Blue Ocean Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

Key findings from an executive mindXchange with leading European B2B marketers

Go West

Contents What happened and key findings

What's the story?

Cabo da Roca, in Portugal, is the most Westerly point in mainland Europe. Back in January 65 of Europe’s leading B2B marketers got together in nearby Cascais for a 2 day digital marketing executive mindXchange. What did we learn?

The following story, in partnership with Turtl, highlights some of the key digital marketing topics discussed at this event, including:

Cascais - go there if you get the chance

Go West - Introduction
North - Marketing budget trends
South - Where is the sun setting on spending?
East - What are the growth opportunities?

With a refreshing sea spray of...

Insight from a marketing priorities survey
Attendees' number 1 objective for the next 3 months
Examples of great content marketing assets
Key take-aways from the thought leaders at the event

The North

Are budgets going up?

Do you plan to increase/decrease your overall Marketing budget in 2016?

54% of senior marketing executives surveyed expect budgets to go North.

Marketing Budgets 2016

A Local Proverb...

"Aqui, onde a terra se acaba e o mar começa..."
"Here, where the land ends and the sea begins..."

There's a sea change for marketing, with the rock of traditional budget spend on events being eroded by the riptide of digital.

Budget Quotes

We had a wash of messages in bottles about budget, here's my favourite contrasting quotes:

"I have been a CMO for 10 years and in my experience, marketing budgets only go down"

"If you can’t negotiate an increase in budget, then maybe you are in the wrong role"

The South

Where is spend decreasing

We asked what was going South

As CMO, which areas would you DECREASE spend on in 2016?

59% of marketers surveyed would decrease spend on large tradeshows

The East

Where is the sun rising on marketing spend?

In this section you will find some key findings on marketing investment growth, answers to the question "what is your number 1 growth objective in the next 3 months?" and you can meet some members of the Frost & Sullivan team who are creating great content marketing stories and assets

Do you plan to increase/decrease your Content Marketing spend in 2016?

61% are increasing spend on content marketing

As CMO, which areas would you increase spend on in 2016?

Neck-and-neck in first place with over 57% of the votes:

Asset Development (white papers and video)
Persona/Target Based Message Development

Multiple responses were allowed; therefore numbers do not add up to 100%.

In second and third place:

36.15% Social Media
34.62% Contact Acquisition

What marketers are saying:

“Provide relevant content that sticks to the mind, heart and soul of the customer or visitor"

“Facts lead to conclusions, emotions lead to actions...through content”

31% of marketers stated that they will outsource marketing asset development (white papers/video) in 2016.

In your opinion, which trend will have the greatest impact on Marketing in the next 3 years?

46.4% agreed on personalised customer experiences

What are the marketing buzzwords for 2016?

“Try to develop emotional connections for our target personas”

“Better target our campaigns and measure results only in that audience”

“Map the entire customer journey properly and find opps of how to leverage digital solutions into this”

Top tip - use industry analyst rock stars to help you tell your story, increase brand awareness and add value to your customer buyer cycle

How do you make sure you are not wasting your money?

64% of marketers surveyed stated that they create white papers in-house. Research has shown that only 9% of B2B buyers trust vendor generated papers versus 44% who trust analyst generated content.

Meet The Team

Rock star analysts creating content marketing assets:

The team

Meet some of Frost & Sullivan's analysts and consultants who create amazing content for our clients. Starting with the very first program, we recognized Frost & Sullivan's unique ability to attract executive attendees, decision-makers, from the top companies in the marketplace. We took advantage of their full integrated solution which included white Papers, eBroadcasts, and eBulletins. The White Paper and eBulletins helped to establish the foundation for these campaigns, and the eBroadcast provided another major avenue for demand generation...nothing speaks to success quite like the results, and each year we have achieved an outstanding Return On Investment." - John Broderick CEO Cicero

Catherine

Catherine Hutt

IBM and Zerolight whitepaper focused on the convergence of customer experience, retail and virtual/augmented reality in the automotive space.

See Catherine's work here or click here on her Linkedin profile

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/car-retail-the-3d-revolution-is-here-and-now-300138642.html

Martyn

Martyn Briggs

"Congestion already stifles the global economy by an estimated 2% of GDP per year, and air pollution causes in excess of 7 million deaths per year as a result of air pollution exposure"

See an example of Martyn's work here or click on his Linkedin profile

http://www.hitachi.eu/en/sib/whitepapers/

Charlie Whelan

Improving profitability, improving customer loyalty, improving Lives.

Why focusing on the supply chain is the key to growing customer relationships and winning in today’s healthcare environment

See Charlie's whitepaper here or click on his Linkedin profile

http://fedex-iwp.frost.com/

Lawrence Lundy

Award Winning campaign titled, Understanding tomorrow's traveller, and aided airlines in better understanding, preparing for and catering to emerging traveller segments. Amadeus harnessed this valuable information in its campaign, Future Traveller Tribes 2030, which recently won the B2B marketing award for best monthly campaign.

