Interview with Marketers: Vickie Raptis

A senior marketing leader with 20 years of Marketing and Communications experience, Vickie Raptis is dedicated to leading Deloitte Canada’s national Field Marketing team, and a member of the Marketing and Sales Support leadership team. Leading a team of senior marketing professionals, she is responsible for the integration and execution of the firm’s marketing strategies. Vickie partners with her team and key business stakeholders to ensure the development and implementation of strong lead generating marketing strategies that help achieve the business objectives of Deloitte in Canada.

Vickie has proven experience developing and executing results-oriented marketing strategy leading to significant ROI. Her experience includes building trusted marketing advisor relationships with senior executives, and managing complex business issues.

1. At a professional services, relationship-based company, why do analytics mean engagement when it comes to marketing?

There are important links between marketing, sales, and analytics, and those links impact engagement and results. When designing a marketing campaign, it is important to think about how the elements of the campaign work together and tell a story, as well as how they will be used to support ongoing dialogue with clients and targets.

For example, for those responsible for sales, how will marketing content be used by in a meaningful way to develop relationships and drive engagement? That’s step one.

And then, it’s critically important to ensure that you’re capturing analytics throughout the lifecycle of a campaign. How is your audience engaging with the material? Are they even engaging with it at all? If they aren’t, it is important to pivot quickly so that you can see how your marketing resonates with your audience. That’s step two. You can also look at the analytics to see what they are engaging with as a means to foster follow-up discussions and dialogue.

Finally, it’s essential to think about the end results you’re looking for first, and then to identify what meaningful accountability looks like, for all marketing initiatives. For example, in the B2B relationship world, how many interactions are the result of a publication? How many meetings are set up after an event?

2. As a leader and coach for your marketing teams, what can you tell us about your “3-year increments” approach to career growth and reinvention?

One’s career is a journey and in turn, a story. I often think of a career in three to four year increments, enhancing the story towards the end goal. When starting a new role or portfolio, my view is that the first year is to build upon the foundation and test the waters. The second year is when you leverage the lessons and learnings to thrive or set up your own initiatives. The third and/or fourth years are when you reap the benefits of what you have accomplished and work on handing over knowledge for others to continue the progress you’ve made.

It’s important to have that story, and to tell other people about how you progressed. When you take the time to learn from your journey, people recognize where you started, what you transformed, and how you can help others in the future.

3. What are the marketing trends you see for 2021?

2020 has shown us that purpose is everything – but it’s not enough to talk about purpose, it needs to be embedded into the DNA of a company and done in authentic way. An organization needs to deliver on purpose in a way that is true and meaningful.

Purpose-driven businesses are much more able to make meaningful connections with their customers, but it’s also important that purpose doesn’t get in the way of authenticity. What does authenticity look like? Companies need to tell an impactful story, they need to walk the walk, and they need to make sure that they’ve put humans at the heart of every decision they make. Above all, however, authenticity means embracing diversity and inclusion to support inclusive decision-making.

As we move into 2021, trust has also moved to the forefront. The relationship between businesses and customers is built on trust, and organizations need to ensure that they’re nurturing the existing relationship, while also taking steps to protect it from outside threats, such as cybersecurity breaches or regulatory failures. Businesses have to understand that data will always belong to customers, and that brands have a fundamental responsibility to keep data safe.

4. What is your MarTech stack?

Like many large organizations, we leverage a number of platforms enabled by our strategic alliances and partners to manage client relationships and create a differentiated marketing experience across multiple channels: email, web, social, and in person.

Internally, the overall operations for our marketing agency is also powered by a work management platform that connects all of marketing to manage workflow, resources, and campaigns. In addition, we also engage with Deloitte’s own market-facing professionals to co-develop proprietary solutions that can be leveraged in the marketplace.

For example, we have an integrated dashboard that drives closer alignment between sales and marketing. This helps drive the sales conversation towards a buying decision by equipping our sales teams with insights about who is engaging with marketing material, and what assets our clients and prospects are most interested in. This helps our teams make smarter marketing decisions by giving them a holistic view on campaign ROI, and near real-time, omni-channel campaign performance. And finally, it lets them correlate marketing touchpoints and opportunities in the sales funnel to better understand client journeys and behaviours.