Author: headstartAdmin

 

André Leblanc began at mdf commerce in 2016. He occupied the position of Vice President, Marketing, before also being assigned responsibility for all corporate communications. Prior to joining mdf commerce, André occupied senior roles at Cossette Communications Marketing in media planning, brand strategy and strategic planning.

He subsequently joined Piranha Advertising as Executive Vice President and helped to grow his agency from 6 to 24 employees; he sold this company in 2008. He then joined Yellow Pages as Director of Brand and Communications, where his focus was on repositioning this world-known brand.

His extensive and varied experiences have allowed him to accumulate a wealth of knowledge in digital marketing for both B2C and B2B environments. He is a graduate of the Advertising program at Algonquin College of Applied Arts, and has also completed multiple courses on marketing and digital strategy.

1. Does it all come down to data as a marketer? 

For quite a few years now, data has become a central ingredient in all that is done in terms of marketing. As the world becomes more and more digital, there are very few elements or interactions that people have with technology that are not tracked in some way. Even when you are not actively using tech, it produces behavioral data. Just think of your mobile phone and how it can feed you data on your location, travels, etc., even when not being actively used.

A constant stream of data “feeds” provides marketers with a wealth of factual data for the strategic process. This will help you “sell a project” internally, and as you execute campaigns to adjust, optimize and course correct, to give everyone precise, post-campaign performance metrics.

Although data is key, there still and always will be artistry in marketing, from brand to storytelling, to imagery and creative, all with the goal of connecting with audiences on multiple emotional or rational levels.

2. How is marketing like sailing?

It’s a bit of a simple analogy, but, in my opinion, remains relevant in terms of comparison.

In sailing you’re constantly adjusting to evolving conditions to optimize performance. This includes components on the boat that you can control, but also the environment that you do not control and must constantly adjust to, as it changes or evolves.

The same can be said for marketing: there are components or levers that you do control, and multiple external factors over which you have no control, but you must be highly attuned to the whole situation in order to constantly adjust your approach.

Also, the ability to adjust quickly, based on those external factors, minimizes the performance gaps between what you can control and what you can’t. In marketing, we’re reaching a point that various data streams give results through constant adjusting and tweaking, minimizing waste, optimizing, and at times, allowing for predictive scenarios.

In sailing, constant adjustments are also key; if you drift two degrees off course, but quickly course-correct, you remain on trajectory, on plan; if you don’t quickly correct the mistake, this seemingly small mistake can lead you to being completely off course.

3. Everyone has been challenged working remotely. How do you take care of your team?

At mdf commerce, we were able to pivot within about three days to all remote working. Of course, that was an immediate reaction to the arrival of the pandemic with the work restrictions that started last March. There had been improvements to processes, at times equipment over the past year.

What started out as a weekly video conference from the CEO for COVID19 updates, has morphed into a weekly operational update. Now we connect about 30 minutes every Friday, with live Q&A from our employees in Canada, US and parts of Europe.

The impact of this approach has been significant to keep people informed and give everyone at mdf a sense of being connected, and to see colleagues from across the company at least once a week.

Also, with my team or direct reports, we have a “1 to 1” every week ranging from 30 minutes to an hour; this helps us all to stay connected.

As a company, we recently put in place a wellness challenge. For 20 days, we sent a daily challenge to all employees, with challenges ranging from “junk food free Wednesday”, to an appreciation day where you could make a shout out to a colleague. We also had a “squat day” and “share your playlist” day, etc.

As many companies did, we adjusted quite well to this “new normal” and as we look into the workplace of the future; returning to a pre-pandemic working 100% from the office is no longer an option.

It’s all matter of resilience, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions and environments. This holds true in marketing, in sailing, and in managing your career or even your personal life. Personal and professional growth is far from being linear. As much as we plan it to be that way, it rarely works out that neatly.

Your ability to identify and understand obstacles or setbacks and, learn from them, work around them, adapt, pivot, refocus are fundamental components to happiness (of course without deviating from your core values). For me, this has been true at work and at home. Changing and adapting is not a destination, it’s a state of mind, an ongoing journey.

4. What is your MarTech stack?

Our core MarTech stack is focused on HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics. Of course we use multiple, other technologies and plugins to gather and present data, and to communicate internally-externally, but at the heart of it all is HubSpot and Microsoft.

