Build a resilient marketing function: start with your most important marketing channel by Sharise Wilkinson, on 13/01/2022 As the pandemic rages on, challenges and opportunities continue to emerge for B2B media and events businesses. From Team MPG’s vantage point, it is clear that the most resilient businesses, and those that have started growing again, have certain characteristics – including: a belief in the strategic importance of marketing – shared by the whole senior leadership team; a strong understanding of what good marketing looks like and should be expected to achieve; and a commitment to invest well in marketing for sustainable growth. This was the focus of Helen Coetzee’s blog published on 1st January: In 2022, the most resilient organisations will have relevant and resilient marketing. In this article, Helen highlights specific areas that require focus and investment for building relevance and resilience into your marketing – and therefore into your whole organisation. One of these specific areas is your website, or more specifically, the website or web pages that serve the purpose of marketing your brand, value proposition and products. The companies that have invested heavily in building high performance marketing websites, are standing out as resilient and winning organisations at this time. And by ‘high performance websites’, we’re not just referring to a beautifully designed ‘look and feel’ for your site – which is usually the calling card of slick creative and digital agencies very good at selling their sizzle (and making things look nice). A well designed, nice-to-look at website is an absolute must, but far too many organisations we talk to have fallen in to the trap of spending a fortune with a ‘shiny’ agency (confusing style with substance…) on a website that just looks lovely, but doesn’t actually work in terms of: (1) Optimised customer journeys in the front end – to acquire more customers and generate more revenue, and (2) Back-end/CMS functionality that makes the website practical and efficient (and viable!) for marketers to manage in the manner required for the website to work well within a content-led, integrated marcomms approach. There is a very specific, specialised set of functionality requirements that B2B media/events businesses need built into their marketing websites that can be very poorly understood by many business leaders (and often their marketers too), and by the too many agencies trusted with this kind of work. These specific functionality requirements are focused on the extremely important role your website serves as the hub of all your marketing efforts. If you want to be a resilient and growing business, your website needs to do all the following – really well: Positioning: host impactful messaging – in words, pictures and sometimes video and/or audio – that positions your brand and value you deliver in exactly the right way. For this you need a strong messaging strategy. See: Build a winning messaging strategy: a step-by-step guide Conversion rate optimisation (CRO): have well structured navigation and CTAs that draw customers through your marketing funnel – getting them to share their data, become a customer, and also share your content. See: 4 Things you should do for a high performance website SEO: use relevant messaging, content and good UX to organically attract relevant people from search engines – to then become exposed to your positioning and converted to engaged prospects, customers and advocates. A well-optimised site attracts the right visitors, in required and sustainable volumes, and clearly communicates your value proposition – which is more important now than ever to cut through all the noise on digital channels. Remember that your website is the hub of all your marketing activity. Every time you post on social media, run a PPC campaign, or send an email campaign – you should be pushing relevant people to your website so that they become visitors, engaged audience members prospects, and customers. If your website is not in the best shape possible, all of your other marketing channels will be much less effective than they should be. There is almost no point deploying any other marketing channels (especially PPC!) until you have a website in place that looks great, and works exactly as it should in terms of functionality needed to deliver customers and revenue to your business. Next week we will share a practical guide to building a high performance website. Subscribe to MPG Insights to get notified when the next article is published. And in the meantime, if you’d like to speak to an MPG website expert about how to optimise the site you have, or build a brand new, high performance website – please get in touch. Team MPG includes website designers, developers and website project managers who have a deep understanding of B2B media/events business models and marketing. We know how your website needs to work to grow your customer base and your revenues. Read more about MPG’s website design and development services. MPG provided excellent design and functionality recommendations for our website – helping us immediately put into action initiatives that would help us gain more customers and move forward as a business. Alex Ayad, Founder & CEO, Outsmart Insight FIND OUT MORE Continue Reading Topics: Community marketingDatabase developmentEvent marketingMarketing strategyMarketing technologyWebsite optimisation
