Franco Ieraci | B2B digital marketing roundtable discussion: A review

Prolific North brought together half a dozen leading B2B marketers and entrepreneurs to discuss the role of digital marketing and engagement in the B2B environment. The session was co-hosted by the leading global B2B agency Stein IAS and the discussion was anchored around the results of the agency’s Digital Marketing Maturity Index.Joining the roundtable group were Charlotte Commarmond, Ingredion marketing director for Europe, James Lawton-Hill, head of marketing at Optionis, Manoj Ranaweera, the founder of tech platform UnifiedVU, Matt Hicks, a global B2B communications manager and Mike Doodson, Brother’s digital marketing manager.

Tom Stein of Stein IAS flew in from New York to join the session with two of his colleagues from the Bollington office, Craig Duxbury and Marc Keating, completing the round table line-up.

Following a two-year courtship, in 2015 Cheshire-based IAS merged with Stein based in New York and the enlarged agency has subsequently opened new operations on continental Europe, China and an office in San Francisco.

The agency’s Digital Marketing Maturity Index (DMMI)was published after over 3,000 global chief marketing officers responded to the online survey comprised of just 12 questions. The DMI itself is predicated on a Google statement that around 70% of the buyer journey is complete before a buyer embarks on a purchase. This the agency felt, was worth fleshing out in more detail and with the B2B sector specifically in mind.Stein IAS director Craig Duxbury offered some light-hearted comparisons between the San Francisco office and Manchester suggesting both cities shared a long history of ‘tech firsts’…

There are four main tenets to the Index:

• Reach and attract
• Engage
• Nurture and convert
• Analyse and optimize

Most digitally savvy companies are also customer obsessed

The most striking conclusion of the research was that brands (companies) typically fell – usually unknowingly  – into three main camps in their approach to their own brand management: they were generally either brand focused (on their own brand), customer focused or customer obsessed. And the startling fact to emerge from the research was that typically the higher up the digital marketing index a brand was, the more to the right – i.e. customer-obsessed rather than other focuses – the companies were likely to be.

Other findings unearthed were that many brands are often surprisingly poor at web optimization and that many companies are still much focused and consequently more successful at prospect targeting than they are at actually nurturing and converting said leads.

Duxbury also noted that their experience of working with US and European headquartered companies showed several instances of a disconnect between the companies’ HQ communication and engagement with the rest of those company’s global operations and that corporate communications still often operates in more of a silo and can be remarkably quite distinct from those companies’ digital and marketing activities. This cultural/physical issue could also be seen in the relationship between IT and the companies’ central buying bases which too often see a further disconnect between these bases and the outlying operations whose web, IT and subsequently sales needs and leads can be quite different. Read More ....