In a constantly fluid field, Marketing Week Live aims to bring together the key challenges facing marketers with forward thinking advice, insights and solutions to drive brand engagement.
Didn’t make it to the event or simply wondering what all the fuss was about? Our team has got you covered with our key takeaways from MWL2017.
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The power of inbound marketing to continually attract quality prospects
Things have changed quite a bit over the years regarding how consumers buy products and services. Brands used to be in control of the buying process, whereby buyers were constantly being bombarded with billboard ads, TV ads and direct mail. Customers are now in control of the buying process as they have all the tools at their disposal to make very informative purchasing decisions.
The old way of outbound marketing is all about the marketer. These include trade shows, purchased email lists, internal cold calling and advertising. Some interesting statistics show that:
- 86% of people skip TV ads – with streaming media platforms like Netflix you don’t have to watch ads, and on YouTube you have the option to skip ads
- 91% of people are unsubscribing from emails that they receive
- 44% of direct mail goes straight into the bin
- 200 million people are on the Do Not Call List
The power of inbound marketing is all about customer centricity and attracting people to your brand with solutions that are going to help solve their challenges that they have.
The inbound marketing methodology can be broken down as follows:
- Attract strangers to your brand
- Convert the visitors into leads by educating them about your brand and how you can help solve their problems
- Close the leads into customers once you hand them over to your sales team
- Delight your customers in order to upsell or cross sell and help promote them into referring you to new opportunities
Understanding the power of inbound #marketing @MWL2017: Attract, Convert, Close and delight! #MWL17 pic.twitter.com/yesKbkMEKQ
— Candice Cunliffe (@CandiceCunliffe) March 8, 2017
You can read more about the power of inbound marketing here.
Digital asset management to support your iconic brand image
Businesses need to market themselves and have the added pressure of creating more content and media than ever before, for multiple channels and markets, as well as telling a consistent brand story.
How much time do you think you or your team spend on reviewing and approving content?
How much time have you wasted searching for a specific file?
How often does your sales team ask which content they can use and where they can find it?
Did you know:
- Marketing departments spend around 12% of their day doing admin tasks around content, such as searching, reviewing and sharing of images, videos and documents.
- The more content you produce the more time you need to manage it, and every year you need to produce more content than the previous year.
- Do you believe the statistic that sales teams are only using 20% of the content that is produced?
It’s so important to manage your digital assets, from your team accessing files, whether they are in the office or on the run, giving external partners the ability to access documents, which will allow you as a business to collaborate with them in managing your assets, but most importantly save you time and add overall value to your business.
Brands need to focus on the power of co-marketing
Marketing Week Live is home to a plethora of tools to help marketers target audiences, but it’s important to remember that behind these insights, platforms, and solutions, are real people—our consumers. Our consumers aren’t only there to pay our bills, and are instead a valuable resource in which brand-consumer relationships have indisputable power, both online and offline.
And brands and consumers are both looking to nurture these relationships:
- 87% of people want more meaningful relationships with brands
- 13% of people think brands deliver these meaningful relationships
- 88% of CEOs see getting closer to their customers as a top priority
- Only 6% of marketers believe they know how to bridge the gap between consumers and brands
Activating consumers in the process of co-marketing by using your strategy to actively facilitate word of mouth and user generated content can have a demonstrable impact on sales and brand credibility:
- 84% of people trust recommendations over any other form of advertising
- Offline word of mouth drives up to 5x more sales than one media impression
You can read more about consumer powered marketing here.
Challenger brands are growing up—but can they keep their challenger mindset?
Challenger brands have emerged from the idea that business isn’t business as usual anymore. Instead brands are dealing with a much more complex business world (think threats from increased regulations, brexit ect.). Challenger brands respond differently to these threats, going against best practices and adapting a Darwinian way of survival. Challenger brands, like most, start small, where it’s easy to keep a way of working emanating through a small group of people. But how easy is it to keep a challenger mindset as a company grows?
When business isn't business as usual-Great #MWL17 panel on how challenger brand leaders get results @MWL2017 @ChallengerProj @MktgAcademyUK pic.twitter.com/PB8JkOmvPh
— Sian Bowles (@siantreuse) March 8, 2017
You need permission:
It’s important that your governing body is behind you being a challenger brand—maintaining a challenger spirit is all about permissions you have in a leadership role that give you room to explore and play.
Challenger brands emerge and emanate from the team:
You can’t fake being a challenger. Instead it has to come from the people who work for the brand—people that believe in its values. However, the problem for challenger brands as they get bigger is hiring people. As Mat Braddy, Ex-CMO of Just Eat, says “you can’t hire 1000 rebellious people—you won’t get very far—so you hire more and more professionals, and the pool of people becomes more professional, as does the output by accident”.
Innocent recruits ruthlessly to their brand values and spirit to ensure their teams are filled with similarly driven people to the point where they’ll run with gaps in teams rather than settling for less.
Have values and keep them flowing through everything you do:
Your challenger brand values need to be clear—have three or four that govern how you and others do things. This helps to not lose sight of the original spirit, and keeps the challenger culture alive. You only have to look at innocent, nearing their 18th birthday, to see that everything they do is governed by a clear set of principles, essentially keeping their challenger spirit alive.