 

Cassandra Jowett is the Senior Director of Marketing at PathFactory, the Intelligent Content Platform for B2B marketers. She’s a multi-disciplinary marketing “swiss army knife” with more than a decade of experience building content-first marketing strategies at early- and growth-stage technology companies. Cassandra is also the founder of the invite-only Content Marketing Leaders Slack and Toronto meetup.

1. Content Marketers need to connect what they do to the business strategy. Why is it important they are brought “to the strategy table” and how can they work towards this if this is not the case?

Content is the rope that buyers use to pull themselves through the decision-making process, especially in B2B. It should be aligned with your business strategy if you want to attract the right audience, and convert them into customers of your products or services. There can’t be any gaps in that rope or else buyers will start falling off. Holding content marketers at arms’ length from the strategy and decision-making process is incredibly inefficient and will likely lead to frustration – on the part of marketing leaders, the content marketer, and the buyers you’re trying to reach.

CMs can’t “just” be content producers. They have to understand what’s needed across the business and why. They need access to high-quality data to understand which messages, content assets, and channels are working for which audiences. They should have a strong understanding of everything in their company’s content library and what personas, products, and buying stages they align with. They must work closely with product, sales, customer success, and leadership to create the right content for the right audience at the right stage of the buyer’s journey. And their opinions and ideas about how to achieve that should be valued by those stakeholders as they synthesize inputs from across the organization.

If these things aren’t true at your organization today, it’s fair to start asking “Why?” and digging into how you can change that. Personally, I got closer to strategy in my own career by being incessantly curious about all of these things. Once I realized it was actually beneficial for my career and the performance of the company I worked for, I didn’t hold back. If your boss and peers aren’t bringing you into the room, tell them you want to be there. Once you’re there, seek to understand. Ask questions, even if you feel like it’s not your place to ask.

2. Why did you start your Slack community “Content Marketing Leaders”?

The Content Marketing Leaders Slack began as a meetup in Toronto for in-house content marketers working at B2B, VC-funded SaaS companies like I was at the time. I was a Content Marketing Manager at a software company and my boss gave me a number of achievements to unlock before being promoted to Senior Content Marketing Manager. One of those was to build a network of peers I could turn to for help.

Like many young Content Marketing Managers, I was just figuring things out as I went and I was the only one in that role at my company. I started with 1:1 meetings, then gathered those people for a breakfast, then that turned into a monthly after-work meetup. Eventually, some people couldn’t attend every month but wanted a way to stay in touch, so I started the Slack community to facilitate that.

Over the last 2 years, it’s really snowballed into a much larger global community of over 400 content marketers. It’s still invite-only and I approve every member myself – not to be exclusive, but to ensure that the community stays relevant to all of us and isn’t dominated by sales pitches. I hope to resume in-person meetups in Toronto once it’s safe to do so.

3. Tell us about your career. What should other marketers prioritize to advance their career?

The seed for my career was planted in high school: I founded the school’s newspaper, held the communications role on student council, and read announcements over the PA system each morning. In my spare time, I built websites and designed graphics in Photoshop. Huge nerd! I went to journalism school after that and learned how to report, write on deadline, and shoot video. I thought I wanted to be a foreign correspondent covering important global issues. But then The Great Recession hit and I couldn’t find a paying journalism job to save my life.

I had bills to pay, so I took a sales and marketing internship with a newly-formed, completely bootstrapped start-up called TalentEgg. I cold called, managed clients, and started building the company’s community on this new thing called social media: Facebook and Twitter were just becoming popular then. The founder asked me to work part-time during my final year of university while I did a full-time, unpaid internship at a national newspaper, and then I joined her full-time after graduating.

We started what we called a “digital magazine” to build our audience and my job title was Editor. But after a few years of muddling along and thinking I was a journalism misfit working in tech, I realized I was doing something called content marketing and it was a real thing! We built the business on the audience my content attracted and our website became #1 in our category.

After 5 years there, I accepted a role as Content Marketing Manager at an early-stage B2B marketing technology company called Influitive. They had a real marketing team, a tech stack, and VC funding, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn how it’s done. And I did. I learned so much in such a short period of time. It’s where I also started getting curious about areas of marketing besides content marketing, especially demand generation.

When my peer in demand generation told me our content wasn’t working, I had LOTS of questions: Who did you send it to? What stage of the buying process? What was the message? On which channel? How are you measuring success? When I didn’t agree with the answers to those questions, I got more involved in making these decisions and stepped into more of a strategic role on the team as the company grew.

