Five marketing leaders share the adjustments and changes their companies underwent in order to adapt to the pandemic.
What’s happened to your approach to innovation in the last four months, and what do you expect will happen to it for the remainder of the year?
SD: We continue to innovate in the marketing we do because I am a firm believer that innovation should never stop. No matter the market situation, B2B marketers have to continually refine what we do, but lockdown really made us up our game and look at things differently. I expect it to carry on for the rest of the year and beyond, and I am keen to hear from other B2B marketing professionals about what they have done differently in lockdown and beyond.
How has your relationship with the rest of the business changed? Has it been an opportunity to reframe things for the better? Have you been able to deliver more and new kinds of value?
SD: The engagement with marketing from the rest of the business has changed significantly. Much quicker than I ever planned they have seen the results of a content-led campaign approach and the benefits it brings and are hungry for more. They now see that our team is capable of really impacting the business positively and can add huge amounts of value in the right ways. It’s no longer ‘I say, you do’; it’s now a proper plan aligned to the business objectives and a conversation about what needs to be achieved and us advising on the best marketing for success. We have delivered huge value to the business and they are now much more aware of the results financially, as well as brand awareness and market engagement.
What do you wish you’d done differently if you had your time in lockdown over again?
HS: I think we, in Finastra, handled the dynamics of change well. Teams like BCP had been running and testing such scenarios regularly. Yet I would think it would be better to document a lot of local team working scenarios.
Looking back, I think we should have accepted the change quicker and adopted, implemented our virtual events strategy sooner. We could also have better prepared people with home office infrastructure.
Are there any positives that you can take from the last six months?
HS: The understanding that working remotely can be equally if not more productive, though I’d question a long-time viability! Collaboration between different stakeholders using online tools helped a lot. It was possible to have ‘water cooler’ discussions using online tools.
How much of your planned marketing activity did you have to re-evaluate or completely redesign?
KS: Almost all of it. As soon as lockdown seemed to be inevitable, we did some intense thinking around what our marketing strategy should look like in a lockdown world, and came up with a plan very quickly which focused on prioritising connection, human-to-human communications and helping, not selling. This has formed the framework for all of our activity since. We were lucky that we had an excellent tech stack already in place, including a great webinar platform, so we didn’t need to buy new tools, but we had to do some very quick work to adjust our processes and use our tools in a different way.
We had around 20 events in the near future planned when we went into lockdown, so obviously one of the most immediate tasks was to replan them alongside negotiating with our venues and suppliers. I’m really proud that we were able to start running digital events within just a few days of lockdown starting. Alongside delivering already planned campaigns in a different way, we launched several new things. One example is that within a week of everyone being sent to work from home, we had launched a twice weekly ‘elevensies’ – informal coffee morning – to provide an informal way to stay in touch with our clients who missed human connections. We’ve run 40 of these so far and they’ve been hugely appreciated, as well as great fun!
I’m extremely proud of the creativity and flexibility that’s come out of my team. Against all the odds, we’ve been able to keep communicating with each other, with the firm and with our clients and contacts, and have performed better than ever against all our key metrics. We’ve kept a really close eye on digital behaviour and client feedback to identify what’s working and do more of it. Being forced into a fully digital world has made us rethink what our content looks like and how users interact with it, and we’ve produced user-centric hubs, events, and content pieces that I think we’d have struggled to achieve back in the office. We’ve even managed to find a way to take our annual client party virtual, which has been massively well received.
How far in advance are you currently thinking? How far in advance is it possible to plan?
KS: We still have a focus on longer term strategy – our direction of travel hasn’t changed, but we know that the journey will look different. We currently have our campaigns mapped out for the next two or three months, as well as starting to plan for bigger campaigns over the winter. However, we are reviewing everything on pretty much a weekly basis to make adjustments and speed up or slow down where appropriate (mostly speed up!). We have dramatically shortened the time from campaign planning to delivery, mainly because the world is changing so quickly that things will fall out of date if we don’t!
This has brought the sales and marketing team closer together. As pressure to maintain market share and revenue has heightened in recent months, marketing budgets have inevitably come under more scrutiny. This has put more impetus on the marketing leaders to tell a compelling story and demonstrate with data, the value that marketing is bringing to the sales process. Putting more focus on this has helped protect the marketing budget and raised the importance of marketing in the eyes of the business, particularly finance and sales.
What do you wish you’d done differently if you had your time in lockdown over again?
KS: Continuing with the recruitment of additional marketing team members. This was started days before lockdown, but was paused for two main reasons: I thought lockdown was going to be a lot shorter than it was, and I thought trying to recruit and onboard virtually would be difficult. Four months on and I am recruiting virtually anyway!
Are there any positives that you can take from the last six months?
KS:We’ve become even more customer-centric. We’ve been able to demonstrate the difference marketing can make. My team has shown that they are resilient and will pull out all the stops when needed.
How far in advance are you currently thinking? How far in advance is it possible to plan?
BM: In a similar way to before, planning continues to be a difficult task. We have been functioning in a VUCA environment for the last three years. Within the Covid-19 scenario, our strategic plan looks ahead no more than two years – we are running the company a 12-month budget, which is followed up quarterly. One thing that has changed compared with previous situations is the increased frequency of our operational committee meetings (on a weekly basis).
Are there any positives that you can take from the last six months?
BM:The value of people’s trust. We are very proud of adaptation, flexibility, commitment, results-driven mindset and kindness of our people. Even in the worst moments, being positive and building trust is a critical issue. It helps us do things better because the environment we have been able to create, motivates people to work with this positive feeling. Recently, we have been awarded with the Great Place to Work certificate as one of the best Spanish companies to work for. More than proud we are honoured with such great distinction.
