It’s been a strange year to say the least! What has been your number one marketing challenge this year?
There have been more than a few curve balls thrown this year right? But for my team, our biggest challenge has been in turning our 1000+ person major conference, usually hosted at The O2, into a virtual event. Smaller events quickly and relatively painlessly shifted to online through webinars, online panels for example, but for our flagship Blue Door Conference, it was far more complex.
How could we replace the networking opportunities it brings? How can we do justice to the great line up of speakers over a virtual platform? Which platform could we use? We didn’t find one good enough so have actually built our own! We really had to think differently on this, pull together different groups of people to make it happen, not to mention navigate lots of internal processes.
Seeing how we have risen to that challenge (like marketers everywhere have done), how we have worked together rapidly and creatively, has been really uplifting. The event is still very much in development, but the signs are there that this will be a fantastic event when it finally comes around in October.
As the UK begins to get back to normal, what do you think will set B2B marketing leaders aside from the rest?
First and foremost, it will be those that have an adaptable and flexible approach. Any residual thoughts of a plan that lasts a full year are now gone. One thing that the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us is that everything can change in an instant. And many long-term shifts are yet to be fully seen. I think it’s super important to maintain an open mind, and to be agile enough to respond to changing customer demands and habits, and that doesn’t only apply to our direct B2B customers, but to their customers too. Keeping up to date with what’s happening in wider markets and being ready to respond and adapt marketing strategies will be crucial to building success. One final thought on this, and maybe an even more fundamental need – the future of work is flexible too. As marketing leaders, we need to embrace this and ensure that we can get the best from our people irrespective of location.
You recently featured in our top 25 ABM opinion leaders. How important do you think ABM will be as normality resumes?
Account-based marketing will be more important than ever, at least in its truest form of one-to-one and one-to-few, where getting to know customers in more depth, understanding their needs more closely at the individual level is the name of the game. Why will this be more important? Simply because retaining existing customers and demonstrating ever greater value to them becomes even more important. Business investment priorities are likely to change, which may mean there is less desire to switch supplier partners – winning new business becomes harder. Keeping what we have becomes even more important than before. And building the supplier-customer relationship into true partnership and making it harder for customers to move away is best effected with a heavy dose of ABM.
And when it comes to winning that new business, ABM has a role to play too. Taking insight-led, focused propositions built for an individual prospect or small group of them is always going to be more successful that a broad-brush approach. And the customer advocates created through customer ABM have a role to play in winning new business too of course.
How do you see the role of the marketing department evolving over the next couple of years as we deal with the fallout of Covid-19?
I don’t see any fundamental changes in the way marketing organisations are structured necessarily, but I do see considerable changes in how they work. Marketing groups, if they weren’t already, are now dispersed geographically and will continue to be in the future. How you manage that team? How do you build alignment and keep cohesion? These are big challenges. There’s less need for centralised command and control and a greater need for delegated and distributed responsibility and accountability. I think for this to work, we need to provide our teams with more vision and strategic direction and fewer rigid top-down plans. Ultimately, it comes back to flexibility and adaptability. In the same way I think ABM will rise in prevalence and importance, I think the move to agile marketing will accelerate for many businesses too.
What advice do you have for marketing leaders over the coming six months?
Keep your eyes open, watch what’s happening in the market and be ready to adapt strategies and plans. But most of all, take note of what’s worked well during these past few months of lockdown and keep it in place. One of the biggest disappointments for me will be if we don’t take advantage of the positive changes that have come about and simply revert wholesale to our previous ways of working.
