Marketing Insights with Jordan Reizes

In his role across Asia Pacific and Japan, Jordan has a unique multi-regional perspective of the rapid transformation of our industry. Whether it is working from home, social distancing or the shutdown of entire swathes of the marketing sector, Covid-19 has created a tsunami of change across the globe.

The sudden transition to digital impacted B2C and B2B marketers equally hard. Prior to the pandemic, we were all doing a kind of half-physical, half-digital approach. But when the crisis hit and other channels shut down, we had to quickly transition the core of these physical experiences into digital engagements.

As you’d expect, the customer’s experience of something designed for a physical environment and delivered on a digital channel will not be optimal. What we can do now is take this opportunity to create true digital experiences that utilise all that digital can offer to engage, entertain and connect with our customers.

The immediate future of marketing is all about engaging your customer with content that really works, that’s what, achieves cut-through and engages a customer and turns that dial.

The value of great content is a given. If the ideas are compelling, the perspective is unique and if the content is effective for the chosen channel, you can achieve your outcomes. But the difference today is the sheer volume of great content that’s needed to feed digital channels.

Great content takes time, and there’s a lot of pressure on marketers to come up with good ideas fast, ideas that push the envelope and engage and enable customers. We are creating webinars, virtual events, emails, and occasionally interactive features and all in much greater volumes than before.

As B2B marketers, we’re used to doing smaller, more targeted, campaigns. We’re used to experimentation. We’re used to trying out different things. But I think the biggest challenge is how do we create an experience that people want to come to, versus engaging someone elses and that they want to come back to? How do we create that experience in the digital world without being face to face which, before the pandemic, gave us that balance to engage but not overwhelm?

As our conversation ends, talk turns to the next frontier for marketers.

I think the next frontier is one step further along from what we’re seeing today. It’s asking how we create something that’s more engaging, that’s personal and that makes me stop and pay attention. That gets the cut-through. Is it a further form of digital? Or something more? I don’t think that code’s been cracked yet.

We couldn’t agree more, Jordan! That’s a challenge for all of us in the marketing community to take up. Read more fascinating insights from B2B and B2C marketing on the McCorkell News.

When the conversation turned to achieving cut-through in a time when so many people have digital fatigue, Jordan commented on the shift in customer preferences from traditional interactions to digital.

“There are new patterns of how we engage with our customers, and how they engage with brands. The buyer journey has never been linear but now they are all over the place. Instead of using one or two online sites, customers will now use many, making engaging them even more difficult.

More than ever, it’s critical to know everything there is about our buyers if we’re going to reach them. How well do you know your customer? What channels did they frequent? Social or professional? Do they still visit? Would they prefer digital or will a webinar engage them?

The answer isn’t just in throwing more money at campaigns and tossing the net wider, it’s the opposite. It’s about creating stand-out content that will not only get cut-through but that is also hyper-effective in reaching and engaging your customers.”