The Hub

Nowadays marketers have a lot more choices than ever before when it comes to communication channels to reach their target audience, especially thanks to powerful online tools. When companies choose communication channels, whatever they are, they should never forget to take their employees into account in their communication plan. Indeed, employees represent the biggest company ambassadors and their engagement can bring tangible results. When employees generate brand exposure, represent their company’s best interest and recommend their company’s products or services to someone else, this is what we call employee advocacy. Generally speaking, it covers each kind of promotion an employee can carry out for his/her company. This trendy concept has become much more significant since social media appeared. In fact, social media allows everyone to share any topic on their network, including, if they wish, company-related content. While employees can advocate for their company in different ways, social media is the channel that companies have the most influence and control over. In fact, companies can easily leverage employee advocacy on social media by simply asking their employees to like, comment and share their content. In this way, brand communication can be more human, leading to real business results. Employee advocacy helps companies perform better on social media and consequently has a positive impact on their business.

You might find that your website is fashionable and trendy, or even better, that it truly stands out from the crowd. As a result, all the stats look great and sales as such should follow, but then they don’t. Why isn’t there a perfect correlation between the number of visitors on your website and sales performance? Well, it all comes down to three words that any marketer should hold dearly: customer conversion rate, or to use the industry jargon, the number of prospects turning into customers. This article focuses on the drivers behind conversion rates and how businesses should focus on user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) to understand the true impact on e-commerce.

In this second article of our series on marketing automation challenges, we focus on the team you need when opting for the new, automated way of campaigning. First, we look at the required roles for the set-up of your marketing automation tool and the roll-out of campaigns. We then dive into the integration of those roles into your organization, before moving on to the number of resources you need.

On the important day of May 25th 2018, not only did someone wish me a 'Happy GDPR-day', I also attended The Next Web (TNW) Conference in Amsterdam. The Next Web Conference is Europe’s largest tech festival gathering around 15.000 people eager to meet and listen to some of the most inspiring tech entrepreneurs, marketing gurus and policy makers. All of that in an incredible setting that looks more like a big summer music festival. Here are 3 talks I attended and would like to share with you.

Why it is important to discover the pile of data you’re sitting on It’s a famous sentence that occurs in numerous exciting and thrilling movies: “Come out, come out wherever you are…”. It indicates a breaking point in the storyline of every movie: will the person that’s hiding under the bed be found or not? The same reasoning can be applied to data: are companies able to find the data that’s hiding underneath the beds of different departments and change their storyline? And if they find the data, will they be able to get their happy ever after? Like in every story, the road to success is paved with obstacles. In our story we want to reach the highest step on the data-driven maturity ladder. But before reaching the top, you will need to face 5 challenges along the road: data usage, data storage, data analysis, data governance and KPI’s and metrics. If you want to build your roadmap to a higher maturity level, you first need to understand where you stand today. You need to assess the level and potential development areas of each of those 5 challenges. But let’s tackle one at a time! Data usage is the one we’re dealing with in this article.

Today’s sales landscape has changed. There are more choices and more information in the current online and mobile world than ever. Buyers wait longer before contacting a seller – if they do so at all. By the time they get in touch, they have already defined their needs, finished their research, talked to other product users and started comparing prices. As a result, the sales cycle is no longer a traditional funnel, but a complex process with branching and overlapping paths. Yet many of the tensions between marketing and sales teams still stem from breakdowns in the lead management process. Marketing blames sales that they never follow up on the marketing qualified leads they receive. And sales blames marketing that the leads they send aren’t qualitative: either they aren’t a good fit for the sales objectives or they aren’t ready to buy yet. The two teams will only work well together if they pursue the same goals and have access to the same actionable information. To synergize a lead management process that works for both teams, it’s essential to build an all-in-one marketing and selling tool. In this article, we show you how the integration of marketing automation and CRM has a tremendous impact on your marketing and sales operations. 

How do you get started with marketing automation? THoMer Robine collected the basic principles and created an overview of the why, how and what.

