Team MPG

Recent Posts by Team MPG

How to get all the marketing skills you need – when you need them

At a recent Renewd virtual roundtable discussion that I was privileged to chair, we heard from our hugely impressive and inspiring guest speaker Monique Ruff-Bell of TED Conferences.

The overall round-table discussion theme was “Leadership challenges and opportunities in a post-pandemic world”, and during this very dynamic session the following key points really stood out for me:

  1. How important it is for business leaders to really understand the perspectives of those ‘further down’ in the hierarchy of an organisation, especially in roles they themselves have not worked in. Only by trying to put ourselves in their shoes, can we see the value they can offer and how to help them grow and reach their full potential.
  2. How we need to embrace diversity in all its forms if we are to build better businesses, including diversity in ethnicity, religion, gender, personality, and also importantly – how people think, and therefore, communicate.

This got me thinking about a key marketing problem in nearly every business I have encountered over the past 10+ years of consulting and running an agency. And this may well be the biggest thing holding your business back – especially if you are looking to scale profitably.

And here it is…

Many business leaders, most of whom have never held a marketing role, expect the impossible from their marketers. They have never walked in their shoes, or even tried to.

One person is expected to have strong competencies in a wide range of areas that vary greatly and require completely different skill sets and natural strengths. Businesses often expect the same marketing person to be great at copywriting AND tech implementations, or database development AND design, etc. 

Businesses often hire junior, inexperienced people as marketers (because they’re cheap and available), and then don’t provide the support and training these people need to succeed. 

Sometimes they hire more senior and experienced marketers, and because they’re paying them more, expect them to deliver a depth and breadth of tasks simply impossible for one person to handle. They want strategically strong people to also be very good on all things ‘hands on’.

This results in frustration (for all parties) at best, and failure of a marketing function at worst.

To counteract this issue, it is important to recognise the five marketing skill sets that every business needs (see our blog from December 2020), and accept a diverse team of marketing ‘thinkers and doers’ will be needed to deliver all the skills you need.

Some of these marketing skill sets can sometimes be combined into one role – if the person in the role has the experience, aptitude and interest in the relevant areas.

And it is important to recognise that certain elements of marketing, particularly the very technical aspects, are often better outsourced – for three reasons:

  1. Certain types of marketing specialists are scarce to the extreme (especially in data, martech and analytics), so are difficult to hire and retain.
  2. An ‘all in-house’ marketing function that includes all resources and skill sets you need, full time, can become expensive and difficult to manage. Some specialist skill sets and flexible resources needed may best sit externally – to compliment what you have inhouse.
  3. There are some marketing specialists you may not need full time, all year-round. Often to be most effective, a marketing specialist’s work is best focused on specific projects that are time-bound, and with set deliverables. Unless they have a pretty full quota of ‘business as usual’ tasks to work on a daily basis, then project based resourcing, using consultancies, agencies and/or freelancers, may be a better option.

The most successful marketing functions we have seen over the past ten years have found ways of working in a highly collaborative and integrated way with strong external partners – over a long period of time. This has enabled them to easily outsource elements of their marketing as and when needed, and thereby always have access to the best skill sets and a good amount of flex in a stable and scalable hybrid marketing team.

Circling back to the Renewd discussion, it is important for business leaders and marketing leaders to take full responsibility for building diverse and fit-for-purpose marketing teams. They need to walk in their shoes, and see their perspectives when it comes to working out how best to build a strong marketing function.

This includes supporting them in working out what needs to be done inhouse and what should be done by external partners, and then ensuring the right level of executive sponsorship is in place to support the marketing function to succeed.

Want to know more about Renewd and the online round-tables you could join?
Find out more at https://renewd.net/. Join the community with a free basic membership here.

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If you don’t integrate marketing & sales – you can’t grow

Scale requires well integrated sales and marketing.

‘Sales and marketing integration’ feels like one of these jargonny terms that we’ve all started screening out.

It’s over-used in the content marketing pushed out by martech and salestech providers who promise the world – and frustratingly often seem to underdeliver.

Why is that?

Because, the people and process piece is MUCH harder than the tech piece.

While the tech companies are delivering the tools, the ‘people and process’ piece on how best to use them is failing. The teams in the businesses buying and using the tech are not developing and following the strategies and processes needed to make the tech work. One might argue it’s the responsibility of the tech vendors to offer more support on the ‘people and process’ piece. But, regardless of who will do it – it needs to be done!

Since 2014, MPG has been working with business leaders to grow their B2B brands – enabled by marketing strategy, analytics, tech, data and digital. The sales and marketing alignment piece is usually a problem when companies approach us to help them achieve better outcomes from their marketing. And this is what we have witnessed in the most dysfunctional businesses:

  • Sales people are determined to defend their turf – wanting to claim revenue as ‘sales revenue’, even when marketing makes a significant contribution. Why would marketers want to work hard to support sales if they don’t get at least some of the credit (or the commission)?
  • At the same time, marketers are still not being held accountable for commercial results, often hiding behind ‘tech and data jargon’. They’re usually very, very busy, but are not taking responsibility for the outcomes of their spend on tech, data and all those very busy marketing people.
  • Senior executives – including Sales Leaders and Heads of Marketing – are not taking real responsibility for the close collaboration, joined up processes and combined KPI’s that the integrated marketing and sales funnel should deliver.

This is all very dangerous, because how B2B customers buy has changed in a BIG way.

Customers are buying very differently now to how they were 2 years ago, and if Sales and Marketing Leaders don’t get their heads together and work out how to optimise the full customer experience, their businesses will:

  1. Lose customers
  2. Be less efficient
  3. Be less profitable
  4. Struggle to scale

It is incredibly important for your marketing and sales teams to be integrated if you want to grow your business. If you support sales effectiveness and efficiency by ensuring marketing is well set up with the right strategy, processes, tools and resources, you will be able to:

  1. Reach and engage with a larger number of potential customers
  2. Qualify and nurture leads better to achieve higher conversion rates, higher average order values and shorter sales cycles.
  3. Measure important KPIs critical to achieving growth.

 

To learn more about how you achieve faster and more profitable growth by integrating your sales and marketing function better, thereby ensuring the whole, combined funnel is fully optimised, download the MPG’s guide here.

 

This resource walks you through the following 3 stages of the sales and marketing funnel:

 

#1 Awareness (top of funnel)

  • In this stage, prospects are indicating there is a problem or opportunity that they may be able to address by investing in your product.
  • Prospects are starting to educate themselves, conducting research to understand, frame, and give a name to the problem or opportunity they are facing.
  • This is where you should focus marketing efforts on building brand awareness, interest and an audience of relevant prospects through inbound marketing and data acquisition. Email marketing targeting relevant people should also be used at this stage of the funnel, especially for very time-sensitive campaigns, such as those that support B2B events.
  • Here your aim is to draw in as many of the right people as possible – with the overall goal of pushing them to your website.

