 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston and I'd like to welcome you to today's Webinar Express focusing your marketing strategy on recovery and growth, which has been organized by CIM Wales. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate in the Q&A session. The presentation will last approximately 30 to 35 minutes followed by a short 10 to 15 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the questions box in your control panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen, if watching on a laptop or on the bottom if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If your question is for a specific member of our panel, then can you please add their name either Jade Georgina or Samir when you type into the question box. If you look at the handout section, you'll find a copy of the presentation slides, which you can download along with a list of additional reading resources to complement today's presentation. The webinar has been recorded and we'll share the link to the recording with you over the next few days. And if you want to share your thoughts on social media, we're using the hashtag CIM events. And finally, you'll be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which would love you to complete. You'll only take a few minutes and also their responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. Okay, so I'd now like to hand over to our panel of guest speakers, Jade Tambini, Georgina Lundin and Samir Rahman. Take it away Jade. Hello everybody, I'm Jade Tambini. I'm a strategic marketing consultant and I run a company called Tambini Marketing. Thanks for listening to us today. It's safe to say that most companies have had a very challenging past year, so we wanted this event to be focused around how you can gear your businesses up for recovery and growth in the context of your marketing activity. Given that we have just 10 minutes each of our sections, I wanted to keep mine really focused around the importance of brand positioning in order to strengthen your brand and also just a very briefly look at a very top level at the role brand building can play within your wider marketing strategy. So the first point to make is that for those of you who are new to brand positioning, brand building work, depending on how junior or senior you are in your career, the simplest way I could describe great brand positioning is that it's about clearly articulating to your target audience. Here's why you should buy from us, not the other options available. Now there's so much talk in marketing about and very importantly, what channels did we use? Where should we be advertising? How do we get in front of our target audience? What should our strategy be to reach these people? How are we analyzing and assessing the data that we receive? Now that's absolutely spot on, but actually what we really want to be doing is also looking at, well, when we're in front of them, how will we stand in apart from the others? And are we making a clear business case as to why buy from us, not the others. So I just wanted to share one of my absolute favorite examples of fantastic brand positioning, an advert from Kingfisher, clearly not this year's advert a little while ago. But yeah, one of the most clever ads I've seen, which of these three kids is wearing FisherPrice anti-slip roller skates? There's a reason, a few reasons why it's clever. FisherPrice had clarity about their target audience, parents, they're not actually selling skates to kids, they're selling them to parents, they had insight into what they worry about, which is safety of their child. Not only did they create a clear position for themselves in the market, we sell safe skates, but they also repositioned other skates as unsafe in quite a clever way. They essentially said, if you don't buy our skates, if you buy somebody else's, it's your fault, you're putting your kids at risk. Now, I'm not saying we should all go out to our market and say it's unsafe to buy from others, but actually we can get across that sort of sentiment in our marketing. So they'd found their positioning sweet spot. Now, very quickly, something for you to look at, if this is something that you've not already done, in order to hit your brand positioning sweet spot, we really need to look at three key things. Your target audience, what makes them tick, what are their pain points, what problems they face and that your brand can solve? Then what are your competitors' strengths and weaknesses? We can really understand where they're placing themselves and also in comparison to your own. And lastly, looking at your own brand strengths. So looking at, okay, here's the customer's problems, here's their needs, and here's directly how we work to solve those problems. So we remove in ourself from getting too dug deep into our product and service, pulling ourselves up to, okay, how do we meet these customers' needs? What a lot of companies do is they forget about looking at competitors. They purely look at what customers want and what they sell, and they forget to position themselves against the other options available. So I would really urge you to have a look at your branding and really ask yourselves a question in your messaging, maybe in your website, in your social, in your campaigns. Are we making a clear case for why you should buy from us, not them? I'm not actually sure who this person is, but I quite like the quote. Just this will relate to a lot of people if they're working in B2B. In B2C, it's off, it can be a little bit easier to find those widgets, gadgets, product differentiators, service differentiators. But in B2B, sometimes we can find that, what is it that makes us different? Now, if you find that your offering is very alike to your competitors, a good brand strategy can differentiate you anyway. So it's really about articulating in what ways you make your customer's life easier over and above the other options. So again, this is applicable even if all of the offerings appear to be the same, we can still find ways to set ourselves apart. So if you research B2B brand positioning and look a little bit more detail into that, that's a really interesting point. I've worked with a lot of companies who their offering was literally the same and they also had competitors who were quite strong in the areas they were, but actually being able to articulate that very clearly throughout their marketing message and journey, they were still able to set apart because they were simply communicating it better