On Tuesday 19th November, the Clevertouch team returned to the Wellcome Collection in London for our final event of the year as we explored how to expand marketing influence through Martech and strategic data management. It was a jam-packed agenda with speakers from our partner, Integrate, customers Fujitsu and Extreme Networks, and of course some of our Clevertouch team.
In today’s technology-powered world, the data used in marketing is more important than ever when ensuring a personalised campaign and improving customer experience for your clients. After an introduction from our joint MD, Phil Ball, CleverTouch’s co-founder and COO, Nick Burrell, took to the stage to explain how to successfully contribute to the business operations and prove demonstrable ROI. Marketing and Sales departments must use the data available to them wisely, otherwise bad things can happen – a certain big red campaign bus springs to mind!
Establishing the ROI of your marketing efforts can be hard in a B2B business as there are so many touchpoints within the process. However, at CleverTouch, we believe the best place to start is in building a “marketing spine” before building out the marketing stack. With the multitude of marketing products on the market, if you start by defining your spine and tailoring the products to your organisation’s specific needs, you can ensure that MarTech is optimised for the areas you need it. Nick explained that once the spine is established, you can then begin to build out the stack to support your wider marketing needs.
One of the biggest challenges the industry has faced recently has been the introduction of the dreaded GDPR. This privacy regulation has led to some organisations completely revolutionising their marketing processes from the ground up. But, 18 months down the line, how are things looking today? Over the last few months, we’ve seen a warming to businesses acquiring compliant third-party data lists since Marketing can’t just rely on cold calling and inbound leads. “The risk of being fined very heavily for a data breach is very, very high,” says Nick. In light of this, Sales and Marketing have had to step up their compliance processes in areas that only IT would have had to worry about before. It’s more crucial than ever for the two departments to align their efforts.
Following Nick’s presentation, we welcomed Nigel Arthur from Integrate to the stage. Nigel revealed some interesting results from Integrate’s recent survey, including that only 6% of marketers consider their data to be in good shape: accurate, compliant and actionable. It’s time, Nigel says, for Marketing Therapy.
Alongside issues surrounding data, the survey also revealed that 45% of respondent’s feel sales and marketing leads were bad and that 33% were duplicated, which leads to inefficient marketing processes with negative outcomes for the marketing team. Nigel emphasised the need for marketers to take a smarter approach to marketing leads and that experts should look for inefficiencies in the process to generate cleaner leads and improve the end results.
After a networking break, Nick returned to the stage to host a panel session with Fujitsu’s Tim Creak, Extreme Network’s Fredrik Sjostedt and James McHarg, for a Q&A about strategic data management and reporting in the enterprise.
When it came to discussing challenges, Tim explained how “one of the biggest challenges we have, with an influx of growth in MarTech, is the concern around how this is going to disrupt the business.” It’s an opportunity to change, but processes and attitudes vary globally so it’s vital that everyone is on the same page.
Fredrik agreed, and explored how “marketers are, to some extent, still seen as wedding planners”. People are fed and happy, so the event is deemed a success. Today, it’s vital to pinpoint the things that have the biggest effect at specific parts of the sales journey.
Weaving in the issue of regulation, Tim explained how post-GDPR, Fujitsu is beginning to have more conversations about enriching data. “From a data acquisition perspective, you need to look at your key accounts and identify where the gaps that need filling lie. You have to acquire your data for the right reason.”
James agreed, explaining how GDPR was such a big upheaval in the market and lots of organisations interpreted it in different ways. As Extreme Networks navigate the post-GDPR world, they’ve found that legitimate interest is particularly relevant for sales and marketing in the B2B world.
For the final presentation of the day, our very own Head of Insight and Analytics, David Irvine, came to the stage to explore how we utilise data and dashboards at CleverTouch. Applying what was discussed over the course of the afternoon, David explored how we can use quality data presented on some of our example dashboards to drive intelligent data-powered marketing.
We concluded the day with a networking session with drinks and canapes at the Wellcome Collection. The team would like to extend a huge thank you to all of our speakers and look forward to seeing attendees at the next CleverTouch event in the new year.