 

#2 Engagement (middle of funnel)

  • In this second stage of the funnel, the prospect has defined their issue or opportunity, and they want to do more in-depth research to understand all the available approaches or methods for addressing a challenge or making the most of an opportunity.
  • Due to widespread, rapid adoption by consumers of more digital behaviours, and preferences for more control of their own buying journey, marketing needs to play an important role here in terms of serving up content-led and product-led messages across multiple channels and tactics – all working together with joined up messaging.
  • At this stage of the funnel, marketing needs to grow engagement and convert people who pay attention to their marketing into qualified leads – giving them ways to signal their intent and readiness to buy – before they are contacted by a salesperson.

 

#3 Conversion (bottom of funnel)

  • This third stage is where sales people need to get involved – and as part of a joined up process with marketing, ensure they call the right people (i.e. those people marketers have identified as relevant and ready to buy) at the right time (i.e. soon after they have indicated intent – because at this time they’re probably also talking to your competitors).
  • Marketing still needs to play a part here in terms of further nurturing your leads until sales people get the opportunity to speak to the prospect. It can often be quite difficult for a salesperson to pin down a prospect for a call or meeting, and in that time they can go cold or pay more attention to competitors. So marketing needs to play it’s part here by continuing to engage and persuade this lead with strong content and collateral – where the USPs and benefits of your product come through loud and clear in regular reminders to your lead that they should be picking up the phone when your salesperson calls.

Unfortunately, what often still happens, is that both marketing and sales work on the awareness stage, but only sales focuses on the engagement and conversion stages. This means that sales people have less time to spend on selling, and they are trying to sell to people who are not yet ready to buy. This has a negative impact on sales cycle length, average order value, conversion rates, the number of sales made and amount of revenue one sales person can generate.

What should happen is that marketers take full responsibility for the first two stages of the funnel (awareness and engagement), and be held accountable for the quality, quantity and sales-readiness of leads being delivered to sales. This then means that the sales team can spend more time focusing on conversions i.e. doing the actual selling that they’re so good at.

 

You need to get your funnel working in a way that enables more scalable digital marketing to reach and engage more people in the top two thirds of the funnel, and therefore have your sales team focused on conversions at the bottom of the funnel. Once you have achieved this, you would have unlocked profitable, sustainable growth with economies of scale baked in to your business in way that will generate higher profits and add significant value to your business.

 

To learn more about how to manage your scalable, profitable integrated sales and marketing funnel download MPG’s guide to B2B Sales & Marketing integration.

Do you need your marketing team to deliver more leads for your sales team?

Team MPG can help you attract new clients with targeted, lead generating marketing campaigns. We can also help create marketing and sales performance dashboards so that you can measure your joined up marketing and sales KPIs and ROI.

Get in touch today to find out how we can help you.

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Google Analytics is changing – in a big way. GA4 is coming and you need to pay attention

By this time next year, you won’t be able to collect any more tracking data via your Google Analytics account – unless you have implemented GA4. On 1st July 2023, Google Analytics will only process new data via their GA4 (Google Analytics 4) properties – meaning you can no longer track any new data via UA. Google Analytics 360 properties will receive a one-time processing extension ending July 2024.

Because GA4 is VERY different to UA, it is very important you pay attention to this change now and start putting GA4 in place as a matter of urgency. If you assume you can just ‘switch’ or ‘upgrade’ with a click of a button, – you’re wrong. If you want to continue tracking, you will need to set up GA4 from scratch, including new filters, conversions, ecommerce tracking etc. Because GA4 data is structured differently to UA, depending on your set up, this may require custom development to ensure everything is tracked according to your business needs.

After 1st July, 2023, you will still be able to access your previously processed data in your UA property for at least 6 months – during which time Google suggests you export your historical data. Eventually, they will stop giving you access to your UA reports in the analytics interface or access to your UA data via the API. This is a big change, so make sure you have an analytics expert – with specific training/know-how in GA4 working on this for you – asap.

The 3 most important things to be aware of:

#1GA4 is a brand new system

GA4 is a brand new system and has to be set up from scratch (you can’t just ‘migrate’ or ‘upgrade’ your current GA set up). It will also take time to get it properly set up and optimised for your business to give you the data you need.

#2No historical data from UA will be available within GA4

No historical data from UA will be available within GA4. So if you require easy year-on-year comparisons, you need GA4 at least activated at a basic level now to start capturing data.

#3You should set up GA4 now

You should set up GA4 now so it starts capturing data straight away, so on 1st July, 2023 you have historical data to use in the reports. We recommend running GA4 alongside UA for a while so you can use UA for your existing reporting while you fine-tune your GA4 set up.


Do you need help putting GA4 in place and optimising it to capture the data you need to run your business well?

MPG’s web analytics experts are trained and experienced in GA4 set up and optimisation, so we’re a safe pair of hands to help you make this critical transition well.

Please get in touch with Team MPG.

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Why marketing events and subscriptions are different (and why this matters)

As business leaders start looking ahead to 2023 and take stock of their full product portfolio, many are asking the same question: “Can – or should – the same marketers work on both events and subscriptions?”

(Within this: events include in-person, hybrid and digital events, and subscriptions also cover memberships.)

As with many important and quite strategic questions, the answer starts with “It depends…”

So, what does it depend on? The following three things:

  1. How important annual revenue growth is to your business.
  2. The importance of subscriptions revenue within your growth mix.
  3. The ‘size of the prize’ and, therefore, how much you should invest in marketing.

If annual revenue growth is very important to your business; and if subscriptions revenue growth in particular is important to your business; and if the ‘size of the prize’ is large in terms of growth, profit and/or exit multiple, then we recommend NOT having the same marketer working on both events and subscriptions – unless they’re well supported by an agency with extensive skill sets and resources.

One of the main reasons why inhouse marketers should only focus on events or subscriptions (but not both), is that events have a hard deadline and need a high volume of marketing delivered in a specific timeframe. This means that if marketers are working on both subscriptions and events marketing, the subs marketing tends to be ignored for a number of months every year – with events getting all (or most) of the attention. This can have devastating effects on recurring revenue as there will be a number of months every year when subscriptions, acquisitions, and renewals dry up due to a lack of attention from marketing. This has an overall negative long-term impact on renewable revenue (with serious consequences for business valuation).

Another reason you should have dedicated marketing resources on events, is that a strong event in a strong market can double in size year-on-year – if your dedicated event marketing effort is planned and executed well. This rapid revenue growth from events is usually very important to strengthen the overall revenue growth rate, and can also deliver highly profitable revenue, providing funds to then invest in growing subscriptions.

When looking for consistent, sustainable growth, it is also worth considering the following 4 aspects of marketing – and how they relate to events and subscriptions:

#1Messaging, marketing automation and the marketing funnel

Event marketing

For events, it is important to remember that most elements of the product (often including pricing) change rapidly in the months and weeks leading up to the event. Therefore, the key messages you need to put out about features, benefits and offers also change over time e.g. this week you may be announcing first speakers confirmed, and next week the key message is about an early bird discount that is about to expire. A couple of weeks before the event, you will want to be pushing out info on the full speaker faculty, and who else will be attending (information you just won’t have 12 or even 6 weeks before an event..).

