars and conference briefings.
Another tool Nelson has found effective is the use of events, both through organising them and attending industry gatherings.
When you’re selling technology it’s often very important to have your customers talk to each other about their applications and learn from each other, as well as have the opportunity to drive more deeply into what the solutions look like and how they can help [client’s] business, she explains.
The science of marketing
Nelson’s contribution to the company’s marketing strategies is well respected by her peers so much so that she received the Frost & Sullivan Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2007 for her contribution to marketing excellence at HP.
One change she’s particularly proud of is her embrace of marketing metrics. Marketing is a science, as well as an art, she says. [It] is both about creativity and hard returns; creatively tapping into customer needs with a compelling value proposition, presented in a persuasive way but also being able to measure the impact to the business. Now, if Nelson were a scientist, who would she be…?
