Marketing Mixtape:
We came to the B2B Marketing Exchange Experience this year ready to refresh, renew and remix. This year’s sessions put new spins on classic hits and got us pumped to move to a new beat as the year unfolds. The strategy team at Content4Demand created a best-of playlist to spotlight the sessions they think are worth a listen. Whether you missed B2BMX or simply want to hit “play” all over again, check out our top “tracks.”
Track List
Create Your Own
If you’re ready to lay down some new marketing tracks, we’re here to collaborate and inspire your B2B audience to cheer for an encore. Our seasoned players are taking your requests for an upbeat mix of classics and brand-new formats, backed by buyer-focused strategies to produce your own fresh marketing playlist. Meet us backstage to riff on some ideas.
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Track 01
Speed Metal for Fast-Paced Growth
A Headbangers Ball for Marketing Teams
Randy Frisch, CMO and Co-founder of Uberflip , believes that B2B brands have a real speed-to-market problem. With every new launch, we get burdened by last-minute tasks and complexities, which creates a daunting launch gap.
Uberflip
Launch Gap =
Target Launch Time - Actual Launch Time
The Results?
3 Ways to Rev Up Speed to Marketing:
Be wary of scope creep.
“Scope creep kills marketers,” Frisch says. Make launch campaigns and programs as clear and concise as possible. Develop a marketing calendar that keeps your team focused and aligned on sales asks. Everyone will have a clear view of goals, priorities and deadlines as a result.
Realize the buyers are in control.
You’ve heard it before, but many marketers are still creating one-lane, mass-produced campaigns. If you come to terms with the fact that buyers are in control, you can expand your channel mix and find ways to create campaigns that align to their unique journeys, needs and preferences.
Embrace the best of technology.
Frisch notes that with every marketing task, there are tools and apps to help teams level-up their results. The right technology will help you:
Drill into data that helps you understand your buyers better.
Find the right channels to get in front of these people most effectively.
Create immersive destinations that engage them once they click.
on the B2BMX Podcast.
For more on this, listen to Ardath Albee discuss
“The Keys to Creating Emotive Content Experiences”
Track 02
A Marketing Love Song
Say it with Feeling to Touch B2B Buyers’ Hearts
The High Notes:
Ardath Albee, CEO of Uber tfli , stressed the importance of using emotion to engage B2B buyers in content experiences.
"A content experience,” she says, “is the orchestration of storyline, messaging and resources that speaks to a specifc audience in context in a way that motivates them to engage and take an action in response."
Marketing Interactions
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Create "Eureka!" moments with interactive content.
Don't go overboard with personalization.
Use emotion to build buyers' confidence and allay their fears.
Help them see the path forward.
Use storytelling to make the buyer the hero in solving the problem.
Understand the buyer's emotional needs at each buying stage.
You want your buyer to engage first, think second.
The lesson we learned will serve us as we approach 2021 trends:
Trend #5
Customers expect personalized experiences.
The importance of personalization escalated, requiring marketers to get creative. An event that once took three months to prepare for has vanished. What do you spend those three months doing? In McAfee’s case, the teams focused on micro-segmentation to reach the top level of ABM targets and scaling ABM with Salesforce tools to segment and personalize messaging for particular groups—including target-focused nurtures and automated task reminders that incorporate a human touch.
of Marketing Leaders say customer experience is the key competitive differentiator.
82%
Trend #4
Brands must demonstrate a human connection.
There was a sea change in tone as marketers learned the importance of speaking to B2B customers not as suits but as humans who needed sellers to demonstrate empathy. McAfee could have simply promoted its security products at a discount—and they would have been perceived as tone deaf to what was happening. Instead, they opted to develop immediate solutions as loss leaders and come back for a sale after customers came out of crisis mode.
of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy.
68%
Trend #3
Digital channels have reached new levels of importance.
To no one’s surprise, online transactions nearly doubled last year. With golf days and corporate lunches off the table, marketing brought sales teams on board to instead focus on following up with digital-driven leads. Hannath describes it as “developing a new muscle” that’s teaching sales not to ignore digital and hopes to continue flexing that muscle. Sales buy-in is likely to pave the way for more of a hybrid model in 2021, blending in-person and digital tactics.
High performers are 1.8x less likely to be doing email marketing in the same way as a year ago.
1.8x
Trend #2
Buyers want new ways to make purchases.
In McAfee’s case, customers’ needs changed significantly. That meant equipping work laptops remotely and educating customers to access everything they needed from the cloud. They worked quickly to develop product bundles that responded to emerging customer needs. The process inspired intense internal collaboration processes they’re likely to extend indefinitely. As changes evolve this year, we need to intuit changing customer needs and discover ways to accommodate them.
of customers say how they obtain goods and services has transformed since the beginning of 2020.
63%
Trend #1
COVID-19 elevated customer expectations.
We had to reimagine what it means to digitally engage customers, which goes beyond plugging a physical experience into the digital realm. McAfee hosted roundtables and shipped its customers wine for wine-tasting events and other concepts that delivered a physical component to remote engagement. Even as the world returns to face-to-face opportunities, we can think differently about where to prioritize in-person events and where a creative digital or hybrid solution accomplishes engagement goals.
of customers say COVID-19 has elevated their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.