In 2022, the most resilient organisations will have relevant and resilient marketing by Sharise Wilkinson, on 01/01/2022 Along with the exciting opportunities for innovation and digital transformation that many leaders have successfully embraced, the pandemic continues to throw new challenges at B2B media and event businesses. Once again, event organisers face issues around live events. Even those who have been able to very successfully grow their digital revenue streams over the past 18 months are immensely frustrated they cannot bring their customers together in-person. Those brave souls who have proceeded to safely host some face-to-face gatherings for their valued community members, in the midst of a pandemic, have found these ‘in real life’ experiences to be most powerful and energising. To keep moving forward positively, senior executives should focus on building resilience into every part of their organisation. From a marketing perspective, organisational resilience can be further strengthened by more relevance. Marketing is all about getting close to your customers and successfully communicating to them the relevance of your value proposition. In the B2B world, this is about focusing – with precision – on the specific individuals within specific organisations who will find your value proposition highly relevant (This is of course assuming you have already achieved a strong enough product-market fit to make what you’re offering worth your target customers’ attention, time, and money. If you don’t have the product-market fit right yet, this should be your focus to strengthen organisational resilience – regardless of pandemics! No amount of marketing can successfully monetise the wrong product…). Getting close to customers is first and foremost about listening. Listening to what they care about, what their pain points are, what motivates them, and what they need in order to get their jobs done well – right now, and in the near future. If you are listening properly to your customers, and responding to their needs with the most relevant products and the most relevant marketing, your organisation will be more resilient. Why? Because your customers will give you their attention and their time, again and again – no matter whether you are delivering your products online or in-person. When you have your customers’ attention over an extended period of time – regardless of format – they should be engaged enough with your brand for you to monetise them well. And, if you can prove you can monetise your customers consistently, profitably and with economies of scale, you have a very good reason to pursue scale. Hence MPG’s mantra since the start of the pandemic: engage, monetise, scale. Building brands as community platforms is only possible if you follow this Engage – Monetise – Scale model. A marketing strategy that focuses on engagement – anchored in relevance – will make your marketing more resilient. This, in turn, will make your whole organisation more resilient. Here are four things we believe are fundamental to building relevance and resilience into your marketing – and therefore into your whole organisation: #1: Investment in customer insight: ongoing analysis on what your customers say and do. Via a set of dashboards, make sure your marketers are constantly monitoring how customers are engaging with your products and your marketing campaigns. Ask your marketers to look for and highlight trends in the data to spark questions to ask your customers about the content, networking opportunities, formats and experiences they find most relevant and valuable, and why. Data your marketers should be able to interrogate should also validate and enhance the answers your customers give you. If your marketers are focused on customer insight, your marketing – and your whole organisation – will be more relevant and more resilient. #2: Specific, clearly defined marketing objectives – fully lined up behind your business goals. Using evidence-based insight on your customers to guide you, insist on marketing objectives that are realistic, achievable, and – most importantly – focused on achieving your commercial goals. Make sure the decisions you make about marketing investments are based on these objectives, and that your marketers are tracking and sharing results and progress with your stakeholders, along with insights and plans to improve performance over time. If you keep your marketers focused on what is most important, your marketing – and your whole organisation – will be more relevant and more resilient. #3: Smart, focused investment in your marketing website and your marketing database. The website you use to attract and communicate with customers is by far your most important marketing tool. And the data you hold on your customers is by far your most important marketing asset. Sadly, these very often receive low levels of investment, or a great deal of money and time is wasted if they are mismanaged. Decisions you make and actions you take to invest in your marketing website and your marketing database should be focused on achieving your marketing objectives (see #2 above) and your commercial goals (see #1 above). Far too often, websites and databases are high-jacked or poorly led by a (usually well-meaning) senior executive with very little knowledge of marketing, or a mostly tactical inhouse marketing team, or – the worst scenario of all – a smooth talking agency with good sales people who are good at ‘selling the sizzle’, but who have no real regard for the success of your organisation, and therefore the ‘sizzle’ fails to deliver. Your organisation will be more resilient if you have both a strong marketing website and good marketing database – led and managed by people who know what they’re doing, care about your organisation’s goals, and understand your marketing objectives. #4: A flexible and agile marketing