Interviews with tech CMOs and Marketers at large brands reveals a shift in marketing focus
Following detailed interviews with CMOs from large technology brands, five trends surfaced that reveal a shift in focus from lead generation to building digital relationships. The 50+ page Technology CMO outlook report unlocks deep insights and thinking from marketing leaders, to understand how they helped to not only navigate unprecedented challenges but unlock business value and opportunity from it too.
CMA members, Copy House and immediate future collaborated to interview CMOs and Marketers from brands including Adobe, Worldpay, Siemens and SAP. The in-depth insight reveals five core trends in marketing that reveal a shift in approach. As said several times by contributors, “there is a move to serve, not sell”.
Kathryn Strachan, MD at Copy House says:
“The change in direction, driven largely by the pandemic, saw marketers move to align more closely with customers and sales teams. The need to compensate for cancelled events and switch from promotional content to more helpful content, fundamentally change the marketing approach: refocusing efforts on delivering meaningful value that would make the audiences’ lives easier and reduce some of their stress by concentrating on solving pain points”.
Conversations surfaced the need to build stronger better customer relationships. It also identified new approaches – the likely permanent move to more hybrid led events; the substantial re-evaluation of the Martech stack; and the desire to slow down and be empathetic to customers. What was clear throughout discussions was that social media played a significant part in their plans for the year ahead.
Colin Jacobs, Managing Director at immediate future, says:
“The brightest minds in technology marketing have paved a progressive path for future social media marketing activities. Realising the importance of learning from human behaviours and data, marketers deliver contextual storytelling across a suite of assets, they have nudged and nurtured customers by delivering ‘relevance at scale’.
Jacobs identifies a significant focus on excellence and best practice in social:
“There’s resounding support of quality over quantity, that cuts through the social noise and builds closer, more personal, customer relationships. To create content that your audience cares about and engage with means you can no longer just pull apart a white paper and fluff a few ‘try now’ or ‘find out more’ posts. That’s lazy and boring social content – and it’s clear from these leading marketers that success is found in being serious about social media marketing and striving to break the social boring!”.
