15 senior APAC marketers explain what they will be concentrating on this year.
Customers, employees and data appear to be the most important ingredients for B2B marketing success in 2019.
Some of the APAC region's marketing leaders have told Marketorium the issues they will be focusing on to achieve success. Once again, many say they will focus on delivering excellent customer experience (CX), which is often identified as a critical B2B performance indicator. Recent Adobe-commissioned research by Forrester Consulting shows those APAC companies making CX a priority are likely to see improved revenue figures as well as better rates of customer acquisition and retention.
B2B marketers are increasingly seeing employees as important brand advocates. They also believe improving data quality and accessibility will be crucial. Accenture’s VC John pulls many of these elements together, saying teams with “seamless access’ to data will better understand their audiences and target insights.
Sandeep Pal, Regional Vice President Marketing APJ, Citrix
"To find ways to engage with multiple audiences, including completely new ones – the younger workforce. Predictions are that, by 2020, 60 per cent of the workforce will be millennials. The ways we have addressed our audiences have been very skewed to an older, business decision-makers profile. So we will need to find ways to scale some of the digital pilots and messages we have tested in 2018 in APJ around this goal. The key will be to identify measurable KPIs that can help us track if we are making progress. Also, a blended approach to defining marketing goals that include short-term sales activation and longer-term farming strategies. This will be key to establish marketing leadership in our region."
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Clockwise from top left: Sandeep Pal, Suzana Ristevski, Emma Roborgh, Mariam Al-Foudery and Karina Gan.[/caption]
Mariam Al-Foudery, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Agility
“Amazing customer experience and user-centred design, online and offline. Not just saying it, but living it, breathing it, being it.”
Karina Gan, Managing Director, Marketing, Growth Markets, Accenture
“Accelerate our journey to become a data-driven marketing organisation and reap the rewards of data-driven insights for our campaigns. Continue taking a step outside of our boundaries and view all that we do in a new light, bearing in mind our mantra to always apply the 'new now'. To focus on advancing our goal of being a responsible organisation through efforts that bring together elements of inclusion and diversity, ethics and compliance, corporate citizenship etc and to build an Accenture that is increasingly truly human for our nearly half a million workforce around the world.”
Suzana Ristevski, Executive General Manager, Marketing & Customer Experience, NAB
"We will continue to focus on communicating with our customers and prospects around ‘life moments' and ‘moments that matter' so we can continue to demonstrate that we are living our brand promise: ‘more than money'. To do this effectively, we need to continue to support and develop our talented and passionate team who represent the customer in our business every day. We will continue to focus on data and digital capabilities and further maturing our agile ways of working."
Emma Roborgh, Founder, B2B Marketing Leaders Forum
“Further aligning and integrating the martech stack to remove as much manual work as possible and getting the automation flow seamless. Also, further track and measure all campaigns better so we can be 100 per cent certain of our ROI of dollars spent.”
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Clockwise from top left: Joanne Thrift, Mahmoud Dasser, Narelle Turner, Jenn ten Seldam and Ljubica Radoicic.[/caption]
Ljubica Radoicic, Marketing Director APAC, Hexagon PPM
“Evolving our ABM program.”
Mahmoud Dasser, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Manager, TM One, Telekom Malaysia
“The main focus is to continue the marketing modernisation journey and create the mindset, skills and capabilities to become a data and AI-driven marketing organisation.”
Jenn ten Seldam, Marketing Director, SEEK Limited
“As a marketing leadership group, we’re devoting energy to understanding where we need to take the function in the longer term. How do we need to evolve, what are the goalposts and why? Having clarity on the ‘third horizon’ is incredibly important in terms of directing our investment and efforts in the next couple of years.”
Joanne Thrift, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepper Money
“The paradigm by which we look at things in the financial services sector has changed, so the marketing focus at Pepper Money will be on ensuring the promises we put into market are followed by the best customer experiences, products and services we can deliver. We have recently completed a customer experience diagnostic that has shown us where we can make things simpler and more efficient for our customers. 2019 is the year where we will undertake the work to make the changes, whether that be to our systems or our processes. It’s a large undertaking, but the marketing team is looking forward to being the drivers of meaningful change and improvement.”
Narelle Turner, Executive General Manager, Development & Corporate Marketing, Broadspectrum
"In 2019, our focus will be facilitating client access to global innovations and solutions so our clients and partners can improve the experience for their customers in an ever-evolving and sophisticated world."
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Clockwise from top left: David Redhill, Julienne Harry, Natalie Truong, Catherine Swee and VC John.[/caption]
VC John, FS Industry Marketing Lead, AAPAC, Accenture
“My focus in 2019 is to draw up an updated set of KPIs that include the following new elements: a) Digital enablement of my teams in the region: My teams should have seamless access to target insights and learn what to make of these insights as well as how to apply them through the new channels that have made themselves available through the ongoing digital revolution (people); b) Re-orientation of the annual campaign budget to ensure that it addresses the ‘data-led campaign design’ imperative that will direct all campaign planning and content design strategy this year and beyond (core strategy).”
Catherine Swee, Head of Marketing, APAC & ME, Nice
"There will be an increased focus on developing more interesting and engaging content and platforms that bring value to our target customers."
Julienne Harry, Digital Experience Manager, Corporate Affairs and Marketing, Lendlease
"We are looking at effectively leveraging data and reporting to not only track our digital campaign performance but also help predict future performance and provide tactical recommendations. We are looking to use these insights both within our digital team and campaign stakeholders. With the growth of digital channel options, we are always looking to question the status quo. Data and performance monitoring tools are key resources to help us deliver."
Natalie Truong, Head of B2B Marketing, Pacific, Mercer
"To make the Mercer sales/marketing handshake one of the highest performers in Australia. We're going to do this by driving for a 50 per cent ‘ATFO/Stage 1 conversion' – how we measure sales acceptance of a lead and whether the sales team is actively pursuing the lead. We're currently sitting at 40 per cent. Given this clear focus, everything we'll do as a marketing team will be about creating exceptionally engaging client experiences through digital, events, brand activations and PR."
David Redhill, Partner, Global CMO, Deloitte Consulting
“Geographic and cross-disciplinary integration of our creative capabilities.”
The B2B Marketing Leaders Forum events in Sydney, Singapore and Melbourne feature insights from the world's leading marketers. To find out more, go to b2bmarketingleaders.com.au
Further reading: What 14 top B2B marketers discovered in 2018