function with the right skills, strong leadership, good management, and the motivation to contribute to the success of your organisation. With virtual working now the norm, the world is your oyster when it comes to finding the best marketing skills to form a resilient, flexible and agile marketing function. This can be achieved with a combination of inhouse resources, complimented with specialist, expert consultants and agencies – all well managed to collaborate, create powerful synergies and deliver great results. Marketing requires a vast array of skills that can be brought together to deliver quite outstanding outcomes, as long as you’re willing to treat marketing as an investment and not a cost – and step away from a traditional and inflexible inhouse team, and/or a ‘known’ agency that may be consistently underperforming. A resilient and relevant marketing function can be built if you are prepared to think differently, consider all your options, invest well, and set up, manage and continually support a highly collaborative, hybrid marketing team. If you have highly skilled marketers working for you, no matter where they are based, and whether in-house or external (ideally a combination of both) – your marketing and your organisation will be more relevant and more resilient. To achieve more resilience, keep an eye on MPG Insights over the coming weeks. We will be publishing a series of helpful guides on how to build a more relevant and resilient marketing function (and therefore a more resilient organisation!). So, if you have not already signed up to MPG Insights – now is a good time! Subscribe here to get an email every time we publish a new blog or resource like this one. MPG did a great job assessing our digital marketing and marketing operations requirements – considering our business goals. They developed a robust strategy, followed by a practical operational roadmap to help us further improve how we use technology to support marketing and sales performance. It has been a pleasure working with the MPG team! Jonathan Perry, Global Marketing Director, PEI – Alternative Insight Do you need a more resilient marketing function? Get in touch to find out how MPG can help you build a more resilient marketing function, and therefore a more resilient business. Continue Reading Topics: Community marketingDatabase developmentEvent marketingMarketing strategyMarketing technology
The future of B2B events: what does this mean for marketers? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 18/11/2021 In our most recent article on the future of B2B events, we shared insights from a strategy-focused roundtable organised by Renewd, combined with MPG’s insights from the work we do with our clients. As B2B events leaders assess their future risks and opportunities, we have considered what the changes to the product and revenue mix mean for marketers. Whether your events are delivered virtually, in-person or in a hybrid format, marketers should keep in mind the following 7 things when working to grow event revenues: #1: Exceptional customer experiences – starting with personalised marketing With the rise of digital events and the emergence of many new products and brands, the noise in the marketing channels your competitors are also using can be deafening. Crowded email inboxes and social feeds are being ruthlessly filtered at best, and ignored at worst. To win the battle for the precious commodities of your target customers’ attention and time, not only do your products need to deliver more value, but your marketing messaging needs to be highly relevant, reaching the right person at the right time with exactly the right message. Adopting personalisation is only possible when marketers have defined their customer segments and ensured their databases are well managed and set up in the right way for targeting via segmentation. Marketers also need access to analytics via a foundation of a solid and well-integrated marketing tech stack. To achieve the right level of personalisation, the marketing data and tech ‘space race’ is on! #2: Marketing strategy aligned with business objectives As business leaders are becoming more confident in defining their medium-long term business strategies, marketing strategies are needed that support business objectives. Marketers will need to set commercially focused, measurable marketing objectives, with supporting KPIs, to ensure that the tactics they deploy are positively and visibly impacting business performance. #3: Measuring and analysing marketing performance It is a marketer’s responsibility to provide ongoing visibility of marketing performance and ROI (the good, the bad and the ugly!). This enables business leaders to confidently make informed decisions on how to continue with their marketing investments. Marketers themselves also need this visibility to understand their audience engagement and how their target customers are interacting with their brands and products. Knowing what is and is not working is the only way to optimise marketing tactics. #4: Audience-first, content-led approach Marketers need to have a deep understanding of their audience – their demographics, personas, motivators, challenges, ‘jobs to be done’ – to ensure their marketing messages are relevant enough. They need to work closely with content and sales teams to ensure alignment, create feedback loops and ensure that audiences’ needs are prioritised. If the audience is going to pay with their time, attention, and money, the content on offer needs to be highly valuable, and a content-first, benefit-led approach to marketing messages and communications is key to capturing and maintaining