As the event product is created throughout the event cycle and marketing campaign, fresh new messages will need to be created. The important detail in messaging changes from one week to the next.

On top of the important product-led marketing efforts, content and inbound marketing need to be running consistently throughout an event campaign cycle to constantly draw new customers into the top of the funnel.

Event marketers need to be masters at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, with direct outreach via email still the most important tactic as customers need to be ‘forced’ down the funnel so they engage and convert in good time ahead of the event.

This highly dynamic messaging means that the opportunities for automated campaigns are very limited. Where you do need to set up automated campaigns to achieve scale, a large amount of manual marketing work is needed to set these up and optimise them, to ensure that an up-to-date (and therefore effective) message reaches the right person at the right time.

For event marketing, all manual and automated marketing requires very intricate planning, strong project management ‘at pace’ and highly efficient tactical marketing delivery – to get a large amount of high quality marketing collateral created and sent out within narrow timeframes.

So, the truth is that for event marketing to be successful, a large amount of manual work needs doing in a highly organised way. How these manual processes are set up and managed makes all the difference to event marketing success.

Subscriptions marketing

For subscription marketing, the product features and benefits tend to remain the same over a long period of time – usually for a number of months at least.

Marketing messaging at different stages of the funnel can remain the same for a longer time period. Automated marketing is therefore not only viable, but usually the most practical and efficient means of achieving strong awareness, engagement and conversions – at the kind of scale that subscriptions should be striving for.

Your marketing should automatically move potential subscribers down the marketing funnel at a pace that suits the customer. This more ‘customer-led’ approach is viable for subscriptions marketing in a way that it isn’t for events, as – unlike events – the subscriptions product doesn’t have a hard deadline, after which it will no longer be available.

Due to the scalability and time factors, automated subscriptions marketing should be personalised with well timed messages, based on what the customer has indicated they are most interested in, and where the customer is in the buying journey.

Subscriptions marketers need to be very strong on branding, positioning, thought leadership, and content marketing. And they must have the ability to map out and set up automated campaigns, and then constantly optimise these for best results.

#2Impactful, mostly manual tactics delivered at speed for events vs. perfecting automated campaigns for subscriptions

Event marketing

Event marketers need to be very strong in planning and executing a range of marketing tactics – at speed. They need to be good at setting and understanding the overall strategy, be very well organised in their day-to-day work, and really great at execution – keeping all the tactics in line with the strategic direction.

Due to very hard deadlines faced by event marketers, they face urgency to convert customers. This means that event marketers need to thrive on pressure and a fast pace. Strong event marketers tend to have a broad skill set, and agile habits that tend to transfer well and can be applied quickly and easily to all types of B2B products.

Subscriptions marketing

In comparison, subscription marketers have ‘softer’ (moveable) deadlines, and therefore, they don’t need to ‘churn out’ high volumes of marketing in a short space of time in the same way event marketers do. They can – and should – spend more time on perfecting every piece of marcomms before it goes out the door, considering and optimising every touch point within the marketing funnel .

The truth is that often the best subscriptions marketers find the pace of event marketing disconcerting and uncomfortable. This is because subs marketers are used to spending a lot of time considering and perfecting every element of a tactical campaign at a pace that is not driven by the urgency and hard deadlines that exist in events.

#3Highly visible outcomes in events

Event marketing

The number and profile of customers that event marketers must attract is highly visible to every event stakeholder – including sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, attendees and internal senior managers. And they need to deliver this audience in a very fixed time frame with a very hard deadline. Unlike subscription marketing, there isn’t time for running trials and testing best approaches before a ‘full roll out’. Testing needs to happen ‘in campaign’.

However, the marketing performance of an event is relatively simple to analyse and report on, because results can be viewed on a like-for-like basis within an event cycle. Results are visible very fast, with a clear ‘end point’, and predictions are easier to make about what final results will be.

Subscriptions marketing

When it comes to subscriptions marketing, the number and profile of customers is pretty much invisible to all external parties. Internally, core KPIs are set and monitored over a longer period and tend to focus on revenue and renewals – rather than who is buying.

In terms of measuring the results, because there are no like-for-like results, and tactics change over time, the success of subscriptions marketing tends to be evaluated by more high level results tracked over a long period of time. It is more difficult for subscriptions marketers to include meaningful benchmarks and comparisons for the results of their tactical marketing.

#4Skill sets matter

The core skill sets of event marketers and subscription marketers are quite different.

Event marketers tend to have a broader skill set, directly handling multiple channels and tactics themselves for both acquiring and winning back customers. In order to do so, these marketers need to be highly organised, excellent project managers and strong in a range of digital tools. They thrive on working at a very fast pace.

Subscriptions marketing tends to work best when a group of specialists work together – each focusing on different channels and tactics. Usually it is also best to have some subscriptions marketers focused on acquisitions, while others focus on retention, because two very different approaches are needed to acquire subscribers, compared with retaining and upselling subscribers.

It is very important that business leaders understand and accept the differences between the marketing of events and subscriptions when considering how best to invest in marketing, and how to get the best structure in place for marketing resources.

At MPG we believe having focused marketing resources is essential for success – which is why a large number of our clients wholly outsource the marketing of their flagship events to MPG, ensuring that these events can grow fast.

Depending on size and circumstances, some B2B media brands also outsource their subscriptions marketing to MPG – especially if their subscriptions and events share the same umbrella brand. This tends to work well because Team MPG includes marketers with the skill sets that cover both events and subscriptions – which is a rare combination, and one that can be very expensive, time-consuming and difficult to build inhouse.

If you would like to discuss how MPG’s marketers handle event and subscriptions marketing – achieving strong results across the board – please drop me a note on [email protected]. I’d love to have a chat!

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MPG Newsletter | Summer 2022

Newsletter • Summer 2022

As live events roar back in 2023 – are you ready to take the top spot?

For the past two years we have seen great uncertainty across almost every part of our lives. This uncertainty has created particular challenges for organisations that rely on live events for revenue, profit and growth.

The good news is that MPG has seen bright green shoots in live events – indicating they are already making a strong comeback.

For the 2022 live conferences and exhibitions that Team MPG has been working on, we’ve seen registrations and revenue matching 2019 figures. Based on these results and strong engagement in event marketing metrics we’re tracking, 2023 looks set to be a strong growth year for many.

When it comes to achieving strong growth for 2023 conferences and exhibitions, there are two important things to consider:

  1. Every event should be treated as if it is a new launch: many delegates, sponsors and exhibitors have fallen out of the habit of investing their time and money in your event, so they need to be enticed back as if they were new customers. Your event product also needs to match the higher expectations that customers now have around value, convenience and experience.
  2. In 2023, the new order of market leadership in events will emerge – and it’s an open field. Events that were front-runners pre-Covid will need to work hard to reclaim their top spot, and the challengers now have a unique and limited opportunity to claim the leading position.

