Last week I had a chance to meet and interact with marketing professionals from all around the world during the annual B2B (business-to-business) marketing event Ignite 2017 in London, UK.
For past couple of years, I’m leading a Marketing team at SAF Tehnika – one of the major microwave communications equipment manufacturers with a global presence in more than 130 countries worldwide. Our company sells to other businesses. Mostly via distributors and regional partners or agents. And this makes a huge difference in how we market our products, how we build our brand recognition and reputation.
It’s important to occasionally meet other industry professionals, interact, gain new insights and share experiences. And to gain confidence that we’re on the right path in terms of what we do.
Speaking about the conference, main industry buzzwords remain the same as for the last couple of years – content marketing is the holy grail. The more balanced bullshit/relevance ratio, the better! There wasn't any lack of the most recent buzzword ABM or Account Based Marketing that has been gaining momentum for the past couple of years. To explain it simply - if Timmy loves apples and Johnny loves oranges then I'll make sure to give apples to Timmy and the oranges to Johnny, instead of feeding both of them with fruit they don't necessarily like. How effective it is for small or mid-sized companies is still something that I am open to discussing, but it works well when increasing sales for larger companies that have all systems and processes well set-up and running on a sufficient budget. There are more and more dedicated services and tools for ABM.
Closed ecosystems like social networks and specific chat groups are doing the best they can to cut from Google's ad profits. LinkedIn has done a particularly good job making itself appealing for both users and advertisers.
To sum up, it was an amazing experience with a lot of new ideas. Now it's time to wrap up sleeves and make them real. Cheers!