Staying ahead of the curve in B2B Marketing during pandemic times!

Seth Godin rightly said, “The only way to consistently grow in B2B is to be better than very good”. The role of marketers is evolving drastically in B2B Marketing environment during this pandemic situation.

In the marketing world, the dynamic environment has led to changes in the needs of customers and clients leading to changes in the roles of the marketers. According to a study, 45% of B2B buyers are millennials who actually tend to dislike the traditional approach of cold calls. According to another study, an average person comes across 4000-10000 marketing messages in a day through different media channels, which has likely reduced the attention of people over the advertisements. Due to rapid change in the environment, B2B is getting complex and it’s marketing needs new innovative techniques to reach the target audience along with the traditional approaches. There is a need of digital acceleration, said Vivian Gomes from CSS Corp at 24 th Inflection Marketing Web Conference & Awards- 2020. He also discussed his views on how marketing is not only about communication of value proposition but also personalisation of Communication. He mentioned some of the following strategies to achieve organizational targets in post-covid environment, which are also his success mantra:

• Usage of more tools and technologies.
• Maintaining the balance between the overall strategy and organizational environment.
• Follow the approach of ‘Do not follow the masses’.
• Exploring the art side area of marketing along with scientific view.
• Network marketing and embracing account based marketing(ABM) will also serve as great help.

Rajesh Kumar from UiPath believes that the unfortunate times of pandemic has given an opportunity to the marketers and their marketing teams to take a step back and analyse the bigger picture of the marketing world according to their organisational objectives. Also, enabling them to touch and engage in the areas which were earlier left untouched and unexplored. Though crisis management, internal bonding and employee communication is vital for the stability of the organisation because in these tough times, marketing helps in keeping the employees engaged efficiently.

In the initial stage of lockdown, the main focus point of the organisation was to engage and connect with the audience rather than achieving sales target. Therefore, the situation served as the great opportunity to the Chief Marketing Officers and Marketers for building a strong leadership base and strengthen their teams by winning their trust.

He also believes that marketers are business leaders who specialises in the craft of marketing, and irrespective of the various departments, the main focus of all is to move business forward. Marketing has a benefit of having a view ahead of curve based on external information, data analysis, research consumption, analyst interaction and therefore, can see where the market is going. It enables them to have a deep analysis on target customers.

His mantra of success is to manage the balance between brand and demand and agility in planning & decision making.

Kaustubh Chandra from NTT Ltd laid his emphasis on how marketing suddenly came in forefront not just for reaching out to customers but also to manage the internal affairs of the organisation. Their key to survive the challenge is through focusing on the following measures:

• Revenue focused marketing.
• Focus on Brand upliftment and content creation.
• Engaging in business aligned campaigns.
• Penetration of existing accounts while also figuring out the measures to engage in new accounts.

He mentioned the fact that so far the above steps really helped the organisation in increasing the sale opportunities. His mantra of success is to figure out the hybrid model of marketing which will prosper growth of the organization.

Abhijeet Mukherjee from Crayon shared his experience about how his team underwent into a deep analysis of maximum amount of business opportunities which could be grabbed from not only existing accounts but also from newer accounts as well. He believes that customers are seeking help from solution providers and therefore, it is the opportunity of marketers to go the extra mile in order to provide the protection shields to their customers. There are multiple reasons as to why marketers adopt technology trends such as Innovation in communication with target audience, brand promotion and empathy over price.

The marketing landscape is shifting its focus from the brand and laying more emphasis on customer for the center of strategy. Apparently in the dynamic environment, marketers should take a step ahead in meeting their customer needs and expectations.

Manoj Nair from Infosys introduced the idea of ‘Digital Pentagon’, and mentioned it’s five arms as:

• Experience
• Assurance
• Innovation
• Acceleration
• Insights

As marketers, their content creation shifted towards the analysis of demand in market, feedback of the audience and also how their organisation reacts to such demands, therefore strategizing accordingly. His teams also realised that it is necessary to communicate with market about how their organisation was serving to the society. He believes in sharing empathy towards the customers, employees and the organization’s team which is also his mantra of success.

Amiya Swarup from EY believes that marketers in today’s era are chief dot connectors. They not only cover the branding area but also are now responsible and accountable to their CEO, CFO, finance team and greatly involved with the sales department. Therefore, marketing is now the considered as multi- dimensional and skill upgradation is the need of hour.

Read More

The webinar ended with the India’s most prestigious Marketing awards ceremony where the top Industry leaders of India got awarded.