We believe that the way in which your event is taken to market will make all the difference to successfully winning back customers and acquiring new ones. To be the #1 ‘must attend’ event in your space you’ll need to have a robust, data-led event marketing strategy, well set up digital marketing and data infrastructure, and the very best, on-target and on-time event marketing execution.

And to make sure 2023 is as strong as it needs to be, you need to start working on your event marketing strategy and investment plan sooner rather than later!

In this edition of our newsletter we focus on some recently published MPG Insights blogs and resources that focus on the biggest revenue growth opportunities, including: commercial marketing, expanding into new markets, and advocacy marketing.

We hope you find the guidance and insights in these pieces useful as you push ahead with your future growth planning!

 

You are not currently a subscriber to MPG Insights, but we want to make sure you received this newsletter anyway as it addresses some of the most urgent marketing issues many organisations are grappling with at this time. To become a subscriber (it’s free) – please sign up here.

#1 Commercial marketing to grow sponsorship revenue

Over the past 3 months, we have seen a significant increase in the attention being given to commercial marketing.

Commercial marketing is a broad term we use to describe the marketing that supports the generation and growth of commercial revenue, i.e. revenue from sponsors, exhibitors, and advertisers.

By using the right mix of marcomms and marketing automation, you can generate and nurture leads of potential sponsors and exhibitors to efficiently drive strong growth in commercial revenue.

 

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.
Tom Fishburne, Founder & CEO, Marketoonist

 

Interestingly, the methodology required for commercial marketing is similar to what is used for high-value subscription or membership product marketing (and also SaaS product marketing). The difference with commercial marketing, especially if focused on event revenue, is that it is time-bound. Therefore, the approach used needs to reflect that urgency required.

See our recent MPG Insights piece, where we explore the opportunities and challenges around investing in commercial marketing for revenue growth:

READ THE FULL ARTICLE


#2 Marketing considerations when expanding into new markets

Do you have a growth strategy that includes entering new markets? Here are 6 practical marketing considerations from an MPG Insights piece we published in late May:

  1. Be clear about your specific goals
  2. Understand your target audience very well – your messaging may need to be adjusted for a new market
  3. Find and activate the right brand advocates in your new markets
  4. Manage your data well, including considerations around GDPR and other country-specific data privacy and marketing laws
  5. Invest in the right marketing technologies to enable expansion and scalability
  6. Develop a marketing dashboard to monitor expansion progress and ROI

READ THE FULL ARTICLE


#3 The importance of leveraging your advocacy marketing

Advocacy marketing has become more important as brand trust becomes a bigger issue. Advocates lend you important credibility and help you get past innate cynicism (especially in B2B!).

Here are 4 ways in which advocacy marketing can help your business be more resilient and potentially grow faster:

  • Advocates helps extend your brand reach and build more brand awareness
  • Activating advocates can be a quick, easy and cost-effective way to find new customers
  • Advocacy can increase loyalty from existing customers
  • You can semi-automate your advocacy efforts, so your reach via advocates can be huge at minimal effort and cost

These points are important if you want to grow your business using advocacy marketing.

In a further blog in MPG’s resilience series, we outlined 5 things you need to keep top of mind when creating and executing an advocacy and referral marketing strategy:

  • Find the right people to help you ‘activate and amplify’
  • Help the messenger – make advocating easy
  • Prioritise quality over quantity
  • Have clear agreements in place
  • Monitor effectiveness

When you have the right brand advocates, then you are successfully activating the most powerful marketing approach of all: WOM (word of mouth).

You also need to support your brand advocates, by making it easy and attractive to advocate for you.

Here is MPG’s guide to advocacy and referral marketing, covering how to set clear objectives, identify the best opportunities, create an actionable plan, and monitor performance

YOUR GUIDE TO ADVOCACY AND REFERRAL MARKETING


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6 practical marketing considerations when expanding into new markets

Renewd recently hosted a Renewd International Virtual Roundtable discussion, where a group of senior executives from B2B media and events businesses came together to discuss practical considerations when expanding internationally.

To receive Renewd’s next newsletter, which includes the key takeaways from this event, please join Renewd here – membership is free.

The Virtual Roundtable discussion was led by Frances Rose, Founder & CEO, The Share Theory. The attendees discussed what they have learnt from expanding, including cultural differences to take into consideration, and how to hire and effectively manage people in foreign countries.

Based on this discussion, Team MPG’s marketing strategists have been considering six important marketing elements to consider when seeking international growth:

#1Be clear about your specific goals when expanding into new markets

In order to grow and develop your customer base in a new market, you should define what the role of marketing is in this growth plan, and specific marketing communications objectives. These objectives should form part of a comprehensive marketing plan, to ensure your marketing activities show visible and strong ROI against your objectives.

#2Understand your target audience very well – your messaging may need to be adjusted for a new market

Before you write a single word of copy or design any marketing materials, you need to gain a good understanding of your audience in the new market you are targeting. MPG recommends using our community mapping approach. This is a useful tool to understand the composition of your end-user target market, which will be useful when building the right kind of monetisation model to generate revenue in your new market. You need to consider cultural differences, so that from day 1 you’re building brand trust.

Once you have completed your community map, and take into account culture in your new market, you should develop a buyer persona in order to define USPs and benefits for your key market segments. These USPs will help you differentiate your product from the competition – which may look different in your new market compared to where you have previously operated.

You can then move on to building impactful messaging by:

  • Defining the tone of voice you want to deploy
  • Creating a messaging strategy that will inform the core copy you repeatedly use. This should include a strap-line that incorporates your USP, and a series of succinct bullet points focused on your benefits
  • Execute this messaging down the whole marketing funnel. As your prospects become more engaged, ensure your messaging becomes more detailed and persuasive – this creates the ‘desire and action’ which makes them want to enquire or buy your product

#3Build the right brand advocates to help grow your business

To effectively attract and engage the right kinds of customers in your new market, it is helpful to have local team members and advocates who know the cultural differences. You need to find the right people who can help you ‘activate and amplify’.

These early community members are needed to bring others to come on board. If they believe in your brand and your purpose, they will be valuable advocates. Build on the momentum gained from these early adopters by holding open events and running community gatherings to gain more insight and build your followers.

It is also important to accept that starting and building good relationships take time. Therefore, you need to focus on this area well in advance – if you leave it too late, it could mean you have less leverage in terms of value exchange. This could lead to reduced advocacy and campaign effectiveness.

#4Data management and the importance of knowing GDPR and other country-specific data privacy and direct marketing rules and regulations

In order to expand, you will need to build a strong database of contacts by following the relevant data rules. Having a well-organised database will allow you to grow multiple revenue streams, drive higher, more consistent engagement, and make smarter investments.