Read the whitepaper on future traveller tribes

Development

Areas

What percentage of sales pipeline does your marketing team plan to contribute to in 2016?

8% of sales teams are being fed an enviable 25 - 39% of their pipeline from marketing. 4% at greater than 50% owe their marketing team a surf and turf dinner (every night).

However, 38% of marketers are at risk of walking the plank, unable to demonstrate how they contribute to the top line!

"Better contextualise leads for sales, show why certain leads are worth converting to increase the sales conversion of marketing leads"

Want to take the survey yourself?

The full survey will go to market later in April - click here to take it now, you will receive the full results.

Final Thoughts

From the Industry Leaders

Heading

To close, here are the top ten take aways from our event host, Ricky Coussins 1. The Buyers Journey Is Iterative 2. We Are All B2P Marketers 3. Build Personas From the Individual Customer Upwards 4. Digital Does Not Belong To The Marketing Department 5. Digital Isn’t Free 6. Market Digital Marketing 7. People Buy Emotionally 8. We Need To Have A Content Strategy 9. Customer Digital Behavior Is Changing Faster Than Our Ability To Adapt 10. Customers Make Un-Intermediated Buying Choices

The Buyers Journey Is Iterative
Lucio Furlani, Vice President, Marketing, EMEA, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, pointed out that we need to understand that the buyer’s journey is no longer linear but iterative and that we need to plan our content for each of the points of iteration in the journey.
We Are All B2P Marketers
Lucio, in addressing the topic of why B2Bs should sit up and take notice of consumer trends, also made the point that he does not do B2B or B2C but B2P – Business To People.
Build Personas From the Individual Customer Upwards
Acer’s Global Digital Marketing Director - Francesco Federico - suggested that we should build personas from an individual customer upwards, finding similar audiences to individuals rather than aggregating from the top down starting with the macro – we only have ‘n’ customers in this predetermined segment.
Digital Does Not Belong To The Marketing DepartmentFrom our Day 1 panel session came the point that Digital, and, by implication, Digital Marketing, does not fit in boxes. It traverses many parts of the organization – it drives the e-commerce and IT agenda, touches operations, customer service and back office functions as well as that of marketing. That means digital marketers have to collaborate with many different parts of the organization that, traditionally, they have had little or no relationship with. Building relationships across the organization is now a priority.
Digital Isn’t Free
As one of the panelists pointed out, digital isn’t free as some C- level managers would like to think. Doing it well involves considerable investment.
Market Digital Marketing
A key concept that echoed through many of the presentations and discussions was the importance of marketing digital marketing to our own organization. Aligning individuals and departments, selling the concepts, processes and the investment needed to our C-level colleagues should form a key part of the digital marketing leader’s work. Especially as almost all C-level managers are not from the digital generation.
People Buy Emotionally
On Day 2 our keynote speaker - Monika Schulze, Global Head of Marketing at Zurich Insurance Group, reminded us that most people make decisions based on emotion. She pointed out that we can use story-telling techniques to tell longer and powerfully emotional stories in the digital space. As long as the story connects to the brand and is a positive one, this approach can be highly persuasive.
We Need To Have A Content Strategy - read event blog here
Giuseppe Caltabiano, Vice President, Marketing Integration at Schneider Electric noted that in most organizations, there are too many ‘digital publishers’ and too much unplanned and unconnected content origination. It is therefore key to have a comprehensively developed content strategy and that strategy should define the channels to be used – the channel strategy, rather than letting the channel define the content.
Customers Make Un-Intermediated Buying Choices
Our keynote speaker on Day 1 – Simon Hall – former Chief Marketing Officer of Dell UK, noted that 50 to 70% of the purchaser’s decision is complete before they ever engage the vendor. The funnel of Awareness, Consideration, Preference Formation and Purchase is no longer controlled by sales. This means that our communications have to be influencing the decision everywhere before any inter-mediation takes place.
Customer Digital Behavior Is Changing Faster Than Our Ability To Adapt
Finally, Luisella Giani, Head of Digital Strategy, Axalta Coating Systems, made the point that we must understand that the world of digital marketing is fast changing. We need organizations that can see these changes and are willing to rapidly adapt to them in order to keep up.

Ricky Coussins, works extensively with Frost & Sullivan.
Ricky Coussins career in marketing began in the early 1970s when he worked for the multinational conglomerate Litton Industries. He later joined Xerox where he worked in sales and then marketing with a responsibility for exploring the potential of new products.

In the early 1980’s he moved to British Telecom where he was Head of Packaged Software Products in their Systems House Business. He later moved into the Mobile Communications division as a Networks Marketing Manager. Ricky started his marketing consultancy, Coussins Associates, in 1989. They supply outsourced marketing services across the whole spectrum of the strategic and tactical marketing mix, including digital marketing communications.