Why new marketing realities need new types of connection

Marketing realities and connections

How will marketers cope in the year that everything changes? For the panelists at LinkedIn and The Marketing Society’s The Year the Buzzword Became Reality session, the answer was clear: redefine your peer group, redefine your skill set, and connect to people and sectors that can challenge your thinking.

“You’ve got to look beyond your peer group,” argued Visa Europe’s head of digital and CSR, Nick Jones. “You’ve got to reach out to colleagues in PR and data because the tools that we need are increasingly their tools.”

“Look at it from the customer’s point of view,” added Pete Markey, CMO of RSA. “They’re not judging you against your sector; they’re judging you against all of the experiences that they now have. To understand your customer today, you really need a way to connect to insights from different sectors that can challenge your traditional ways of doing things.”

The need for such new skills was nowhere more evident than in the execution of content marketing, something that Jones in particular was keen to see reaching a new level in the next year. “The difference between content communications and marketing is a difference in timescales,” he argued. “It’s a different rhythm. If we can combine the rigour of marketing with PR’s abilities around content and influence then we can hit the sweet spot. Let’s make sure we’re celebrating some really great content delivery by 2015.”

Connecting to fellow professionals wasn’t the only source of insight that our panel feel marketers need to make more of this year. One of the major contributions that social media can make is in powering more insightful connections with customers as well. Pete Markey described innovative work that RSA is doing in the UK and Canada, using LinkedIn to disrupt the brand’s dealings with insurance brokers: “We’ve been building these strong LinkedIn communities and generating great engagement scores. We’re distributing content to help them sell more and we can see what is being read and what’s being shared, which is really important. We’ve used the LinkedIn communities as the basis for dinners bringing the brokers together and that in turn informs the content that we share on LinkedIn. It’s changing our relationship into a partnership.”

In the age of Big Data, all panelists argued that the role of such personal connections and human intuition cannot be forgotten. “If we ask the same questions of more data, we’ll still get the same answers,” said Adobe’s Digital Marketing Director, John Watton. “Often what we need is unstructured learning and different thinking.”

Above all, the panel were united in a plea for marketers not to hide behind the new concepts and new technologies setting the agenda this week – and to remember what their essential responsibilities are.

“One of our biggest challenges is to keep our shareholders and board members on the journey,” said the automotive marketing director, Greg Levine. “And that means putting these new concepts into a context that matters to them, where they can see the value.”

“I love buzz, it pushes the frontier of innovation,” he added. “But the big risk is when you get obsessed with one concept in isolation. It’s how we integrate these techniques into what we are doing that matters. We need a clear focus and we need a way to keep things bloody simple.”

“We’ve seen massive tipping points in all of these areas, moving from delivering a mass experience to a hyper-personalised experience,” summed up Watton. “2014 saw the realisation of all these things; 2015 will be about making them real.”


This article originally appeared on LinkedIn's website here. Browse more Advertising Week content in our Clubhouse.

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