When expanding into new markets, you need to take into account their various rules and regulations around data privacy, data protection and how data can be used in direct marketing. There are quite big differences between jurisdictions – e.g. the state of California has different rules compared to other US states. What counts here is where the data subject (customer or prospect) is based – not where your company is based.

It is important to do the thorough research and planning for the jurisdictions you want to expand into, because how data can be used will determine the marketing tactics allowed; as well as how your products, systems and processes are set up to be compliant.

#5Investing in the right marketing technologies to enable expansion

To scale effectively and efficiently (and follow data privacy rules), you need the right marketing tech stack.

Having a strong martech stack:

  • Improves customer experience, and allows for a smoother transition between each stage of the customer lifecycle
  • Allows you to track your customers’ progression in the customer journey
  • Helps you make impactful investments, which will mean you can monetise and scale your audiences well, in a more digital world

The right marketing technology is critical for any business expansion, including entering and growing in new markets.

#6Develop marketing dashboards to monitor expansion progress and ROI

To be able to measure the success of your marketing activities when expanding into new markets, you need visibility of your marketing metrics. The best way to get this visibility is to build dashboards that ideally pull data automatically from systems and show you key marketing metrics in real time.

To have fully optimised marketing dashboards, you need to have the right marketing analytics in place to measure the success. A marketing analysis and reporting process is useful to gain insight on how your customers, prospects, and leads interact with your marketing channels. Having your website analytics set up in the right way (with GA4) is critical for understanding how they interact with your site, and can help you create remarketing and retargeting campaigns to build your customer database.

If you’re aiming to enter or grow in new markets, then considering these six marketing elements will help you well on your way!


MPG supports Renewd in building an open network community of specialised subscription, membership, and event professionals. We help organise and participate in roundtables and other community events, such as networking dinners.
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Do you want to grow your business in new markets?

Team MPG’s marketing experts can help you develop the best marketing strategy to grow your customer base and revenue.

Get in touch today to discuss your marketing opportunities, challenges and requirements.

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Commercial marketing to grow sponsorship revenue: opportunities and challenges

At a recent Marketing Leaders dinner hosted by MPG, I had the privilege of chairing a great discussion about something that has become a big deal for many B2B media/events organisations: commercial marketing.

What do we mean by ‘commercial marketing’? This is a broad term we use to describe the marketing that supports the generation and growth of commercial revenue i.e. revenue from sponsors, exhibitors and advertisers. Sometimes these types of customers are called ‘clients’ or ‘partners’.

The type of marketing that applies here is very different to marketing we use to attract ‘audience’ i.e. conference delegates, exhibition visitors, magazine readers or website visitors. Marketing to attract new audience members tends to be more transactional, requiring a very high volume of activity executed across multiple channels simultaneously – some manual, some automated.

The methodology needed for commercial marketing, on the other hand, is very similar to what is needed for high-value subscription or membership product marketing, which is akin also to SaaS product marketing. The main difference between commercial marketing for events and the SaaS businesses is that events have a hard deadline. Therefore, commercial marketing to attract event sponsors is much more time-bound, with a great sense of urgency required in marketing processes and execution, as well as marketing messages.

Why do we believe commercial marketing has become so much more important recently? We believe there are three reasons:

  1. As we emerge from Covid, there is a huge amount of opportunity, with large numbers of sponsors looking to invest significant sums again in live events. When automation is applied to commercial marketing, this opportunity can be fully exploited via automated lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead management techniques that can be deployed at scale.
  2. Sponsors have fallen out of the habit of sponsoring the same event every year. In other words, they are less loyal. Event organisers therefore need to use commercial marketing to convince sponsors that their events are the best investments of sponsorship budgets – with strong messaging and well-executed campaigns.
  3. Many event organisers are concerned that delegate revenues won’t reach pre-Covid levels. With many digital alternatives now on offer, and travel becoming more expensive, delegates may be more price-sensitive than they were. So, sponsors need to make up the shortfall. (It remains to be seen if delegate revenues will recover well or not – the jury is still out on that one, and we expect it will be for some time to come).

The above is based on MPG’s perspective from working with a variety of event organisers globally – mostly focused on conference-style events for senior executives. To get the perspective of these companies more directly, here are the ‘key takeaways’ from the Marketing Leaders discussion about commercial marketing:

 

Opportunities:

  • In the short-to-medium term, conference organisers are expecting sponsorship revenues to recover and grow much faster than delegate revenues.
  • ABM techniques can be used to great effect when targeting specific companies, to attract them as sponsors for events.
  • When approached at ‘brand level’ (i.e. sponsorship opportunities promoted across a range of products in a portfolio), commercial marketing can work very well in terms of economies of scale and synergies.
  • Commercial marketing tactics can be built into existing delegate customer journeys e.g. by adding a tick box to ‘agenda downloads’ for the downloader to indicate if they are interested in sponsorship.
  • Applying automation to commercial marketing can deliver great results. Automation should be built into lead generation, lead nurturing, lead management, and lead scoring – all to help the sponsorship sales people be more efficient by giving them better quality, warmer leads.
  • Building a dedicated, benefit-led messaging strategy for commercial marketing can significantly improve results. Strong collaboration between the sales people and marketers is essential to develop the most compelling and impactful messaging.
  • Building data-led performance reports for commercial marketing gives all stakeholders strong visibility of how investment in commercial marketing grows sponsorship revenue, increases conversion rates from lead to sale, increases average order value, and reduces length of sales cycles (i.e. making sponsorship sales more efficient).
  • Having a strong marketing and sales alignment – through commercial marketing and sponsorship sales working closely together towards the same goal – can turbo-charge revenue growth from sponsors.

 

Challenges:

  • Senior executives, including sales leaders, are often not aware of, or have limited knowledge of, the concept and workings of commercial marketing.
  • Sales people can often be quite skeptical about the value of marketing, and sometimes don’t pay attention to the leads generated by marketing – preferring to rather leverage existing relationships or source their own leads.
  • It is very difficult for marketers to work on both delegate marketing and commercial marketing as they are two very different types of marketing, with different methodologies and cadences. Also, marketers who are experienced in delegate marketing are typically not trained in, or able to do, commercial marketing very well. It may be necessary to separate out delegate marketing and commercial marketing, in terms of the allocation of marketing skills and resources.
  • Marketing databases are not set up well for commercial marketing campaigns. Often the data is missing from the database, so email campaigns to attract new sponsors to events are difficult to deploy.
  • A substandard marketing tech stack can stand in the way of effective commercial marketing, as automation is not possible and data doesn’t flow in the way it needs to for marketing and sales processes to be aligned, efficient and effective.
  • In order to build marketing performance reports, data has to be managed well. All sales people need to be logging in the CRM when leads are followed up and closed. This does not always happen, which means that it is not possible to accurately track, analyse, and report on the performance of commercial marketing or sponsorship sales.

