Your rapidly growing software business has doubled in size over the past six months with accelerating demand for its digital experience platform and a raft of acquisitions. But, how can you continue to widen awareness and attract the right kind of skilled talent you need to continue growing? And how can you maintain both momentum and quality when expanding so quickly? 
Sitecore’s CMO Paige O’Neill has the answers. This is her seventh such role in a two decade-long career that’s seen her working at organisations of every size from embryonic start-ups to publicly listed enterprises. She knows that the different milestones in a company’s growth cycle require a different focus for marketing. And what a rapidly scaling business needs to ensure sustainable future growth is a strong brand.
“We’re a leader in our space and well-known among technologists, but we need to dramatically expand our global audience to help people understand what we do,” says O’Neill. “One of the most interesting things about being a CMO is going into businesses at different phases of their growth and understanding what their particular business challenge is. A global brand campaign to introduce Sitecore to new audiences is one key area we need to focus on at this point.”
So far, it sounds like a traditional brand building brief. Yet, O’Neill isn’t planning to elevate Sitecore using traditional marketing tools alone. She argues that the nature of brand building for B2B organisations has changed – and so a CMO’s tactics and strategy need to change in response.
A tech-enabled approach to brand building
“We’ve all seen the stats about how the buying process has completely changed – that up to 80% of the research phase takes place before buyers stick up a hand and tell you that they’re interested,” she says. “You’ve got to make sure that you’re top of mind for your target audiences. If you were doing a brand campaign in the past, you used to think automatically of TV and airport billboards. But, the technology available today means that we’re able to be much more targeted. LinkedIn, for example, enables us to really filter down who we are trying to reach with our branding. That’s made branding a more relevant option for smaller B2B companies than it ever has been.”
O’Neill’s view on the value of targeting B2B brand campaigns is based on many years of experience on how the conversation about brand marketing ROI plays out in reality. “There’s a real difference between the theory of brand building and then the practice of standing in front of the board and being asked to explain how you spent millions of dollars,” she says. “In theory, there can be recognition that this is a longer-term investment and needs to be measured in a completely different way. In practice, once that campaign starts to run, you will still get questions about the contribution it’s making to the pipeline. We’ve got to be aware of that and make sure that we can point to that contribution. The fact that a brand campaign can now be targeted, and you can point to movement within those targeted customers, gives you something to leverage.”
The customer experience revolution
Technology and data is doing more than making brand marketing a more accessible option in B2B. It’s also helping to broaden the role of marketing as a whole by positioning it at the forefront of digital transformation.
“During my 20 or so years in marketing, the profession has gone from not really thinking about leveraging technology to a point where everything we do is automated and measured to the ‘nth’ degree,” says O’Neill. “Over the same time, we’ve seen the digital customer experience advance to become as important as the physical experience. Marketing’s been on the front line of this, putting content out there and getting feedback quicker than anyone else in the business. It’s a unique position that’s increased the scope of the CMO’s role because we were among the first to understand how important the digital customer experience was becoming.”
Talent: the other crucial audience for B2B brands
It’s not just the customer experience that matters, though. O’Neill is keenly aware that the brand she’s designing for Sitecore doesn’t just need to support the pipeline and widen demand. It has another audience that’s equally crucial for a business looking to scale up quickly.
“The competition for talent in tech is fierce,” she says. “It’s changing the dynamics within business – and it’s an area where marketing has the opportunity to lead. Five or ten years ago, we’d be putting content and messaging out into the world just thinking about how our buyers would respond. Now we’re thinking about the talent that we’re trying to attract to the company as well. That’s a big reason why sustainability and diversity are now so important to a brand. The next generation don’t want to do business with organisations that don’t follow diverse hiring practices or take social responsibility. They don’t want to work for them either.”
In a digitally transforming world, B2B brands have more to contribute to growth than ever. That’s why CMOs like Paige O’Neill are so determined to use all of the data and technology available to make the case for them.
For more insights from visionary Marketing Leaders check out LinkedIn’s CMO Corner.