In 2017, I joined LookBookHQ (rebranded to PathFactory in 2018) as the Director of Content Marketing. The idea of joining a company that was all about leveraging content in digital marketing strategies was (and still is) fascinating to me and allowed me to continue my learning about demand gen. Through a few marketing reorgs, I was promoted to Director of Integrated Marketing and then Senior Director of Marketing, where I now lead the “brand and demand” functions including content, design, customer marketing, and demand gen.

What I prioritized to advance my career – your mileage may vary:

• Being helpful, even if it’s outside my job description
• Being curious, asking questions, and seeking to understand as much as possible
• Working with good, smart people I could learn from
• Following my own interests and passions
• Finding my own unique ways to network, self-promote, and speak up

4. What is your MarTech stack?

PathFactory (yes, we really do use our own software every single day), Marketo Engage, Terminus, Sprout Social, WordPress, Vimeo, Full Circle, Sendoso, Digesto, and Insent.

 

A seasoned B2B marketer with a background in creative writing, Anne supports storytelling as both a marketing and business strategy, and believes the most compelling narrative weaves the interests, emotions, challenges, and needs of the customer into the narrative of the organization — to form a brand that is thoughtful, inclusive, and effective in putting the client first while influencing the bottom line.
 
Anne’s current role at CGI aligns perfectly with her intrigue around the impact of technology on the financial services industry — its customers and the institutions that serve them. As marketing leader for CGI’s Canadian financial services practice, Anne is devoted to developing and executing campaigns that elevate CGI’s reputation in the market, build deeper relationships with decision-makers and influencers in the industry, and uncover opportunities for CGI to help current and future clients grow and prosper.
 
On a personal level, Anne is dedicated to fostering inclusion and diversity within and outside the workplace, as both an advocate and ally, as well as building her own leadership acumen while helping develop the leaders of tomorrow. In her spare time, you’ll find her either active and outside or curled up with a book – Anne’s passion for hiking and the outdoors is rivaled only by her love for reading and coffee.
 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/annejoyce
LI: linkedin.com/in/annejoyce

1. What do you mean by seamless storytelling vs regular storytelling?

I think organizations – especially in B2B – tend to obsess over how to tell their own story – their brand narrative – without taking into account the narrative of the customer, and how that fits in. This isn’t to say they don’t place importance on the customer journey, or personas, or experience, but they may not always use these insights to drive their narrative.

I believe the most compelling and effective brand narrative is one that features the customer as a key character, even protagonist, and their challenges (and solutions to them) comprise the plot. And this is what I mean by seamless – the brand and customer narrative become one and the same – so seamless that the customer feels they are hearing their own story told back to them, without even realizing it.

Gaining a deep understanding of your customer is only one step – being able to craft their story and weave it into your own is another, important one; those who do it well not only engage their customer at a deeper, emotional level, but demonstrate they are truly customer focused – they know their own story couldn’t unfold successfully without the customer at its heart.

2. In B2B marketing, what are some of the obstacles in finding out what the customer wants? And how did you overcome them?

It’s widely known that we rely heavily on the anecdotal in B2B – meaning, while there are ways to gather and interpret customer data, we don’t always have the best processes in place to follow through and connect those insights to the sales cycle.

In my experience, there are two key elements B2B marketers should consider when trying to understand the customer:

1) build and nurture a deep, mutually beneficial relationship with sales, knowing that they are often your only direct link to the customer – bring them in early, be open to their knowledge and experience with clients, and involve them as much as possible in the content creation process; and

2) first-hand experience is always best, so seek out ways for you and your team to connect directly with clients – some examples could be running events with client-led content (necessitating planning discussions where marketing can be involved), developing content that includes client insights, offering to absorb communication or relationships with clients when it comes to marketing initiatives, and encouraging/facilitating collaboration with clients’ marketing and communications teams.

3. Diversity and inclusion are more and more on the corporate agenda. Why is it important as a marketer?

Great question, and one that is important to me at a very personal level – my son is on the autism spectrum and my journey raising him so far has taught me how to open myself up to divergent ways of seeing the world and thinking through problems.

I believe D&I goes beyond just knowing that our customers are diverse and responding to this with inclusive messaging and practices, or developing programs to educate on and celebrate D&! – we need to embed inclusive thinking in everything we do. It’s a mindset shift, to be able to operate with this type of openness (to new ideas, approaches, ways of communicating and thinking), but it exposes us to a vast array of possibilities for how we engage with clients and the world.