Clearly there is a lot of opportunity to grow revenue fast via sponsors – as long as the right amount of attention and investment is given to building and maintaining commercial marketing capabilities. It is important to bear in mind that not all of these capabilities need be built inhouse – some external expertise and resources can be plugged into an events business to deliver great results in a scalable and repeatable manner.

As with all marketing initiatives, having a strong strategy and operational plan in place is essential for success – with good execution absolutely critical. It’s easy to talk about commercial marketing over a networking dinner, but it is quite another thing to do it well!

Topics:

A guide to advocacy and referral marketing

In a recent MPG blog, we covered why advocacy and referral marketing is so powerful, and how having an amplification strategy can help your business be more resilient and grow.

Team MPG have helped many clients efficiently and effectively accelerate growth by tapping into their strongest brand advocates and most loyal customers for referrals. Here we outline the 5 things you need to keep top of mind when creating and executing an advocacy and referral marketing strategy:

#1 Find the right people to help you ‘activate and amplify’

To identify the people or organisations most likely to be good advocates for your brand and/or products, carefully consider the value exchange: what is in it for them to refer you to one of their colleagues or respected peers? Think about what you can do to make it worth their while. 

Usually, the following types of advocates have something to gain by sharing your marketing messages and collateral with their relevant networks, thus advocating for you. Always remember: these advocates will help you reach large groups of relevant people who are not all on your database for emailing, or could be hard for you to reach and engage with by other means.

  • Media/association partners: research and identify the key publications, digital platforms and associations with subscribers, members, readers or communities that best fit the target audience you want to reach. Then, consider what you can offer to make it worth their while to advocate for you, e.g. a discount for readers, subscribers or members; or special access to additional value like an exclusive networking part of an event, or other high-value elements of your product. For example, you could offer a ‘premium’ product for the same price as a ‘standard’ product as a benefit for their own customers.
  • Advisory board members: if you don’t already have an advisory board, you should consider forming one! Individuals suitable for your advisory board should be carefully selected by you to provide valuable input on your overall strategy and value proposition. They would also typically have excellent and highly relevant ‘little black books’. By being an advisory board member, an individual should gain credibility and even stronger networks – so make sure you give your advisory board members these types of opportunities they would most value. In exchange, you should be able to tap into their growing and engaged professional networks.
  • Content contributors and event speakers: individuals who are respected in their industry as thought leaders are often keen to keep building their profiles and further strengthen their reputations by agreeing to speak at events, contribute to reports, and write articles and blogs for you. These individuals are likely to be some of your very best advocates. They are likely to actively promote to their networks the event or content they’re contributing to in order to raise their own profiles – and in so doing they provide powerful advocacy for your brand or product.
  • Sponsors/exhibitors: companies investing in your events and marketing solutions will probably be open to raising awareness of your brand/product to make the most of their sponsorship/exhibitor status. Your potential reach via their own customers and prospects is great! So work closely with them to help them see the value of advocating for you, and then leveraging their advocacy well.
  • Customers: people who have chosen to already spend money with you, register for your event, subscribe for your content, or give you their time and attention in some way, are probably your best salespeople! MPG has partnered with Ingo to help our clients create a powerful, automated referral engine via customers. To find out more about this – please get in touch.

When you successfully activate any of the above types of advocates, you are activating the most powerful marketing approach of all: WOM (word of mouth). And WOM in the digital and social age is more powerful, scalable, and important than ever!

 

#2 Help the messenger – make advocating easy

The easier you make it for your brand advocates to share their support for your brand/product, the more likely they are to do it! 

For advocates, create partner packs with ready-made assets such as web banners, images, video content, email copy/HTML or infographics, that are easy to access and share. The easier you make this for them, the more likely they are to advocate for you.

Consider using an automated referral marketing tool. This will enable very efficient and strong amplification of your messages, to very large audiences – so it is worth the investment (as long as the tools are deployed in the right way!). Get in touch to find out how MPG can help you do this.

 

#3 Quality over quantity

A common mistake is to sign up too many advocates to manage effectively. Putting the effort into developing a strong and mutually beneficial relationship takes time and effort. Make sure this is closely managed!

 

#4 Have clear agreements in place

This is most relevant for media or association partners, although you may consider including some advocacy or promotional activity into your speaker or sponsorship contracts, e.g. obliging them to share your content via social media. 

Once you’ve found the right partners and come to a mutually beneficial arrangement, make sure you both have a copy of a written agreement that clearly articulates the deliverables for both parties.

 

#5 Monitor effectiveness

As with all marketing channels, you should closely monitor the effectiveness of your advocacy and referral marketing efforts throughout the campaign. The relative performance of every advocate will help you determine which partnerships you want to renew and further invest in. There will be some that just don’t work at all, so make sure you know which ones they are, so you don’t keep pursuing them!

Understanding which of your supporters are generating the most leads or customers will also enable you to reward the most loyal and effective advocates, further enhancing their trust in your brand, and increasing the likelihood they will continue to advocate for you within their valuable network.


DOWNLOAD MPG’S ADVOCACY MARKETING PROCESS & KPIS

If activating advocacy and referral marketing is a strategic priority for business resilience and growth, get in touch. Team MPG’s marketers can help you attract and convert more of the right customers with a robust advocacy and referral marketing strategy, and followed by rigorous execution.

Topics:

Leveraging the power of advocacy to make your business more resilient

There has never been a fiercer battle for the time and attention of B2B audiences. As B2B offerings become ever-more digital, and B2B customers become smarter and more discerning in how they find the information they need, as well as peer networks they tap into to inform their decision-making, getting and holding the attention of your precious audience is not as simple as it used to be!

As the battle gets hotter, the noise grows – and so does the scepticism of the B2B buyers and their decision-making unit members, all of whom you’re trying to influence with your (expensive) marketing efforts.

So, how do you get ‘cut through’? How do you get on to the list of ‘daily reads’ and ‘must attends’? Just because you tell your audience that event is the largest and best, it doesn’t mean they will all believe you, especially if they have never attended your event before or never heard of you.

Human beings, especially with their professional hats on (i.e. in B2B settings) are a cynical species! And as brand trust becomes more important than ever, they look hard for reasons to trust you before they’re willing to get involved with your brand.

The viewpoints and actions of trusted colleagues, peers and community thought leaders have a huge influence on purchasing decisions. The individuals you are hoping to attract as customers will be watching and listening, to see what others they relate to and respect are doing and thinking.

Someone who is respected in their professional life, and who buys your subscription or registers for your event – and is seen to do so – immediately becomes an ‘advocate’ for you. Your very best salespeople are those who actively share their decision to become or remain your customer, or deliberately recommend your product to their network. They are also probably your cheapest sales people to ‘employ’ and motivate! (That’s not to say you shouldn’t also have salespeople – you just want to make their lives easier, and help them make more money for you, by getting others to warm up their targets first!)

Advocacy marketing, sometimes called referral marketing, is incredibly powerful. But, sadly, it is often not recognised and usually under-valued. Every marketer should have it as part of their toolkit!

