Creating Excellent Customer Marketing Experiences

Business strategy and marketing strategy are the same strategy. If your marketing plan doesn’t grow and drive your business, what’s the point of having one? At CTI we’ve come to rely on the annual Marketing Summit held by the PSNI Global Alliance . They get the importance of marketing strategy, and the event put together by Hailey Klein , PSNI’s Director of Marketing and Communications, is incredible. We take what we learn there and use it to elevate our marketing (and business!) strategy for the next year.

I’d like to share some of the ideas from this year’s event that stood out for the marketing team and me. Some of these ideas might already be part of your plan, but that doesn’t mean everybody knows about them already. Feel free to share some of your ideas or argue with mine down below in the comments!

Connecting Sales and Marketing

The summit began with a discussion about connecting sales and marketing. Aligning these two teams may seem like a no-brainer. We have a great marketing team at CTI. They generate a ton of leads while supporting our design consultants with presentations, graphics, and stats to service our customers. It’s critical here at CTI, but it continues to be a struggle for many organizations.

A. Lee Judge , a talented B2B marketing strategist and the host of The Business of Marketing podcast made it simple: when sales and marketing have different KPIs and different goals, their strategies tend to be off. Judge went on to discuss how to bring those goals in line with one another and gave the marketers in the room tools to get on the same page as sales in their companies.

Calendars as “Living Documents”

Pam Didner , a legend in B2B sales and marketing, brought the idea of a “living document” to our attention. Almost any marketing group can improve on being strategic and looking at the year as a whole. It’s certainly an area our team is looking to improve!

Didner suggests, instead of producing a calendar toward the end of the year, keeping it as a “living document” and making it a rolling calendar. That means that on any day of the year, we can look out 12 months from now and begin planning. Business doesn’t stop in December, and neither should your planning!

Pillar Pages and Content Creation

I believe content creation should be part of everyone’s marketing strategy. Let your employees blog about industry trends, or answer customer questions. Give them an outlet to flex their muscle and show potential customers the expertise they’re searching for. When those customers engage, you’ll find you’re spending less time educating them on the basics and more time listening to their needs and developing a plan.

DemandJump 's Ryan Brock co-wrote the book, Pillar-Based Marketing. His PSNI presentation explained the core of this strategy for supercharging content marketing. First, Brock explained how people use search engines and how to determine what your potential customers are searching for. Then you move on to brainstorming and creating a ‘spider web’ of the content your customers are looking for. It’s about building trust and authority and delivering the right content to drive page rank and outcomes. We’re looking forward to tracking the results.

AI Isn’t a Threat, It’s a Tool

CTI is data-driven. I’m naturally curious about the latest in business applications and how the dev team at CTI can program them to yield the best results. My son is deeply involved in the world of AI, so it’s been a personal interest since long before ChatGPT started flooding the headlines. CTI employees are deeply engaged with ChatGPT, from experiments with writing, summarizing research and documents, coding, and, we hope, creating more effective chatbots.

Clark Boyd , a Columbia and Cambridge lecturer, and the founder of Novela , a startup dedicated to "professional development in the AI age" joined the Summit to give attendees a graduate course in AI for marketing. Boyd noted that OpenAI , the organization that developed ChatGPT, offers a host of machine learning models and that leveraging them with open-source tools commonly available on GitHub promises unprecedented opportunities for crafting dynamic interactions for customers.

This is not a “set it and forget it” type approach. Large Language Models like ChatGPT are still in their early stages. They need to be checked and monitored. Still, I’m excited. The ability to create content and connections custom-built for our customers is intriguing!

I’ve been a part of marketing at CTI almost since the very beginning. We’ve not always done it well. But our team now is among the best in the industry. Giving them the tools and training to become even better is important to me and to the future success of CTI. With PSNI, these opportunities grow every year and I look forward to what we can do alongside the PSNI Global Alliance for our clients around the world.

As always, if you have a question about the future of AV in your organization, feel free to connect with me or reach out to CTI at any time!

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