Transforming your business to be digital-ready was a major theme at this year’s second Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco. Executive Vice President and General Manager of Meraki, Todd Nightingale, says, “Before you can ‘Uber-ize’ your business, you have to digitize your network.” Business transformation starts with digital transformation. But what, exactly, does it mean when digital is applied to marketing?
It’s beginning to seem a bit like “digital marketing” has achieved that generic level of nebulous normally reserved for “cloud” conversations. Yet, after attending #CiscoPS16, I’ve emerged enlightened and ready to go #FullSpeed and all-in on everything digital has to offer. Here is a glimpse into three take aways I’ve gotten from the event, on how to prepare your marketing team to go digital:
Connecting with Customers on their Journey:
Master Brand Builder and NY Times best-selling author, Martin Lindstrom, has a unique way of understanding customer behavior. “I am a compulsive collector of clues, an explorer of Small Data,” he told the audience. Lindstrom encouraged us to change the angle from which we view our customers – and our customers’ customers – by listening, turning problems into opportunities, and learning to become a storyteller. According to Lindstrom, we are all deeply irrational, and so are our customers. But we can combine the rational values of big data with the irrational values of small data to connect with our customers emotionally. Making that connection, leads a valuable customer relationship.
Deepening Customer Relationships:
Cisco executive VP and CMO, Karen Walker, was the perfect choice to close out this year’s event with a keynote focused on how to increase sales, accelerate the sales cycle and deepen customer relationships through digital marketing. The key: connect, engage, amaze.
In the last year, Cisco has invested $1 billion in brand equity (that’s billion, with a B…) to provide air cover for what Cisco describes as “Brand Exchange” – creating value for your brand in the process. Cisco tracked a 23 percent increase in marketing generated pipeline last year, so you should be leveraging the investments Cisco and Comstor have made in this demand generation engine.
Embracing Digital Fully:
Digital marketing shouldn’t be an after thought. It’s not the latest fad. It’s something that you need to consider for your own marketing teams as you work to engage, develop, grow, and extend your customer relationships. In fact, I encourage you to take a tip from Walker who said, “We’ve infused digital marketing into everything we do, it is our oxygen.” In other words, digital marketing is here to stay.
Now that Partner Summit has come to a close, and we are all back to the realities of our regular work week, expect to hear from Cisco. The team has said it will follow up with all partner marketing leads via e-mail with links to assets for all of the announcements from this week. In the meantime, if you missed out on the week’s exciting events, you can still catch up on all the social media action by checking out #ciscoPS16 and #fullspeed.
Hope to see all your marketeers soon at Cisco Marketing Velocity in Chicago!
