Yesterday I attended the GIIMS at the Ritz Carlton, Bangalore. The Paul Writer event had ITSMA & LinkedIn as partners and is India’s only forum for IT services marketers. Here are my 10 key takeaways from the event.
1. Social media is free; social media marketing is not.
2. Digital is a great leveler. Even if your competition is 5 times bigger than you, the digital platform offers a level playing field. A smart marketer can leverage this to his advantage.
3. The rate of disruption of technology is brutally fast. With themes such as Internet of Things and Internet of Me coming to the fore, marketeers need to be abreast with tech changes and sharpen the saw regularly.
4. A lot of people are becoming non-responsive when you try to reach them via email or phone. Hence the concept of Social Selling becomes more relevant. You need to figure out how you can reach out to customers that don’t respond.
5. The customer is becoming a cat and not a dog. A dog has loyalty but a cat often scratches around and looks out for more options. Today’s customer always looks around with multiple suppliers before making the final decision. This was not the case a decade ago.
6. The goal of marketing is always going to be a moving target. Change is constant and as a marketer you need to get comfortable with a lot of balls in the air at all times.
7. People buy from people. So don’t forget the fundamental truth that we are marketing to humans. The human angle should not be missed out amidst all this techno-commercial play.
8. The key competency that a CEO looks for from a CMO is being able to deliver to business outcomes. The quantity of marketing activities don’t matter to the CEO as much as the end results.
9. Your content strategy could be like a “big rock”, where you have a big chunk of content created at one go; that is sliced and diced and re-purposed across different platforms. LinkedIn did this with their campaign on “The sophisticated marketer’s guide to LinkedIn”.
10. Content still remains as king! Atleast 10 pieces of content are consumed before making the purchasing decision. So you need to seed content in various platforms such as blogs, websites, immersive digital books and allow for the prospect to discover the content on his own.
Image courtesy of [hywards] at FreeDigitalPhotos.net