68%
Track 04
A New Spin on the Classics
Tune In to the Chart-Topping Trends in 2021
No one needs to tell us that 2020 was a difficult year, so it was refreshing to hear a positive perspective from Kyra Meyer-Johanson, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at Uberflip , and Brett Hannath, CMO at in their discussion about “How 2020’s Marketing Trends Are Shaping 2021.”
Salesforce
McAfee,
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Extending Past Trends to Shape the Future
The hard-won lessons of 2020 aren’t a waste if we build on all that work with an eye to the future. What we experienced was a catalyst for learning new skills and doubling down on proven strategies with hyper focus. As we stride further into 2021, we can carry those lessons forward and find new ways to apply them.
“We can look back and get mired in the negative,
or we can look at all that came out of it.
We all became better marketers as a result.”
Changes in the Past Year
Covid has changed a lot over the past year. Here’s what rose to the top for the CMO panel:
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Diversity became a measured strategy.
Woods said she has always worked on diverse teams, and those teams have always been high-performing teams. The two go hand in hand, and diversity should be a priority because the markets people are selling to are diverse.
Bullock added that diversity should be a business priority because it is as critical to business success as marketing itself. “You have to measure it. It can’t just be a whimsical exercise.”
Digital and content roles were in the spotlight.
“There’s no substitute for content,” Woods said. “There’s no substitute for storytelling. I think what people figured out is because you are not meeting someone in person and you can’t have a hundred and one webinars, the only thing that’s going to stand for you is your content. And your content has to be the thing that draws people in and engages them, and helps them understand how your capabilities can deliver on the needs that they have and solve for their pain points. That has been really important.”
Bullock added that digital teams have been indispensable because they have had to find creative ways to reach people with less budget and during a time when everything, everywhere is shifting.
Zoom democratized roles, and that’s a good thing.
Woods and her team launched the NielsenIQ product in 2020 and she felt it helped democratize the process. “There’s a part of me that thinks it made us stronger, because in Zoom, we all have the same size box. It doesn’t matter if you’re the product manager or the chief marketer, your box is the same size. So I felt it gave me an opportunity to get to know people I might not necessarily have gotten to know who I now know extraordinarily well.”
Management styles had to adapt.
Personality traits and other intangibles that CMOs typically use to motivate and lead just don’t work the same way on a virtual conference call. So, leaders had to adapt: “Not just outwardly did we have to change, but inwardly because your teams are getting a little bit burned out, so [you have to] think about what you can do to mix it up and be creative,” Bullock said. She recommends using Zoom not just for meetings but also for creative brainstorming time.
MODERATOR
Track 05
New Age Sounds
Remixed Teams & Roles for the Digital-First Age: CMOs Sound Off
How Roles Have Evolved
It is easier to see marketing’s impact on the business because of data.
Woods said that in the past five years, marketing itself has changed to become more disciplined, and this has raised marketing to a more strategic level. The same way a chart of accounts is an essential strategic component that is managed by a chief financial officer, digital marketing is an essential strategic component managed by a CMO. The change is all about data: “Now we can point to ROI and other results related to the business much more systemically than we have been able to do in the past.”
Heidi Bullock, CMO
Tealium
Megan Heuer, Managing Director
Winning by Design
Jacqueline Woods, CMO
Nielson IQ
. . .But marketing is still accountable for traditional responsibilities.
Bullock: “We went through an era where marketing owned brand. Then it was, 'Okay, now you’re all about metrics.'" Today, marketing is really both. Those are two skill sets that you have to have. You (still) need to drive the strategic narrative, and especially this past year because for a lot of companies, their strategic narrative changed.”
-Brett Hannath, CMO, McAfee
Off-the-chart responses of how happy InVision employees are compared to one year ago
Bonus:
“Marketing is a team sport and a people-powered discipline.”
Track 03
Groovin’ with Growth
Respond to the Rhythms of Revenue & Pipeline
“Growth marketing is being able to find and exploit levers to deliver predictable, repeatable pipeline and growth,” says Elle Woulfe, VP of Growth Marketing at .
When her team decided to remix outdated processes, infrastructure and programs, they tuned in to best-practice approaches to reinvigorate marketing’s contributions to pipeline and revenue. They transformed from order takers and brand broadcasters to strategic drivers of revenue performance. She gave B2BMX attendees a backstage pass to see how InVision did it.
InVision
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A Marketing Love Song
Say it with Feeling to Touch B2B Buyers’ Hearts
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Groovin’ with Growth
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A New Spin on the Classics
Trend #2
Buyers want new ways to make purchases.
of customers say how they obtain goods and services has transformed since the beginning of 2020.
63%
Trend #3
Digital channels have reached new levels of importance.
High performers are 1.8x less likely to be doing email marketing in the same way as a year ago.
1.8x
Trend #4
Brands must demonstrate a human connection.
of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy.
68%
Trend #5
Customers expect personalized experiences.
of Marketing Leaders say customer experience is the key competitive differentiator.
82%
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New Age Sounds