Keeping up with the changing pace is not difficult, but requires a mindset of wanting to adapt, adopt and grow. The several marketing events each year have proven a successful platform for the exchange of ideas. Slack and Discord communities are growing by the day. There is no shortage of channels to stay informed.
1. Tell us about your background and journey.Most recently, I am the Director of ABM, Digital, and MarTech at Cyient. After completing my engineering, I began my career as a software engineer. However, I found my calling in marketing but my roots were attached to technology. I was fortunate to pursue my MBA at IBS Bangalore in Marketing and IT, allowing me to sharpen my marketing skills while retaining my passion for technology. This played a huge role in shaping my future as a B2B marketer. My first big stint in marketing was at Aditi Technologies, where I was critical in driving business and demand through marketing channels.
Subsequently, I had a nearly five-year-long career at ThoughtWorks where I was responsible for global lead generation, digital marketing, and automation. This was also my first foray into marketing operations and hands-on experience with CRM and Marketing Automation tools. I returned to Aditi Technologies for a seven-and-a-half-year-long career where I continued with the teams through their acquisition by Symphony Teleca, HARMAN, and Samsung.
In this round, I led the inbound, content, and lead generation functions. Having gone through multiple acquisitions, each opportunity provided a roadmap to working on strategic initiatives, end-to-end campaign processes, and in-depth market research.
In the near future, we will see marketing teams operate at the intersection of human-enabled marketing and AI. Human-enabled marketing will bring more current and recent data points on customer attributes, behavior, purchase patterns, and more, while AI delivers a predictive or proactive roadmap on how to engage with them. Considering how marketing teams have already begun playing a huge role in the revenue pipeline, the future will see a greater shift towards product-led growth, even in the B2B services industry.
3. How are B2B marketers adapting to the scale and pace at which marketing is evolving?
The vast number of networks and forums today provide a great platform for marketers to keep up with changing trends. Unlike before, the marketing community has become vocal about successes and failures, sharing best practices and what to avoid. Platforms like product hunt are launching new products each day, and early adopters in the martech space provide detailed and unbiased reviews of how these have helped them.
Keeping up with the changing pace is not difficult, but requires a mindset of wanting to adapt, adopt and grow. The several marketing events each year have proven a successful platform for the exchange of ideas. Slack and Discord communities are growing by the day. There is no shortage of channels to stay informed.
4. How do you gauge recall of your creative ads or in-stadium displays and activities? More importantly, how do you assess whether your brand was correctly linked to your ads and activities?
When it comes to consumer products, there are easier ways to measure in-stadium displays and activities. The direct proportion of website visits, the surge in app downloads, or the customer engagements across social channels is a keen indicator of how the brand is perceived. In-stadium displays also prove to be noisy, considering the number of brands that are being flashed at viewers. So in a B2B setting, more intimate activities have proven effective. For example, you can witness several companies rent out boxes at stadiums to invite their marquee customers, make an event out of the sporting activity and transform it into a customer day. These are more informal settings, but have a greater impact on customer recall, especially in IT services where there is a long time to close for sales.
5. Which is your favorite book and why?
There are quite a few books that I go back to every now and then. Zero to One by Peter Thiel is one that constantly inspires. I revisit This is Marketing by Seth Godin and Hooked by Nir Eyal almost once a year. The books offer keen insights into customers and what makes them stick. Going back to them frequently serves as a refresher and also provides a fresh perspective into how we conduct our day-to-day business.
6. What is your greatest life lesson so far and a piece of advice that you would like to share with future marketers?
Never stop hustling. It's a mantra we have to live by because marketing is dynamic and changing each day. There are books, videos, blogs, and tons of content that can provide the foundations of marketing, but one cannot be a marketer by absorbing the theory alone. The hustle mentality keeps you thinking and adapting to newer technologies, trends, tools, and other ways of interacting with customers.
(All views expressed in the blog are solely the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities.)
Brief Bio:
Over 16 years of experience in IT Industry and 14 years of experience in core marketing in IT Product and services segment across Digital marketing, Customer based marketing, Martech and Marketing Automation. With significant experience in global high–growth environments, working with distributed teams and aggressive targets. Experienced campaigner in end-to-end marketing cycles involving industry-specific marketing, gap analysis, prospect identification and engagement, CRM, web marketing, and customer engagement.
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