Learnings from creating growth with digital – (Digital) marketing, an essential part of becoming “being digital”

A company aiming to become “being digital” has an awareness problem. Today this company is known for its non-digital offerings and non-digitalized customer experience. Future digitalized business with new offerings and experience is something customers do not associate with the company. “Great brand, a company we can trust but for digital it is not on my list “. 

“Mikko, why do want to invest into digital marketing?”, “Your ideas that we need (more) marketing are interesting”, “Why do you want to talk about marketing, this should be a business conversation”. Parallel conversations… “Mikko, you need to generate growth”, “We need more sales”, “We need more business”. Too many times I have faced a situation where the conversation of marketing is separated from the growth discussion.  

Blog about marketing is not an easy task. Definition for marketing has a wide spectrum from “sales need nice looking product brochures” to “strategic and operational management of brand, offering, experience, and customer value delivery”. Companies with engineers’ mindset position marketing more towards sales support. Companies with a more strategic understanding of marketing see it as much more than a support. No matter what the definition for marketing is, every company, from small to big, across all industries share one challenge; awareness. 

The first awareness challenge is the awareness of the company has in general. The second awareness challenge is the associations people have “what can I get from this company”. The second challenge is common across the board for established brands, new digital offerings are something that customers do not associate with the company. The more the company has countries in focus, the bigger the awareness problem is.

Some claim that sales will do it, fix the awareness issue. The big problem in sales is that not a single company in the world has enough sales force to cover all customer opportunities. Opportunities are from companies that are made of people. To start with, these people have awareness of different things and their own preferences. First, the company needs to earn its place on the long (awareness) list, then on the shortlist, and finally a chance to win some business. It is really painful to be in sales, meet customers, and to learn “we are not even listed as an alternative, at all”. If the salesforce is the only function to educate customers, results are a long list of lost opportunities and at best long sales cycles.

Contribution from marketing (function) could be an answer here. To my taste, a large share of B2B marketing communication is boring. One-way communications, facts & features listings, boring press releases, images of unknown men wearing hardhats placed in front of a plant/mine/construction yard (why every industrial company has these images…), one-time read web content, etc. No emotions, no stories, no call to action, nothing to remember. Content focus is too much on old things, what the company has been known for decades. 

My experience is that the traditional split to B2B and B2C businesses is out of date. Especially in (digital) marketing, this split makes no good. Concepts created for consumer business can be applied in B2B business with great success. It is all about P2P (People to People) business. It is we people who make the decisions, have emotions, have preferences, search for information, do things, and do not things. Years ago, I established a marketing function for one company, and ideas of P2P were on the driver’s seat. (I had forgotten that the presentation is still out there… still looking good…  https://www.slideshare.net/MikkoMarsio/dovre-digital-marketing-management )

In P2P business (in all businesses…), emotions have high relevance in decision making. The bigger the price ticket, the more the decision is based on emotions. A car, an apartment, a house or, a boat, all purchases are driven very much by emotions. Of course, we have Excel sheets for so-called rational decision making. In B2B business one area of big decisions is partnering, how a customer selects its development vendors. Both in the selection phase and in later actual partnering, trust is everything. Trust is an emotion. Which company customer’s decision-makers trust to deliver and create results? 

I love storytelling in marketing. Great stories create emotions. A business, its future vision, and strategy, if all these are integrated into a compelling story that is loved by employees, customers will fall in love as well. Love means fans and fans mean the best possible business. The story is told by your integrated marketing efforts and it can be told in a nutshell as well. Nutshell example is from ABB where I created the idea (and the need) of a future mining video https://youtu.be/dPwV6hP8p2w 

I have been with 30:70 split in consumer and B2B businesses. B2B companies do not respect marketing as they should, it is their “7th or 11th most important area to develop and invest in”. Those companies that respect marketing, stand out from the crowd really nicely. My cure for the situation has been “Digital marketing, 24/7 salesforce” marketing strategy/concept. Not always internally branded as such but anyway replicated company after company. Who would not want a super salesman who sells 24/7 across the Globe? From the first awareness-building moments “this is how we see the future, please join the transformation” to help close deals and to support existing customer relationships development. Storytelling, interactive, educational, always analytical and measurable through digital footprints, and always with the call to action.  

Whether a company has reached the level of “being digital” is not decided by the company. Customers decide it. “Being digital” requires that sizeable business comes from the digital business or from the offerings that are enabled by digital technologies. To earn sizeable business from the customers, customers need to buy the story company has for digital. For the story to have the right amount of awareness and customer buy-in, marketing is a critical area to invest in.