interest over time. #5: Highly targeted, account-based marketing There is an expectation from customers that marketing messages are highly targeted, personalised, and super relevant to them as individuals. A well executed ABM strategy should deliver strong ROI through higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles and higher average order values by creating highly personalised messaging and customer experiences for key individuals within targeted accounts. #6: Marketing training and development Marketing is always changing, and marketers should always be learning. Businesses that build agile capabilities in their marketing function by supporting and investing in training and developing their marketers are likely to get better results from their marketing, as well as achieve better staff retention. Many of the best marketers value continuous learning and progression opportunities more than a punchy salary. #7: Marketing and sales alignment Marketers need to play a bigger role in how businesses offer and execute marketing initiatives for their commercial clients. They need to work more closely with the sales teams who are selling marketing services in order to create marketing campaigns and initiatives that are more engaging (ideally content-led), effective, and can demonstrate ROI. In summary, the key to success for B2B media and event marketing over the coming years will be about high-value, engaging and unique content delivered via a highly personalised, multi-channel approach that is executed, measured, and optimised with a rigorous approach. There are no shortcuts. But there are definite market-leadership opportunities to be grabbed when the right kind of marketing approach receives a good level of investment and executive support. “MPG has a deep understanding of the pain points in marketing within our industry, and they can deliver a strong base of best practice, having been through this process with so many community-focused events businesses. Their rigour and structured process really gives us confidence.” Phoebe Kimble-Wilde, Marketing Director at MarketforceLive Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business objectives? High performance marketing that drives revenue growth and consistently delivers against business objectives can only be achieved when based on a robust marketing strategy. MPG’s Marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you get ahead. Find out more Continue Reading Topics: Event marketingMarketing skills Account based marketingMarketing strategy
The future of B2B events: 5 insights from MPG by Sharise Wilkinson, on 05/11/2021 I recently had the opportunity to participate in an excellent strategy-focused roundtable organised by Renewd, the global, open network of specialised subscription, membership and event professionals. More than half of participants were business owners, and all participants were senior executives responsible for long term strategy development, with events being a key part in their product mix and revenue growth plans. From the discussions, it was clear that events-focused organisations are still in – and will continue to face – a great deal of uncertainty. Transformational, rapid change has occurred in almost every market, and therefore the ‘extreme and ongoing change’ paradigm we find ourselves in could well be the ‘new normal’ for some time. Based on the observations of MPG’s senior leadership team, and what came out of the Renewd round-table discussions, five specific areas have surfaced that, at this time, present particular risk – and in some cases significant opportunity – for organisations where events play an important role: (Note: when referring to ‘events’ below, we’re referring collectively to all events that are being run in virtual, hybrid and digital formats) #1: Competition is more intense than ever. Nearly every market has a great range of events for customers to choose from, especially in digital formats. Barriers to entry have been lowered for new event organisers, while ‘legacy’ event organisers are also running more events, and plan to continue to do so. So there is a huge amount of noise out there, with inboxes and social feeds buzzing constantly with numerous ‘must attend’ events and ‘last chances to book’. This won’t die down any time soon, if ever. #2: Event audience expectations have changed – for good. They expect value, and are still willing to pay for it with their time, attention and money. Event participants want better value for money from events of all formats. They are expecting high quality production, as well as highly relevant, valuable and unique content and networking. Targeted event attendees don’t mind giving their time, attention and money to event organisers who deliver what they most value. They also don’t mind being ‘sold to’ by sponsors and exhibitors, as long as they are the right vendors worth meeting, and all vendors respect a ‘content-led, value-first’ approach. #3: An audience-first, data-led and research-informed approach to product development, content creation and marketing is essential. A deep understanding of your audience is essential for any B2B event organiser’s survival, and this understanding should be based on robust data and research practices. If you don’t understand your audience – at all times – you cannot create or deliver what they most value. If you don’t serve up what they most value, they won’t give you their time and attention. And if you don’t have their time and attention, you can’t monetise them via ticket sales or via sponsors/exhibitors. #4: Commercial clients want more data, better qualified leads, and strong visibility