Innovating through risk taking

Innovating through risk taking
Vinopolis

I recently spent the evening in the stylish embrace of London’s Victorian arches drinking the nectar of the gods and feasting on a delightful cheese board while listening to three of the UK’s top B2B marketers discussing the merits of innovating in business. The event was hosted in the impressive setting of Vinopolis by The Marketing Society, and sponsored by Saint Omobono as part of our focus on promoting knowledge sharing within the B2B arena.

The Marketing Society brought together a talented panel - Annabel Venner from Hiscox, Nick Allen from Shell and Peter Thomas from Accenture - to discuss views on “Innovating through risk taking”. The discussion flowed as freely as the wine and a pleasant evening was had by all, although I did feel a little sorry for the panel at times, as business journalist Ray Snoddy did a sterling job of grilling them on the good, the bad, and the ugly of B2B innovation; at times they looked a little like lambs to the slaughter, especially when pressed for examples of the mistakes they had made in their past.

Perhaps the main take-away was the extent to which B2B marketers have embraced the ways in which marketing has changed in the past 5 years; even traditional marketers now fully respect the importance of digital. Frankly, it would be impossible not to as Google is as big as News Corp - but it’s good to see this mindset has been adopted widely. Equally interesting was the widely-shared belief that - when developing a marketing strategy - you should always start with digital, as the technology in the background can inform every other channel through immediate feedback from your audiences; if you can understand their needs and problems, you can provide a solution or targeted message.

The panel also agreed that saturation levels are a significant issue in B2B. We are so often tasked with reaching only a small number of people, yet those people are already bombarded by multiple marketers; how can we reach these people and prove to them that we are worth their attention? The answer is by innovating, but (and here comes the tricky part!) the challenge is to innovate without being too ‘out there’, or challenging their values too much. The importance of internal communication and alignments was also raised as a key consideration - how do you forge and maintain strong relationships with your audience if the main internal stakeholders - the very people who should form these relationships - are unclear on the ‘story’ of which they are supposed to be a part. We should not just focus on inbound marketing, but also spend time optimising internal communications and communication training.

Another area of focus was the changing ways in which the media communicate - perhaps the biggest risk to a company’s brand identity these days with ever-increasing adoption of social media. The editor of The Telegraph recently claimed he used Twitter more than editorial feeds, stating that the Telegraph aimed to get a breaking story out in under 3 minutes, via Twitter. The faster the media moves the more important it is that they have a strong, unified understanding of a brand and its values. The panel also agreed that whilst new technologies and channels do mean we have to know how to engage with your audience via multiple channels, especially social media, the balance between digital and traditional media is important; try not to over-focus on one individual channel unless you have evidence that it has a high return on investment.

Indeed, the panel agreed that social media isn’t always a necessary or even relevant channel; Peter Thomas from Accenture made the point that ‘Digital marketing can be made more powerful by social media, but it can also distract if you are not careful. For Accenture, face-to-face time with clients is still important, and digital helps them to bring people together’.

This is certainly true and serves to highlight the importance of proper planning; the importance of traditional and, crucially, personal channels are often overlooked. Nick Allen agreed that it is not necessary for companies to be completely integrated in digital communications immediately, as it is a process. It took Shell 5 years, but they have come a long way, and now have a fully integrated digital communications strategy. Social media continued to pop up throughout the evening and Annabel Venner from Hiscox made the point that whilst a powerful tool – monitoring Twitter to see customer trends can be particularly useful - it’s important not to underestimate the risks involved with social media and to ensure you plan to mitigate those risks. One option: consider distributing staff guidelines- if you have Twitter in the workplace you must be careful about how your company and staff uses it. It has worked well for them – Hiscox has values and their people live them, which works very well on social media. This, once again, shows the importance and value of solid internal communication in helping a brand deliver on its ideals.

Overall what was a thoroughly enjoyable evening (I mentioned the wine and cheese, right?) was equally insightful; it’s nice to know the big guns have the same issues as the rest of us after all! It’s also reassuring to see the importance of digital communications continuing to be recognised in large global enterprise and even put at the forefront of the whole marketing planning process.

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