Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

Social Media Is Indispensable & Personal

Earlier this year, I was invited by Jason Chu, the Chairman of the Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium to speak at the Customer Relationship Excellence round table hosted by DHL on my views on Social Media as part of the O2O customer experience.

The first step is to recognize that Social is Personal and that is is indispensable as part of a customer experience.  The more involved you are, the more you can capture those moments to make it an awesome customer experience.

Being someone active in social media, my behaviour is typical of what customers are like, and companies should embrace and care about being engaged in social media.

Here are 5 why the Chief Customer Relations Officer should care:
1. I have 4000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Linked In
2. I wake up and reach for my phone to check my social accounts and that's the last thing I do before I go to sleep
3. I am great at multi-tasking: I am active on my social accounts at work or at play
4. I shoot, post, tweet, share and answered the responses before I finish my meal or leave any social event
5. I share everything - the good, bad and ugly. I am vocal. Hear me express myself!

In 2010, only 25% will share their negative experience on social media.  That has risen to 75% in 2015.  Capturing the negative is not all.  It has also become a sales generation tool.  Gartner's research suggests that by 2015, businesses around the world will get 50% of their sales from social media.

Looking at Gartner's Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, we have already experimented on many elements from all the various stages.  We are definitely already on a journey in a new way of marketing supported by technology from real-time marketing, to data-driven marketing, to commerce everywhere, to web analytics, and so on.

But why are we not seeing the results of our technology and digital marketing getting exponential results?

Gartner thinks that only 80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

From the response around the audience, while many have acknowledged that social media is here to stay and the customer engagement needs to evolve, many are still hesitant due to fear of backlash of negative comments going viral.  While the desire is there, the management focus, processes, policies and skills may not be ready.

Let's look at how well our top leader, the CEO is doing in embracing social media. IBM's CEO Study estimates that only 16% of CEO use social media as a tool to connect with customers.  This is expected to grow by 3.6x to to 57% by 2018.

The social transformation must start with setting the strategic goals and culture, strong executive sponsorship, integrated orchestration across the organization with new processes and roles, governance and policies, and then technology and standards.  Will the CEO drive this change?

B2B Content Strategies: Content is the heart.

It was a great gathering with a couple of panel speakers in "B2B Content Strategies: Lessons From The Trenches" with the world of content creators, aggregators, clients, agencies and communications professionals. 

Catch the interview: http://youtu.be/S0RJN6AIUUM via @YouTube

 
Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Understand B2B Content World. In the B2B world, targeting different job titles, industries, roles in decision making process, technical jargon and technology life cycle make content seem more complex than B2C.  However, if you think about it, the same targeting, segmentation and consumption patterns is studied and applied. Your target audience is human too.

2. Segment with precision. I am known as a guru of segmentation using analytics to better understand my customers and potential customers.  The reason why the marketing programs that are run by my teams are so much more effective is the precision of message and approach based on segmentation. 

3. Content can drive ROI. We have done such a great job in delivering pipeline for the business that sales believe in the power of marketing in lead generation. Demonstrating return on investment still remains an important part in getting budget and resources to focus on content.

4. Content is the heart of persuasion.  Today, there is a lot more content in multiple forms but are they the right ones? Content is the heart which transmit the right messages at the right time to the right person. Content is about how we can engage someone to develop a deeper relationship with the customer.

In the B2B world, we need professionals who are willing to invest time to understand the portfolio and pitch the appropriate content mapped to the customers' journey.

Here are some of my quotes:


“To break through the content clutter is to really understand customer and then bring the right content" 


"What do love and dating have to do with B2B content marketing?"
 
“Ultimately, when it comes to convincing internal stakeholders of the investment, IBM Asia-Pacific’s Director of Marketing for IBM Power Systems, Anne Phey, suggests “showing that conversion rates and revenue” are increasing over time. 

It may even be a case of sitting down with the business leaders and CFO to explain what marketing does, how conversations on social media help us gain insights on customers and content trends, how online activities such as web traffic, downloads, etc are monitored against targets, as well as showing the opportunity pipeline for conversion to wins. 

Adds Phey: “Our  business leader understands that content doesn’t have to generate revenue straight away. It’s like having a relationship. You’ve got to start dating and wooing the prospect before he becomes a customer. As of 2015, we’ve appointed content marketing managers. That’s a breakthrough for us.” 

Read more from Gracia Chiang's at

http://www.kingcontent.com.au/creating-emotion-in-b2b-content-marketing/