Marketing in the Coronavirus Crisis: Notes from a Discussion at the Boston Meeting of the Gramercy Institute

Just before everything shut down in the face of the pandeminc, a group of financial marketers convened in Boston for a meeting of the Gramercy Institute. The session was billed as focusing on the topic of ”What’s New and What’s Next in Financial Marketing“ and indeed much of the content touched on the future, but, taking a cue from the news at the time, the host initiated a discussion of marketing in a crisis.

Broadly, the conversation fell into two buckets: communication “best practices” and the role of marketing. Two key take-aways:

  • Communication “best practices.” There was agreement that transparency and authenticity were key to building connections with customers, but also that there was no clear playbook for communication frequency and channel. Discussion participants recognized the need to respect the limited time and frayed nerves of customers but also saw potential value in providing clear guidance in an environment filled with uncertainty. Likewise, they recognized the need to find a balance between communication overload – exacerbated by the worldwide turn to digital communications in light of severe restrictions on face-to-face contact – and the value of demonstrating presence and building community when so much of the current crisis feels (and is) isolating. Finally, participants expressed mixed feelings about finding opportunities in the crisis. Many said that this was definitely not the right time to be promoting products. Some made the argument that people are looking for concrete assistance and that there was a place for tasteful promotion of solutions that could meet the needs of customers in the current environment.
  • Role of marketing. As the discussion turned to the role of marketing amidst the crisis, there was widespread consensus that in some ways the environment was one in which marketing could really prove its value in building relationships with customers and prospects and in delivering timely, conscientious, clear communications. Even more, though, there was agreement that marketers at B2B financial services companies should seize on this as a chance to forge a closer partnership with their sales colleagues, who are likely to be struggling to adjust to a world in which face-to-face contact is minimized or even completely foregone. Everyone agreed that if Marketing could find a way to enable sales to leverage digital and voice channels to nurture relationships at a distance and at scale, it would have a significant impact on the ability of the company to navigate these difficult times.

While the event was likely the last in-person meeting for the near future for most in attendance, it was a valuable opportunity to share ideas with colleagues and learn from each other as chaos seemed to be descending. It has given us much to think about as we all now hunker down, socially isolate to try to stay safe, and think about what the future might hold in store.

When Engineers Speak: 4 Key Cloud Marketing Implications

For marketers, almost nothing is as valuable as hearing the unvarnished, unfiltered point-of-view of buyers. At last week’s Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council’s “Cloud Seminar: Choosing the Right Cloud for Your Business,” marketers would have had a lot to listen to.

Speaking to a sophisticated, engineer-centric audience with over 20 years’ experience in development and operations, GitHub’s Mark Imbriaco didn’t pull any punches in presenting his perspective on the myths and realities of the benefits of the cloud.

  • Cost savings? Myth.
  • Means of avoiding IT bottlenecks? Myth.
  • Driver of increased agility and speed to market? Definite reality.

From a value proposition perspective, the implications are clear: be wary of emphasizing cost and operational advantages of your cloud solution because they’ll like meet with skepticism.

A panel discussion featuring engineering executives from Carbonite, Ipswitch, Acquia, and Scribe built on Mr. Imbriaco’s perspective. In responding to questions about their infrastructure evolution, they said that decisions about when and how to deploy IaaS, PaaS, and S(torage)aaS would always be based on the strategic business needs for a given initiative or project: when time-to-market is critical or in which utilization is highly unpredictable, cloud is attractive; in a scenario with consistent demands and a need to control variable costs, cloud is a poor choice.

This nuanced view of the application of cloud services should point marketers towards the development of materials and campaigns that enable the customer to drive the buying process based on specific requirements for specific projects. Specifically, the following would likely be effective:

  • Inbound marketing to allow prospective customers to pursue the information most useful to them
  • Web-based self-diagnostics to help prospective customers learn which cloud solution may be the right one for them
  • Sales enablement tools to facilitate sales’ role as a partner and helpful guide
  • Cross/up-sell marketing based on utilization data to take advantage of natural evolution of needs

“Sincerely, Vice President”: Why Marketing for Sales Is Vital

Since EMI’s founding over 20 years ago, a core focus has been what we call “marketing for sales.”  One of the key propositions of this focus is to bring marketing principles, strategy, and messaging to the point of sale. And it’s obvious that many companies struggle with this, as we often encounter samples of sales campaigns that demonstrate a lack of marketing expertise.  One such example is below.

The goal of this email is to get the target audience to attend these sessions, and certainly there are elements in the email – the prominence given to the information table to attract the eye, the “Last Chance” message at the top of the email – that head in the right direction. However, the ability of email to achieve its objectives as effectively as possible is undermined by execution that fails to adhere to basic principles of email marketing:

  • Having a single, prominent call-to-action. In fact, the only call-to-action in the message is to respond to the email and write a message stating which session is preferable.
  • Facilitating response by offering multiple response channels and making it easy to take the desired action. There is no opportunity to click on a link to respond, no number to call to register, no button taking you to a form on which you could register. Any or all of these additions would have increased response by making it easier and more straightforward.
  • Offering a compelling and prominent headline that draws the recipient in. What is the headline of the email? Is it the small message at the top saying this is the last chance to register? If so, only the more patient readers would find that sentence because it is overwhelmed by the logo immediately below it.

Based on the content and the fact that typically this company is a very effective email marketer, it seems likely that the email was sent not as a marketing campaign, but rather by the sales team. This ineffective email is precisely why “marketing for sales” is so important and represents such a powerful opportunity for many companies.  Imagine how many more prospects would have registered and attended these events if the email had offered large buttons for each event which, when clicked, would have registered the clicker and taken them to a confirmation page that offered them a “save to Outlook” option. Consider how much more compelling it would have been to have a name in the closing, rather than just “Vice President”.  Injecting marketing expertise into sales channel activity means more registrations, which means more attendees, and that means more sales.