Here are some specific ways in which advocacy marketing can help your business be more resilient at the very least – and at best, grow fast and far:

 

#1 Advocates extend your brand reach and build more brand awareness

LinkedIn alone has over 800 million users, with an average user having at least a few hundred connections. These connections are usually highly relevant, meaning anyone advocating for your brand via LinkedIn is reaching 100’s of people who could be your customers.

Other community platforms and social channels such as Guild, Twitter, and Facebook also give your advocates a platform to spread their views – and often these views will be about a specific brand or product/service.

Advocates also spread the word via email by forwarding on the best stuff you send them – so make sure you create emails people want to forward on!

 

#2 Activating advocates is a quick, easy and cost-effective way to find new customers

Your speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and repeat customers have already bought into your brand and value proposition. You have a direct line to these people, so why not use it? With a bit of extra effort and very little financial cost, you can successfully encourage these people to spread the word.

 

#3 Advocacy increases loyalty with existing customers

Recommending a product to a friend reinforces the buying decision of the advocate, making the referrer think more about why they bought the product in the first place and how it’s adding value to their lives.

Where referral marketing programmes offer rewards and incentives that customers truly value, they also grow the trust the customer continues to place on their brand.

 

#4 You can semi-automate your advocacy efforts, so your reach via advocates can be huge at minimal effort and cost

In our next MPG Insights resource, we will be providing a practical guide to the methodology and tools to put into action to get great results from advocacy marketing. This will include some top tips about marketing automation tools that Team MPG deploys on behalf of our clients – to great effect.



So, make sure you subscribe to MPG Insights so that you get the next resource (and every resource after that!) as soon as it is released. 

And in the meantime, if you’d like to speak to MPG about how to tap into your valuable marketing resource of brand advocates to drive long-term, sustainable growth, please get in touch.

 


 

MPG’s marketing strategists provided us with clear direction on how to establish strong brand positioning. Having MPG as collaborative and creative marketing partners, who focused on delivering marketing assets that we could immediately put into action and gain ROI from, really helped us move forward as a business.

Alex Ayad, Managing Director & Founder, Outsmart Insight


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Topics:

MPG Newsletter | Spring 2022

Newsletter • Spring 2022

Marketing analytics • Marketing technology • Data • Marketing strategy

In a world where almost every organisation faces extreme uncertainty on a daily basis, it is important to consider how adding more ‘science’ to your marketing can make your organisation more resilient.

What do we mean by ‘marketing science’? Analysis, data, metrics – enabled by the martech and digital tools.

Without these ‘science’ elements, the ‘art’ you put into your marketing won’t hit the mark. With the right level of science applied, your creative and messages will reach the right people, at the right time.

This newsletter focuses on why the science elements of your marketing are essential to survival and important for long term success; and how to invest strategically in marketing strategy, analytics, data, as well as the right martech and digital tools for a strong ROI.

 

You are not currently a subscriber to MPG Insights, but we want to make sure you received this newsletter anyway as it addresses some of the most urgent marketing issues many organisations are grappling with at this time. To become a subscriber (it’s free) – please sign up here.

#1 Marketing analytics and intelligence for evidence-based decision-making

To invest blindly in marketing without a strong understanding of what channels and tactics are delivering the best return can be detrimental to your business. 

The best marketers, those who understand that marketing is both an art and a science, know that they need to have analytics tools and reporting dashboards set up and integrated into their marketing process for evidence-based decision-making.

This marketing intelligence provides the kinds of insights that should feed in to your marketing planning.

 

“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes

 

MPG believes the best way for marketers to get the required level of science into their marketing is by building and regularly reviewing dashboards – combining the most important marketing metrics for digital marketers with website analytics that should be at the heart of marketing decision-making.

In a recent MPG Insights resource, we shared our tried and tested website analytics process that helps our clients become sustainable, growing businesses.

DOWNLOAD YOUR PRACTICAL GUIDE TO WEBSITE ANALYTICS


#2 Optimised martech for valuable insights

Many organisations have martech challenges – having either the wrong tech or tools in place, the right tools but poorly implemented or poorly adopted, or missing data flows and integrations. As marketing scientists, finding the right compound, or mix of systems and processes, when it comes to your marketing technology stack is vital for creating long-term, sustainable growth.

Good marketers understand that having an optimised martech stack, will provide you with analytics and behavioural data that should give you valuable customer insight as you see how customers are engaging with your products. If your marketing tech stack is not well set up and fully integrated, then your sales and marketing efforts will be negatively impacted.

Martech is constantly evolving, so systems and the tech stacks within which they operate need to be reviewed regularly. Your martech stack will also need ongoing maintenance to ensure all integrations are functioning as they should.

 


#3 Data

These uncertain times have also brought with them exciting opportunities for innovation, and many business leaders have embraced the changes brought about in their businesses. They understand that they need to invest in their marketing databases to build more resilience into their business, launch new revenue streams, or drive higher engagement with their existing customers.

 

“Data!data!data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”
Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes

 

Marketing leaders know that to acquire the right quality and volumes of data to achieve commercial objectives, you need a fine-tuned approach to building, maintaining, and enhancing your database.

The gold standard is a growing database that is filled with the right contacts, integrated with your website and other systems where data is collected, and where data flows automatically so that you can target the right people, at the right time, with the right message.

Using MPG’s extensive experience in optimising and strategically growing B2B databases, we’ve created a robust process for structuring, growing, and maintaining a database that delivers consistent revenue and drives growth. Here is your practical guide for database development and optimisation:

YOUR STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS FOR DATABASE OPTIMISATION


#4 A strategic, hybrid approach to marketing

As uncertainty continues, business and marketing leaders should be asking themselves the following question: “How can we build a high performance marketing function that is also agile, flexible and cost-effective?”

MPG believes that in most cases, the most effective way to build this kind of marketing function is by using a strategic, hybrid approach.

Finding the right balance, with an integrated internal marketing function that works in collaboration with 3rd party support, is key. MPG recommends that the first step towards this agility in your marketing function is to assess what skills you already have in your inhouse marketing team, and then identify where the gaps are that can be filled by a trusted and external partner.

DISCOVER THE OPTIMAL MIX FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE MARKETING

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4 areas that need marketing focus for international growth

Senior executives from niche B2B media and events businesses recently came together to meet and share insights in a confidential space at the 2nd 2022 Renewd International roundtable. 

The hot topic of discussion was ‘lessons learned’ by event organisers when scaling beyond events. There was much to be said about how event organisers that had always relied almost solely on events in the past have been moving towards more digitalised offerings (accelerated over the last two years during Covid), including many instances where their in-person events have remained as their most important format.

To receive Renewd’s next newsletter where this article will be profiled, please join Renewd here – membership is free. 

