Presenting Marketing Mavericks, a series initiative by Paul Writer that gives an inside look into some of the greatest marketing teams in the field. For our very first segment of Marketing Mavericks, we interviewed the team leader of Happiest Minds to find out what 2018 going forward looks like for them.
1. What is the topmost priority for the marketing team this year?
Happiest Minds is focused towards leveraging disruptive technologies to deliver non-linear growth and digital capital faster to its customers. Towards this, marketing is focused on harnessing the power of digital marketing to the hilt in showcasing our thought leadership prowess (via all marketing levers/channels) and leading the way in creating a healthy sales pipeline.
2. How is AI viewed within your organization or as an offering for your client?
AI and machine learning are rapidly transforming the technology landscape and creating more personalized marketing opportunities for storytelling and branding. At Happiest Minds, we couple augmented intelligence with natural language processing, image analytics, video analytics, and emerging technologies like AR and VR to help businesses deliver digital capital to our customers, resulting in immersive customer experiences and outperforming the competition. Our solutions and accelerators such as: digital assistants, recommendation engines, speech/text recognition software (conversational commerce), image recognition software, etc are gaining ample traction at the marketplace.
3. What are a few team building initiatives that have worked for you in the past? What do you do for continuous learning for your team?
Teams can be intrinsically motivated and nurtured by facilitating greater autonomy; by fostering new ideas and encouraging knowledge sharing; and in general, by making the workplace fun. It is important to include the team in decision making and also celebrate significant achievements. As a team we do indulge in fun activities and some of our previous team events: bubble soccer, paintball, bowling, adventure sports, escape games, cookouts, etc.
Continuous learning is achieved by a mix of on-the-job trainings, classroom training as well as via various online e-learning courses. The marketing team also attends a lot of industry events and this is also an important channel for keeping abreast of latest trends and technologies w.r.t marketing as well as the industry in general.
4. How do you use data to make marketing work in your organization?
A data-driven marketing approach is the key to our success at Happiest Minds.
(a) We have 3 focused business units (BU) – Digital Business Services (DBS), Product Engineering Services (PES) and Infrastructure Management & Security Services (IMSS). Each BU understands their respective target audience and has built solutions and services to cater to its market segment and deliver an accelerated GTM to its customers.
(b) Leveraging both internal & external social channels. We have a rich content repository and collaboration platform called Smilescentral for internal collaboration within Happiest Minds. The marketing team also ensures that all important information and collaterals are shared abundantly via our extensive social presence – via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Blog site and Corporate Website. We also participate in an extensive media outreach to showcase our thought leadership and technology Points of View (PoVs).
(c) Personalized Marketing. Data-driven marketing approach has helped us design and execute successful custom campaigns (digital, events, webinars, etc ). This has also helped us to garner a deeper understanding of the customer profile as well as pinpoint areas of specific improvement for the next campaigns.
In summary, it is important to extract real-time actionable insights from marketing data and use it to course-correct and optimize ongoing marketing campaigns.
5. What was the last campaign you worked on? What were the challenges you faced and how did you overcome it as a team?
A recent marketing campaign was to increase the volume and enhance the quality of inbound sales inquiries. For the success of this program, we created a cross-functional team (technology, content, design, digital, thought leaders) and eliminated departmental Silos. The focus was on creating industry-leading thought leadership content and showcase it across all social channels. Our SEO team too played a pivotal role in ensuring we got through to the right audiences via organic search. Wrt marketing automation, integrating new tools and technologies into the marketing strategy can be overwhelming at times. The project is far from over and no challenge is insurmountable as long as we have a committed team to see it through. The key is to monitor the campaign continuously, derive insights and fine-tune the tactics to deliver better outcomes.
Profile:
Name: Kiran Veigas
Designation: Program Director – Corporate Marketing
Organization: Happiest Minds Technologies
Size of the Marketing team: 8+
Awards and accolades won in the last 12 months :
- 100 Smartest Digital Marketing Leaders | Feb 2018 | World Digital Marketing Congress
- Digital Marketer of the Year ( category: Digital Businesses) | Dec 2017 | Moneycontrol & IAMAI
- Most Influential Content Marketing Professional | Nov 2017 | World Marketing Congress
- Adobe Content100 – India’s Top 100 Brand & Content Custodians | Aug 2017 | Adobe in association with Paul Writer
- Digi100 – India’s Top 100 Digital Marketers | Aug 2017 | Pluralsight in association with Paul Writer
Congratulations Paul Writer for starting Marketing Mavericks.
I am going to be a vivid follower.