of event performance. Event organisers are being interrogated more by sponsors and exhibitors to prove ROI. They are asking for data and proof points focused on relevance of the audience and quality of leads delivered. They are now comparing events to the other digital alternatives they relied on for lead generation when Covid first came along. In the time it took for events organisers to postpone, and then pivot their events to digital, many sponsors and exhibitors did their own ‘testing and learning’ – trying out content-led ABM campaigns, digital advertising and even their own events. A lot of this will stick – especially because the data around how these deliver ROI is generally quite strong, and most importantly, visible. Events organisers, by and large, are still playing catch up on the ‘data-led insights’ front. In the near future they will have to match what their clients can get elsewhere. #5: Hybrid working and the ‘great resignation’ have meant that good leadership, strong people and team management, good team culture and investing in employees are now top priorities. Event organisers are having to work very hard to retain the talent they have, and they are having to work even harder to find and attract new talent. Flexible working and well thought-out, carefully planned ‘facetime’ with team mates, managers and subordinates is now expected. Organisational and brand purpose, positive culture, attention to employees’ wellbeing, CSR initiatives and investment in professional training and development have all become important in attracting, keeping and motivating staff. These are no longer ‘nice to haves’ – they really matter to current and potential new employees. If you have more insights to share, or particular view on the insights above, please do get in touch. And make sure you subscribe to MPG Insights to receive the follow up article to this blog – which will explore what this all means for marketing, and marketers, in B2B media and events businesses. Subscribe to MPG Insights MPG did a great job developing a marketing strategy to help us grow one of our flagship communities and largest US events. They added a level of science, rigour and new thinking to our approach that our internal marketers are excited about, giving me confidence we’ll achieve great things together. It is a pleasure working with Team MPG! Philip Doyle, Director, MarketforceLive Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business objectives? High performance marketing that drives revenue growth and consistently delivers against business objectives can only be achieved when based on a robust marketing strategy. MPG’s Marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you get ahead. Find out more Continue Reading Topics: Event marketingMarketing strategy
What’s going on with email marketing? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 14/10/2021 Email is a challenging area for B2B media and events businesses right now. Several companies have recently told us they are struggling to maintain strong levels of engagement and good enough results from their email campaigns – especially where email marketing had been a strong channel for them until relatively recently. When investigating this email marketing challenge for a range of clients, we are finding that declining email performance is due to a similar set of issues, all of which have similar solutions, regardless of the market or product in focus. In this post, we share MPG’s five key recommendations for fixing an email marketing performance problem: #1: Messaging strategy development There are 4 things to get right with your database to achieve strong engagement and conversions: (1) relevance (2) currency (3) size/number of contacts you can email (4) how your contacts are tagged, or organised. Simply put, you need a database of enough of the right kinds of contacts (those who will find your value proposition relevant and valuable), that are up to date and correct, in order to achieve engagement and conversions at the required level. To understand how much room there is for growth in your database, you must understand your total addressable market (TAM). Lead generation tactics such as downloadable content pieces, powered by inbound marketing, are a very important way to constantly and reliably grow your database with relevant, interested, and engaged contacts, all year-round. Additionally, dedicated, targeted database research is a very effective way of filling key gaps with relevant (high quality) contacts. Get in touch with MPG to find out how we can help you invest well in this kind of research – to achieve a strong return on investment, short term and longer term. Find out more about MPG’s Database Development & Optimisation services #2: Segment and target Segmentation and targeting well have always proved – in MPG’s projects – to almost instantly improve email performance. The main purpose of segmentation and targeting is to make sure the content of the email as relevant as possible to the person receiving it. Firmographic, behaviour-based, and demographic segmentation are the three methods we recommend – often to be used concurrently. The exact segmentation method chosen should always be based on the desired outcome of improving relevance to the audience. More relevance = more engagement, which usually = more conversions, which usually = more revenue. To enable segmentation, ensure your lead generation (data capture) and data research efforts include the categorisation needed to organise your contacts well to enable segmentation and targeting. Emails targeted as specific segments should be used to present the most valuable