Team MPG’s marketing strategists who participated in the discussions have highlighted the following four things that came out of the discussion that we think are particularly relevant for marketing:

#1 An event is an event, and should be marketed like an event

As your value proposition changes and becomes more digital (24/7/365), it’s important to ensure that when marketing an event (online, F2F or hybrid), you still use the tried and tested best practices that work to attract the required number of attendees – who fit the right profile.

As your most important marketing channel is your website, make sure you get this right – first and foremost! Even if your event is part of a community or membership offering, build a website for your event that is very well set up to promote the event. Event websites ‘all look the same’ to an extent – for good reason! The smart marketers who’ve chosen how they should look and work know that customer journeys for getting people to book on to an event need to work in a certain way.

#2 Customer journey mapping must be one of the first things you do

Every marketing strategy should incorporate a well-mapped out customer journey that will deliver ‘customer success’ i.e. the customer engaging well with your offering so they get the value they need.

If you’re not thinking about precisely how your customer will be buying and then consuming your products, you’ll inadvertently be putting barriers in their way.

If you want to encourage a customer to buy a membership before they buy an event – make sure all the marcomms in all your marketing channels make that clear in the right way, based on where they are in their level of engagement with you. 

If you want to encourage a customer who has bought a subscription or membership to attend an event, make sure you’ve thought about – and planned – how the customer will be led towards your event and convinced to buy a ticket. If members don’t attend events, they’re less likely to be getting the value from the membership and less likely to renew.

Important note for marketers where events are part of a membership: just because a customer has purchased a membership that includes an event, doesn’t mean they’ll turn up to the event! You still need to market and sell the event to them as if they were paying, as they still need to give up their time and attention to the event, and for F2F events they will also need to take time out of the office, and often buy plane tickets and hotel accommodation. 

#3 Data and analytics are critically important

Creating virtual events, geo-cloning existing events or creating subscription or membership offerings are good ways to expand internationally and ensure strong, monetisable engagement 24/7/365. To make these successful you need your data and analytics set up in a way that gives you deep insights from your analytics and a healthy, growing database to enable sustainable international growth. These include: 

  • Customer insights surfaced by analytics: deep analytics that provide customer insights are essential for successful product development, and also for relevant, impactful marketing.
  • A growing, well maintained database: to grow your customer base across a range of products and internationally, you need a growing database – especially as buyers of your membership or subscription products may not mirror buyers of your events. Ongoing inbound marketing and well managed, compliant data acquisition and management processes are essential to attract, engage and convert the right kinds of customers in the right volumes.

If you underinvest in your analytics and data, you won’t be able to scale – domestically or internationally. It’s that simple.

#4 A well set up martech stack is essential if you want to scale

Having a good tech infrastructure with the right integrations, automations and data flows means your marketing, sales and customer services people can work efficiently and have more impact. 

Making sure tech does more of the work, means marketers in particular can spend more time on strategic, value creating activities that will drive growth. Far too many marketers spend a large amount of their time wrestling with platforms and systems that do not allow for efficient processes. When they’re spending their time on this wasteful and unnecessary kind of activity – just because the right tech is not in place, has not been set up properly or is not being used properly – the whole business suffers.

If your tech is not set up well, your marketers will not have the time or headspace to create and execute strategies that will enable international growth. 

The companies that invest well in fit-for-purpose marketing channels, systems, processes, data and analytics – along with the required marketing skills plugged into these – tend to achieve strong and sustainable growth of any kind, including international growth. 

Whether you’re focused on growing F2F events, digital events, subscriptions or membership offerings, without strong marketing, your business will really struggle to grow. 

 


 

I was very impressed with the marketing strategy MPG developed for Environment Analyst. The level of thinking that went into this strategy and how it was delivered has created great value for our business. My marketing manager and I now look forward to working with MPG to execute great marketing together.

Julian Rose, Director & Co-Founder, Environment Analyst

 


 

Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that supports your international growth?

MPG’s marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies that drive growth and deliver strong ROI for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you build a robust marketing strategy that consistently delivers against business objectives.

FIND OUT MORE

Topics:

Building a resilient marketing function: putting website analytics at the heart of marketing decision-making

In a recent MPG Insights article, we covered why having a high-performance marketing website is essential to success when it comes to building a resilient marketing function. 

If your business has a well-designed website, with well thought-through and carefully mapped out customer journeys, as well as efficient back end/CMS functionality – you’ll be in a good place when it comes to building resilience into your marketing function.

An important aspect that should not be neglected, is how you evaluate the performance of your website – and thereby also your marketing.

Website analytics reports are critical for understanding your customers, and how they interact with your site, as well as your other marketing channels. This is the #1 marketing priority, as stated by MPG Founder & CEO Helen Coetzee in her blog from 1st January 2022 – In 2022, the most resilient organisations will have relevant and resilient marketing”.

Having a website analytics tool and a reporting dashboard set up and integrated into your marketing process is the only way to make evidence-based decisions to feed into marketing planning and overall business strategy.

Getting value from your website analytics requires going beyond basic stats from your Google Analytics report. Analytics dashboards should be set up for a deeper dive into what you need to know about your website visitors – going well beyond just the number of visitors, pages per session, bounce rate etc.

You need to use the right tools to collect and analyse the data available, so you can understand how your audience is engaging with specific pages on your site, as well as the marketing channels, campaigns, and tactics that brought them to your website in the first place. 

Getting the right setup and process in place for your website analytics helps build a resilient, growing business in 7 ways:

  1. Allows you to see what is driving people to your website.
  2. Enables a good overall customer experience when they get to your website.
  3. Allows you to create personalised customer journeys that deliver the most relevant, compelling, and engaging content to your customers.
  4. Delivers more conversions at an optimal conversion rate – so more web visitors do what you want them to do when they are on your website.
  5. Helps you identify the website content your customers most value, and therefore build strategies and operational plans to create more of the most valued and engaging content.
  6. Means you can leverage your best advocates and create a strong referral engine.
  7. Gives you visibility of which marketing approaches, channels, tactics, and specific campaigns are working best, in terms of driving high numbers of relevant people to your website; and then the specific ROI of each of these, based on website conversions and ultimate revenue these conversions deliver.

Quite simply: if you don’t have website analytics set up in the right way, you can’t know how any of your marketing initiatives are working, what return your marketing investment is delivering, how to improve the return, or how to invest more for growth.

So, if you’re unsure of whether your website analytics is set up correctly and you’re not seeing marketing reports based on these, we recommend you focus on this as your next area of marketing investment. Investing much more in marketing campaigns before their performance is visible to you is not a smart move.

In our next MPG Insights resource, we will be providing a practical guide on which metrics and KPIs you should be monitoring via our website analytics. Subscribe to MPG Insights to make sure you don’t miss out on the next resource, and future useful resources after that…

And in the meantime, if you’d like to speak to MPG about how to get your website analytics properly set up to help your business grow, please get in touch. Team MPG includes website and analytics specialists who can help you get great visibility of your marketing performance and ROI.

GET IN TOUCH WITH MPG TO FIND OUT MORE


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