The key message at Adobe's Summit on May 3rd and 4th was that we as marketers should become experience makers. Adobe raised a key question on social media during the Summit: “what does 'experience maker' mean to you?” I liked the following definition: “A true experience maker is only happy when the customer’s life is made a lot easier”. Or like CMO Claire Cronin states: “At Virgin Atlantic, we are memory makers and the customer is the compass”. For example, the crew is empowered to create special experiences, not based on predefined scripts, but on their initiative and with their own creativity. Creating memories is linked to creating relevance for the customer, and the key to unlock this is data, the gold for marketers. I hear you thinking “this will require a lot of effort and investment”, and it’s true. Research by Forrester1 shows us that these efforts and investments in becoming an experience maker (and the marketing technology needed for it) will not be in vain with e.g. a factor of 1,4 more brand awareness or 1,5 higher average order value.

As a female marketer who is following developments in the #MeToo-movement closely, I found myself wondering what broader impact this movement will have on business in general and, of course, on my own area, marketing. Upon reading “The Future 100” of JWT Intelligence - 100 trends to keep on your radar - I was delighted that the first trend mentioned was "The female gaze”, clearly a trend that is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Something female has been set in motion, and it is not about to stop. But what does it mean exactly? This blogpost is meant to give you a quick taste of the “female gaze”-trend and what you can learn from it as a marketer.

The buzz of Lacoste’s Capsule polo line replacing its iconic croco logo with endangered species sends a positive signal to all brands: sustainability can be sexy! Designed to cast attention to the fragile equilibrium of biodiversity at the Paris 2018 Fashion Week, the line sold out immediately. For Lacoste, ‘The Save Our Species’ polo shirts mark the beginning of a three-year partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Cynics will argue that Lacoste could work on a greener production line instead of selling polos. I asked myself the same question. But got pleasantly surprised when reading the brand’s extensive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments. Next to Lacoste, Lego recently announced they’ll market a range of eco-friendly bricks made from responsibly sourced sugar cane. The group wants to reduce its plastic waste by fully replacing current raw materials with eco-plastic by 2030. Not later than this year you’ll be able to buy the first set of sustainable plant shaped collection…raise your hand if you want to be a child again! However, it is not just about owning a historical fashion item or some eco-friendly bricks. As marketers, we are sensitive about what customers want. Part of their expectations now includes a commitment from the brands they buy from on issues of general concern. The pull is dubbed by a push coming from employees who are themselves on the lookout for more purpose and positive impact in their jobs. Are we entering an economy of ethics? I’d dare to think so. Today the circular economy is in a full scale-up phase. While initially encouraged by smaller, somehow marginal actors, big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, L’Oréal and Mars are joining the movement. OK, to be fair there has been a decent amount of pressure from world leaders at the Economic Forum in Davos asking multinationals to step in. But who doesn’t need to be pushed to start to change…? Ethics should be considered as a competitive advantage, a determining factor of choice between two comparable options for a picky customer. All organizations will have to confront sustainability. And this is not a boring nor a moralizing message anymore, but an exciting realm to explore. Winning on the 3Ps leads to opportunities such as supply chain optimization, employee retention, new product development at low CapEx and risk mitigation in the innovation funnel. But how? If CSR is only considered within organizations in an isolated manner, CSR will fail. Stories of customers discrediting shady make ups of multinationals got a lot of harmful press exposure (Shell, Coca-Cola,…). Sustainability needs to run in the corporation’s veins. What we see today is that many companies are still missing out because CSR is not integrated in key departments, namely marketing. The Lacoste and Lego stories are sexy because they are so cohesive with their respective corporate long-term vision. These brands understood how to integrate good causes into their brand building strategy in order to win on all 3Ps and have involved their marketing departments closely to get there.  CSR is not philanthropy. It starts with a clear business strategy. Social promises should meet business targets that are clearly communicated with internal and external stakeholders. No promises to be made before assessing how CSR investments support the organization’s objectives and practices. In this context marketing can be the guardian of market success by providing relevant customer insights and preserving the brand identity when integrating a CSR dimension. If no customer-centric thinking is applied to the roll-out of sustainability policies, it will not have the desired effect on the bottom line. The rise of viable sharing economy models as well as changing consumers’ and employees’ expectations create a positive climate to include more ethics into business models. Examples show that integrating sustainability factors can increasingly be achieved without compromise on financials targets and even reinforce brand equity. The most it takes is to start to look at things differently and find a cause that resonates with the brand’s core values. Adding this little effort, let’s make marketing make sustainability sexy and make sustainability a priority for marketing. As a marketer, I sign for it. And you?