Part 1: Marketing Lessons From Successful Communications Professional Of Global Leader
Communications Manager with more than 20 years of experience provides her top tips on smoothing the transition to digital marketing.
In Part 1 of this three part blog series, based on my interview with Kristina Tullberg, Communications Manager for Northern Europe at global IP Surveillance market leader Axis Communications, we take a closer look at key lessons learnt in the company’s transition to digital marketing and marketing automation.
This version is truncated. I’ve published a more complete version of the first part of this interview which is now available in the PR insights section of my agency’s website. But I hope this piece captures some of the gold dust which Kristina gave me when I spoke to her three weeks ago.
Q1. What are your Top 5 Tips for successfully transitioning from traditional media-led PR to digital marketing from your experience over the last 5–6 years?
A1. Tip #1: Allow yourself a good deal of time to complete the transition to digital marketing.
It’s important to try to carry publishers with you through the digital transition. Some have made highly effective transitions to digital publishing already. So, don’t underestimate their ability to change to support you in the new digital-dominated world. If you give them a challenge, they may well rise to it. Media relationships are still very important but the form and dynamics between media and companies have changed.
Put simply, the media increasingly recognises that it is high quality, engaging content which is king for both parties now. That and the captive audience which their circulation can deliver if we get the content right and distributed in a variety of online channels.
The publishers which can partner with us to help us engage a well-targeted audience of decision-makers, moving them through the sales funnel, are the ones we find most interesting these days.
Those that simply offer us hard copy display advertising are not as interesting because we struggle to measure the brand building merits of this approach.
Tip #2: Don’t forget about the quality of your content
Early in the transition, there was so much to learn about new digital channels like LinkedIn and marketing automation techniques (we plugged Pardot into our CRM system), that it was easy to take your eye off the ball in terms of content quality.
The content needs to move online and there is more to create that’s for sure. However, that doesn’t mean that you should be any less careful about the quality of your content as, in the end, engagement will not be strong unless the content is well written, audience-relevant and stimulating.
Tip #3: Make sure your content hierarchy is strong & build campaigns
One of the early mistakes a lot of companies make is to not have an adequate range of content that is needed to pull prospects through the sales funnel. A common mistake is not building these ‘content journeys’ well enough.
In the early days, we would just try to create sales leads off every piece of content we were creating. It meant that we created loads of sales leads but we were not qualifying those leads well enough. The problem then is Sales were getting too many not well qualified leads and they could not handle the volumes we were creating.
For us, the turning point was thinking in terms of more gradual, layered engagement through campaigns. We used Pardot Engagement Studio to help with this. In this way, it’s possible to distil down from the 250 leads which downloaded our latest White Paper, to the five hot leads which are worth passing through to sales to connect with.
Sales can then report what happened to those five hot leads so we can learn from each other and more deeply integrate going forward.
Tip #4: Don’t assume your brand will look after itself
Although some aspects of brand building have been consigned to the dustbin with the transition to digital, brand building itself can still be measured in the digital world, even if the ‘call to action’ isn’t built in.
For example, we’ve been running LinkedIn branding adverts aimed specifically at some of our partners across Northern Europe over the last few months. We’ve been pleasantly surprised how strong the engagement rate has been — in the realm of 4% when industry-typical rates are closer to 0.5%. It’s worked particularly well in the UK actually.
Tip #5: Recognise that digital marketing enables you to localise content and you must!
What we’ve come to recognise now that we are about six years into the transition is that audiences are in pockets, they don’t all read the same set of industry publications anymore. They have their own, quite personal media landscapes. When we go online, it’s easier to pick and choose what you read. Your key sources might vary from month to month depending what you are looking for more information on.
When you go digital, you need to appeal to audiences more individually and on a local basis wherever possible. That could mean that you need to put out more local language content. Even in Sweden, where everyone speaks English, we’ve found content engagement is much higher if we can put out content for a Sweden-only campaign in Swedish.
This localisation is becoming increasingly important today because of the huge volume of content being pushed into decision-makers inboxes and social channels each day. This localisation trend has wider implications for websites.
Q2. What else do marketing departments need to think about when planning the ‘digital marketing switch over’?
A2. You need to recognise that it’s a massive learning curve. So, you must be working for a company which enables you to take time out for training in new skills on a range of new channels.
It’s important to keep abreast of technical marketing knowledge. This is less of a problem with younger marketers coming out of universities now with strong digital marketing skills. However, for more experienced marketers (like myself) there is a real need to set aside a good deal of their time to keep up to speed.
We need to be able to build campaign pages, design, and launch campaigns on LinkedIn and Pardot for example and even if we don’t do the actual job ourselves, we need to understand the logics behind it all.
You need to recognise that effectively you are now a publisher. The skills you need in your marketing department need to include the ability to publish great looking content and analyse results in each channel.
We choose to spread these skills quite widely across the team. However, you may decide you want channel-specific specialists or design specialists who you hand over to once you’re ready to go public with your content. There is not one way fits all when building a modern marketing team, but every company needs to find the way that suits them best.
“You need to recognise that we are going through a fundamental change of the entire marketing profession so don’t underestimate the need for training to bring your people with you.”
The Top 5 Points I took from this part of my conversation with Kristina were:
1. For larger companies, allow up to 5 years to complete the transition to digital marketing and marketing automation in order to take your media partners with you and to acquire new skills in-house.
2. Don’t compromise on the quality of the content you are producing even though you are likely to be producing more of it for publication across a wider variety of social channels and online publications.
3. Organise your content into campaigns and build ‘content hierarchies’ designed to meet the needs of your target audience(s) at various levels of engagement. Create ‘content journeys’ for discrete groups of prospects.
4. Explore brand building in different ways — using LinkedIn advertising for example, setting engagement level (but not call to action-level) targets for this activity.
5. Firms that are already global or plan to be global over the next few years, need to embrace localisation of content, even extending to localised adaptation and translation of content.
The author of this piece, Miles Clayton, has worked with Axis on and off for nearly 20 years. It’s always worth checking back on companies that changed the world — inventing a new product and market. Axis is one such company.
You can also sign up for my next workshop on ‘Building your Content Journey to Turn Prospects into Customers’ starting at 4PM on Friday 22nd January. Sign up here to join this limited numbers session and begin building your business’ Content Journeys.
