Barry Callebaut Group

When I first started out as a FMCG marketer almost 2 decades ago, 360deg integrated brand campaigns, TVCs, ATL, BTL marketing were the common terms that I associated with on a daily basis. Determining a marketing activation plan was much simpler back then. However, the days when a brand could easily gain visible market share just by running a GRP loaded TVC were long over.

The consumer journey had become more complex over the past decade with multiple touch points arising, offline and online inclusive. 15 years ago, influencer marketing wasn’t even a thing! With this changing landscape, marketers are constantly faced with challenges on identifying the right touch points to engage with their target audience. Brands spend huge amount of money and time in market studies to define these “optimal” touchpoints. While this part of the problem is being circumvented by research, they are often faced with a constant struggle of finding the right metrics for effective measurement, especially the online touchpoints.

Similar to a consumer journey, the customer journey in a B2B world is nowhere less sophisticated in times of today. Covid19 has made the needs for digital capability in a B2B organisation a “non-negotiable” overnight, especially from a marketing perspective. In order to stay competitive and ensure high customer engagement during such unprecedented times, organisations need to see this capability as a business driver, and no longer just a check-in-the-box or a “right thing to do”.

As a marketing leader in my organisation within the APAC region, I was faced with a lot of challenges during that time to get my team organised and get digital marketing up and running…FAST. People these days are pretty digital savvy themselves. What we found next was a flood of requests and suggestions on “can you do a webinar? Can you do a TikTok Video? Can you do an email campaign”...and the list goes on.

At that moment, I was pretty distracted and overwhelmed by the circumstances and incoming requests. However, a part of me also realised we need to first slow down in order to go fast!

Here are some of the guiding principles I relied on to frame my thoughts and plan amidst the frenzy.

1. Do some homework - the “digital audit”.

The fact is, there is no need to start from scratch. Within the organisation, we do have a couple of owned digital channels such as the company website, CRM platform, social media accounts etc. As there are several business divisions across the organisation, some channels were not managed centrally, resulting ina lack of governance when it comes to content creation and maintenance. For e.g, each market/brand might have their own social media account that is managed locally. Some accounts were active and some were not. Some were not even activating on brand guidelines.

The company website was also not at its optimal state. It was set up a long time ago with a corporate image in mind and we had different brand pages/urls. While that was being fixed by our global digital team before Covid, it was not adapted with local languages at markets where it matters (e.g Japan). It also lacked the right content/keywords/layout which impactedthe search-ability on the internet.

"Having The Stakeholders Engaged With Us And Understand Every Step Of The Journey Will Help To Ensure The Implementation Is Lesser Of An Uphill Task"

Hence, it was critical to conduct a thorough analysis on all these existing channel and assets, have a deep understanding of what is the current state, who maintains it, what is working/not working.

2. Start creating your ecosystem…but do make your choices. FEWER BIGGER BETTER.

After the digital audit, we found that there were 2 strong assets/channels that has great potential to anchor our digital ecosystem à our CRM platform and the company website. However, the database in the CRM platform then was far from what we see as use-able to run any automated campaigns.

Firstly, only 2 percent  of the contacts stored were what we called “golden profiles”. The rest were either incomplete, not updated or simply - not accurate. This means even if we have world class content being created, they will not reach any of our prospects in a meaningful way.Cleaning up database, ensuring quality leads with “golden profiles” was the first step to enable this part of the automation journey – email marketing.

Our website was also a critical piece to fix as it operates as a landing page for all the automated email campaigns. The first step was to look at accessibility of the site, whether it’s easy to read (local language) and whether the content was relevant to our Asian customers.

For the first 2 years, we focus only on email marketing, website and SEO. What guided our choices were1) the measurability of those touch point, 2) the linkability between those touch points to engage customers and 3) the versatility of the touch points (it’s not just about generating awareness)

Many companies out there are starting to emphasize on performance marketing in recent years. Linking the digital investment and outcomes to business metrics, tracking return on investments have become more important than ever. We need to measure beyond “vanity metrics” (a term which I learnt from a fellow Marketer) such as number of impressions, open rate etc, which looked good on paper but do not suggest any direct business impact.

B2B marketing budgets are usually a small fraction of a B2C budget. Hence, to ensure we get the most out of it, the chosen touch points need to work hard together to achieve a 1+1 =3 effect. For example, when we run an email marketing campaign, the same assets are adapted onto the website and the website is used as a landing page to capture prospects into the CRM platform for subsequent follow ups. The content is then enhanced with key words to ensure we became more searchable on the net, which will in turn earn us more leads for re-targeting.

3. Don’t forget the customer journey. Always think personalised, bespoke and authentic experiences

Chocolate is an indulgent category. At the heart of it is “pleasure” which builds on a multisensory experience. While it’s important to think digital first within the customer journey, I believe the execution has to be phy-gital (a hybrid word from physical and digital) in order to deliver an authentic experience. A great AR technology or video might be able to replicate the sight, sound and smell of chocolate, but they can NEVER bring the great taste to life unless it’s combined with a physical activation (such as a sampling drive or through a chef’s creation). Therefore my point is, we always need to balance human touch points with online touch points especially in categories where experience matters.

4. Internal alignment…from top to bottom!

Needless to say, stakeholder’s management is critical to ensure we get the necessary blessings (& resources) to implement digital marketing. The start of the journey could end up in a lot of trial and errors. Hence having the stakeholders engaged with us and understand every step of the journey will help to ensure the implementation is lesser of an uphill task. Lastly, engage and TRAIN the sales team! We need to show sales teams the value of automating marketing and how such efforts helps them to secure more business. They need to support the change and speak the same language, because at the end of the day - they are our most valuable human touch point in the entire ecosystem!

Starting this marketing automation journey was definitely not a walk in the park. It requires a lot of patience, conviction and the courage to say “no” at certain junctures.I won’t say I am there yet, but definitely, in the right direction.

As I slowly expand into more channels and touchpoints in the days ahead, the next priority would be to look at how we could collect more data (first party, 2P, 3P) via new channels, use them to derive the various customer segments so that we can retarget them with more bespoke experiences.