4. What is your MarTech stack?

What I love about our marketing team (and the overall culture) at CGI is an openness to test and learn and remain agile; we are always trying to find better ways (technologies, platforms, channels, approaches) to meet our overall objective as marketers – to provide the best support to the business.

So, we are constantly evolving our stack to help facilitate the smoothest customer journey and experience, and have the most impact on sales and ROI.

 

Niharika serves as a fractional Chief Marketing Officer across TIFIN’s innovative fintech companies, including Magnifi, Clout, and Positivly. An entrepreneurial marketing leader, Niharika has spent 20+ years building brand and marketing organizations in financial services and high-growth consumer environments. Previously Chief Brand Officer for Prudential Financial Inc, Niharika had led several early-stage and incumbent companies through their digital commerce and multi-channel transformation journey.

1. What does it take to be lean but innovative in Content Marketing?

To answer this question, I think it is important to first underscore the value of content marketing. Content marketing is the firepower businesses need to build relationships between moments and at moments of consideration to drive growth. In other words, content marketing delivers salience and value to a prospect/client across the customer lifecycle so that your brand/firm/business can be the preferred choice when a moment of truth (i.e. a prospect or customer making a revenue-impacting decision) arrives.

Salience implies high relevance of content; value implies insightful information available for easy consumption. I have always believed that the shortest distance between a brand and a person is a story. Compelling content creates that connection.

In essence, when done right, content marketing is really all about relationships and eventually, growth. Engaged prospects convert and engaged clients stay. Simple? Not really. Achievable? Yes.

So, how to be lean but innovative?

I. Embrace the power of the machines to get to a segment of 1. Unleash AI to identify and hyper-personalize your content sourcing strategy. The always-on downward pressure on resources and cost can be mitigated with the human/tech hybrid model. Whether it is your own content or insightful content sourced from public domain, algorithms can be your ally in curating content for every customer and prospect. Netflix, anyone?

II. Be the signal in the noise. This is the hardest principle to live by. The age old adage: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all” applies. In this case, if your content or perspective does not reflect unique insight don’t bother, you are wasting your time and in fact, adding to the noise.

III. Raise your firm’s Digital IQ. Inform and activate your frontline team on social media in a manner that requires them to do as little as possible. Embrace content in all its forms. There are tools for this. Lack of digital culture? You can solve this by finding “flywheel adopters” — early adopters who will help spread the word when they see the value.

IV. Create a long-tail content shelf. Amazon made long-tail sexy by creating infinite shelf space for (almost) every imaginable product and invited trusted third parties to participate. In this context, find non-linear, interesting topics to engage clients and source them internally or with through partnerships. A straightforward example is financial advisors sharing travel destination reviews with clients. A more interesting example is a financial firm sharing stories of social impact created by companies that are held in a client’s portfolio.

V. Tolerate no waste. If you can’t measure it, drop it. No more words wasted here 🙂

2. What trends and marketing technology to do you see for 2021?

I. Marketing automation upgrades to Marketing intelligence. So far, a lot of what we have seen in marketing tech is automation, essentially scaling the “doing.” I think we are at the point where “thinking” martech will see a surge in adoption giving marketers new (ROI) power in influencing budgets, customer experience and product innovation.

II. Data is the new fuel and first-party data is going to be the “clean energy” of marketing – sustainable, valuable and socially responsible. Marketers will need to look beyond (and resist the urge to) spray-and-pray campaigns to truly leveraging their own customer and prospect databases.

III. B2B Marketers embrace DTC tools and mindset. Maybe this is more wishful on my part, but for too long, B2B marketers have been bringing a knife to a gun fight. I would love to see my fellow B2B marketers, move beyond just sales enablement and embrace the power of digital selling by embracing the tools and tactics used by high-growth DTC marketers.

3. From a talent and team-building perspective, why do you prefer a multidiscipline approach and what skills do you look for?

Marketing is a team sport and while we do need specialists, I have seen teams do their best work when they are given the creative freedom to think across disciplines while they may have to execute in their own lane. This kind of systems thinking, almost anti-disciplinary approach yields the best results and team dynamics. I look for people who are genuinely curious, data friendly and outcome oriented. And yes, enjoy the daily requisite belly laugh!

4. What is your MarTech stack?

We use Clout: myclout.com, to power AI-driven digital and content marketing along with Hubspot and Google Analytics.

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.