This week, along with marketing visionaries from BrightTALK and Marketo, we held a breakfast event in the city which focused on lead generation and nurturing strategies for growth. The technology and finance industries are both booming: they provide significant contributions to the economy, with both industries creating over a million jobs each and contributing approximately 6.5% to the GDP.

Our joint Managing Director, Phil Ball, kicked off proceedings as he outlined both the differences and similarities between tech and finance marketing—both have their strengths, weaknesses and challenges. In finance marketing, it’s more about the brand than it is the commercial aspect, whereas for technology it’s all about the leads, with more of a commercial focus, typically around product. Despite these differences in marketing between the industries, each can learn a lot from the other, with both often too inwardly-industry-focused.

When developing a successful Marketing Automation program there are lessons to be learned in both cases—as Phil pointed out. Marketing failure is never down to the technology you use and there are common factors that marketers should all be aware of. Common reasons, including a lack of clear vision or standardised processes, can affect both industries.

If you want to build a successful marketing journey, it has to be engaging and relevant—you can’t just spam your customer with an always-on campaign. We also heard from CleverTouch customer, Simon Mott, Head of Marketing from HANetf, a financial services company just beginning their journey into Marketing Automation. Simon further developed Phil’s ideas around engaging the customer: regardless of the industry, marketing has to be multimedia and multiplatform today. Digital Strategy and Vision are critical as when marketing to a client—if you want to drive engagement, post to places the customer is already going rather than trying to attract them somewhere new.

After hearing from Phil and Simon, Vicki Scheele, Senior Marketer from Marketo UK shared her industry insights on how to build an engagement engine that can capture, nurture and drive revenue. Although not a massive fan of the buzzword, Vicki stressed to the audience the importance of being aware of Digital Transformation: it’s changing the game for all of us, changing the way we live our lives as well as how we market. The pace of change is quick and we all have to pick it up whether we like it or not.

However, as expressed by Phil and Simon, you can’t just post spam your customers on every platform—it pays to tailor your efforts to your customer. In fact, Marketo found that if you listen to your audience and get it right, despite the recent introduction of GDPR, 60% of consumers will share information if they think it will result in relevant tailored communication.

After a short break for tea, coffee and some delicious pastries, the final speaker, Val-Pierre Genton, VP Product Marketing at BrightTALK, took to the stage to share his insight on how to create more inspired content to boost campaign success. Val had flown over from San Francisco especially for the event and emphasised the how the importance of video will continue to grow. Video based content will become the story telling media for marketers, and soon 80% of all web traffic will be video.

Creating content that customers want to engage with will make sure that you create engaged leads for the business. The buyer journey can often be very complex and not as linear as some perceive. When working on generating leads for sales, it’s important to stay focused.

As Phil Ball summarised at the end of the morning, the best sellers think like marketers and the best marketers think like sellers, and so it’s important to keep your teams aligned when engaging with your customers.

Having learnt so much from these experienced and insightful marketers, we’re now looking forward to our next event at the end of October – will we see you there?