NotableTalks with Emily Tippins, CMO at Avantra 

I agree that it is quite tough for marketers for the last couple of years. The budget has been squeezed. Customers are harder to get a conversation with. One of the key changes we could not do physical events anymore. A lot of people relied on lead generation and generating MQL from going to physical events. So, one of the trends that we adapt to very quickly be becoming our events host. So, we looked into the right event platforms around there first to produce a lot of content and reach the people we needed to without actually travelling to those places and it did support our demand generation activities and allowed us to get our brand, we are a young brand without our products going to be there in the market, you know our brand is young and it needed to get out there in the market and one of the ways we could do that jump upon to the platforms when it was established. And get into their channel feeds so the content we are producing is the right kind of content and answer people’s questions and the pains they are going around from digital transformation and cloud migration and we could tap into platforms algorithm because they have their algorithm which creates content to the audience who is going to be interested in your webinars. So, that is one of the things we do and produce lots of content and it was the low cost was not that expensive to subscribe to the platform and of course, it takes time to produce the content and make sure that your content is valuable and relevant to people and I think what the other trends we picked upon is co-creation of the partners of the brands so you can write their tales.

So, we are lucky that we got some partnerships of hyper scale-like Google clouds. So, to produce content with them and publishing in their event platform meant that we can effectively access their audience as well plus other people who work in their ecosystem who would just be interested in that topic. For us, that is something massively beneficial time when we were are budgets were tight and we couldn’t access the people in the same old traditional way and terms of the on-going evolution in the trend is going to be around the met verse. You have interacted to many people that met verse is the latest thing marketing trend but actually, I think the world is the king of getting new things popping up that is something emerging there we should investigate about that but making sure of how to use it be authentic for your B2B brand and I think for us certainly in the evolution of event community space and bringing to that virtual world is something that we would be developing next year. We have been running a couple of some big community submits this last year virtually. And one of the platforms we have been using for that is allowing the people to be in and participate even though they are sitting remotely at home. They need their space to communicate with their peers and interact with their colleagues. That’s what we have been able to do to push that to the next level. Is about how we can bring that to the AI world to enhance the experience so it is like we are all together in the same room.

It would not be right if I was not working in an automation company and I was not using myself with my team. Yes, it is right it is a key for us in terms of automation is relevant is when it can save time you know it is no point in using automation if it makes havoc or makes things confusing so what we have been doing we use it to do actually to run the whole of the top-funnel program so inbound marketing efforts about getting people into the website and then nurturing through them so that they are ready to speak to somebody about our product it is something that we do it through our marketing platform and is all automated, we have several different scenarios that we do by persona. So, we are very clear about which persona we want to talk to and nurture the path we want them to go on. It is all automated and it saves somebody manually sitting there engaging with people.  When they're not ready to buy and you focus on the manual effort or your intelligence of keeping people to speak to the people at that point where they raise the hand and say yes I am ready to buy the product and want to have a conversation. 

And I think some of the other usual automation is where and I am sure lots of people already doing this is important to keep using things like smart rooms, predictive text on your website and your email rather than creating a 20 different email you can create one email but you can tailor it with smart rules that this section only needs for this persona, and this section only need to be sharing, for example, the job title or in this vertical and how you can save time and use automation to your advantage. I just want to point out and mention that around automation and we found it very useful because we are a global brand we have a very small ad jog but a very smart marketing team but we are global and often translation is a part of what we do. We have a global strategy but we need to translate that for the relevant regional markets. And using an AI tool to translate our content has been very valuable because it saves so much time and my marketers spent time doing that is very valuable as supposedly translation content. That AI tool does a pretty decent job in translating the content and then what we need to do is give a human eye and make sure that it is valid. That is a great innovation in marketing recently cool tool for AI translation.

For me, it is about being able to build a team from the ground up. We are a smooth team but what we have done is to focus on getting the basics right basic marketing principles which should not be ignored. Yes, we have all this new exciting marketing tech around but let’s make sure we use it by making sure it is cemented in the marketing principles we are trained in. But making sure that we understand for example I have mentioned persona you got your persona clearly defined and actually to the sales understand them because it is one thing if you have them is defined is something marketing keeping in their back pocket but if your salespeople don’t recognize and don’t understand how it can help them in their conversations is pointless. 

I know it sounds to be boring and dull but I would say to make sure that you go to your marketing principles and we have all learned them. They are so important to make sure that you go back to especially when all new exciting things coming up the pace is so fast everything is changing. The new things coming up in the market in every few mins for you to try. But if we are not solid in why we doing what we are doing the marketing strategy in our brand presented in the market then we can’t make the right decision. And I think I have seen this before and I have been also like oh look new tool oh new thing over there but humans need to take a back and think ok how can I use this and does it fit with our brand or does it make it easier to understand and I think that something that people always tend to forget. 

When you are a startup or you just scale up the usually one-man band you know usually you know that you are the only marketer in the business you don’t have the luxury to have the agency partner and I think you have to be again and it can be tough. But I do think that new marketers coming out into the world now I’ll highly recommend beginning into the startup and wow you can cut your teeth on so many great things you are the PR representative, you are the social media manager, you are the brand guardian and I think if you got support with people around you and you have got the good leadership team and understand what you are trying to do and support you then that is a great way really on you stripes as a marketer. I think you have got to start with the brand. I think you need to understand who you are as a business and if you are working in a startup you know usually the sole marketer gets under the skin of the founder, the owner or the CEO to find out from them what their vision is as a company because if you want to start your vision and mission value proposition then that’s how you can grow your brand from the ground up.

Oh Wow, I got to look a little earlier this week you really love talking Meta verse, AI, and AR. You have a very supercool interactive Chabot on you website I love that I think that is really cool and think I might steal the idea for myself.