At this year's virtual B2B Ignite event, hosted by B2B Marketing, Omobono were proud sponsors of the CX stream and enjoyed the wide and varied discussion across the event.
B2B Ignite is the flagship event for the B2B marketing industry, where B2B experts from both client and agency side come together to share experience, learning and take a look to the future.
The streams for 2021 were focussed on some of the main pillars of great B2B marketing: MOPs (Marketing Operations), Customer Experience (CX), Insight & Intelligence, Execution & campaigns, Growth, Brand & content strategy – although there were many discussions on ABM and #B2B digital experience too.
Some themes continued from previous years but this year we saw some new trends and great practical examples including: how COVID has forced change, organisations battling with uncertainty, organisations transforming their customer value propositions and sometimes making large pivots as creating new brand purpose and brand strategy.
The highlights for me were:
Digital experience
-
Of course I would say this but I enjoyed Simon McEvoy pushing the agenda on better digital experiences for business brands and how we can succeed with #B2Becommerce even with complicated and regulated purchases. Research now suggests that B2B buyers are confident buying something up to the value of £0.5m digitally with no sales consultation. Wow!
Marketing Leadership for business brands through transformational times
-
Antonia Wade talked about leadership through transformational times – the importance of saying no and choosing what you won’t do as carefully as what you will do.
CX and customer insight
-
Michael Brenner shared that '60-70% of the content we create goes completely unused' 😱 and the antidote is to provide content that is useful. Simple but true.
-
Great advice that we practice was to map the customer journey (with solid insight that backs this up) and ensure you are delivering the right content and formats at the right point of the customer journey; with the aim to really aid buyers and sales teams.
-
James Smee & Rebecca Stallard gave some practical examples of supporting sales digitally through diagnostics, digital sales enablement content and showing how great value exchange makes for better sales conversations.
B2B brand
-
We enjoyed the strategic session from Doug Kessler on brand pivots and a lot chimed with our own talk from James Holland on ‘Do you need to rebrand… or are you just bored?’
-
Paul Cash also shared his way of thinking about brand likeability with an Octopus but I’m not sure what the octopus’ testicles had to do with it (oops :D)!
Creativity and bravery
-
We heard that MOPs is the backbone of B2B Marketing – if that's the case is creativity and bravery the heart and soul? Annabel Venner and Mark Choueke talked about fear and bravery in B2B marketing and how it’s crucial to overcome this to do the best work. My favourite quote was whether technology is blunting our talent.
-
Kirsty Waller shared a brave #experimentation with Tiktok for SMEs. It was great to see a large corporate really testing and learning in market – a principle we hold dear at Omobono.
ABM
-
Many of the ABM sessions focused on the how of ABM, but there was an emerging desire to consider that ABM is more than just process. At Omobono we believe that ABM is more than just Another Boring Marketing campaign. We showed how even though bid support is a particularly unloved area of ABM it can be the most exciting. Lee Wardell shared how you can be the best part of your prospects day!