than the others were. Former CEO of Disney talks about, so I really want to briefly touch upon the role of the brand building journey as well. So once you've got your brand positioning in order, what do we do with it then? So absolutely it needs to be linked to a broader marketing strategy. Michael here talks about a brand being the product of a thousand small gestures. Now, this is where marketers often stumble with asking for investment in brand building activities is, well, what's the return? Brand building can be a very long process. We're not, we're complex beings. We have many pain points we need to overcome. And actually without brand building and constantly reiterating, repeating, getting our message in front of that audience, highlighting why we're better options, highlighting what we can do to solve their problem across many different gestures in line with their bio journey. That's how we can have a really fantastic brand strategy. So just a few stats here from a company called Paragraph LLC who did some research, actually strong brands of, you know, when we need to learn to talk the language of our finance directors and really be able to engage with them on making a business case for brand strategy. So brands with strong reputations offer 31% higher shareholder return. Those brands that have more engaged employees who can help their company grow profits three times faster than competitors. Now what that means is if you've got a brand promise that you're putting out to your clients and you've gotten your employees engaged with that promise, not on a, not on a level of just simply telling them your brand values, but actually here are the behaviors that we adopt in order to meet the promise we're making to our customers. Here's how we need to meet that promise. If they're truly bought into that and they are directly engaging with, with customers in a way that meets their needs, then this is what it's saying is that profits can grow three times faster than competitors. And it's not just B to C. So in B to B, the top 10 brands with the best customer connections had a 31% greater revenue growth over three years compared to the 10 lowest brands. So I hope that so far I've made a bit of a case for the importance of brand positioning. One of the things that I see very often with companies is that the focus is too much on channel strategy and advertising strategy. And I think that's just a symptom of how, how scientific marketing has become, which is no bad thing. I absolutely endorse support. What we also need to look at is if we've been pressured by our finance teams as to what return on investment we're getting on our marketing, that it isn't only about channel return and what return we're getting directly from each source, but actually analyzing or behind the data, which is absolutely crucial, what behaviors, what's happening, what attitudes are we helping to change. So the messaging and the branding is absolutely imperative to underpin that channel and advertising strategy. Otherwise we're literally just mechanics and looking at the science behind it rather than the actual human at the end of our communications. So just to leave you with a few tips in terms of what I would say to focus on in relation to recovery and growth for your brand is first look at developing your brand positioning, look at developing a brand narrative, which clearly articulates your point of difference and also looking into creative execution. So what imagery, what messaging, how will this look, what would be our, I guess, essential ad bringing this together. Define your promise and your culture. So what are we promising to our customer in a really realistic way? So rather than being too fluffy, it's about here's what we actually deliver for our customers and here's how everybody in the company can get on board with this and here's our culture and here's how we do things. Project your personas is another great piece of advice. So asking your clients directly, what is it that you care about, what problems you have for us to solve and then project that out into your marketing message and answer directly the question, you have this problem, you're frustrated with this and here's how we can help you. Ensure consistency of message, don't be afraid to repeat a recycle repurpose. Often I see companies scared to say the same thing again, often sick scared to tweet the same thing twice, but actually once you've got a strong set of brand messaging, we need to repeat recycle repurpose. Design and content pieces, get them sorted in line with the buyer journey, what's relevant at each stage of that buyer journey? How can we craft in the messages? What do our consumers want to consume during their journey? Help and sell. So people often say help, don't sell. Yes, help at the start and then sell at the end, get directly into the nitty gritty. And then lastly, learning to talk that finance language so that when you're challenged about marketing by your board and rightly so and your finance directors, you know how to speak that lingo. So just a closing sort and I'm going to pass over to Georgina Lewington then of Glue Marketing and she's going to be talking about setting marketing budgets, looking at objectives and really getting into the more the crux of a strategy. Just to set the scene for that, there was a passage written in the Harvard Business Review in 2009, obviously another challenging time, saying in recessions, consumers set strict priorities and reduce their spending. As sales drop, businesses cut costs, reduced prices and postponed investments, marketing expenditures are slashed across the board, but indiscriminate cost cutting is a mistake. Although it's wise to contain costs, failing to support brands can harm performers over the long term. Companies that take a scalpel rather than a cleaver to the marketing budget and adjust their strategies in response to customer needs are more likely to flourish both during and after a recession. So absolutely infesting in brand building, getting the strategy absolutely spot on and focusing on what recovery and growth is needed will be the way forward. So thank you and I'm going to hand over to Georgina Lewington now of Glue Marketing. Thanks for listening to me. Thanks Jade. So yeah, I'm Georgina and I run Glue Marketing, helping businesses develop and implement strategic marketing plans which connect their marketing activities with business goals. And I want to talk to you today about some simple models that I've been using recently to help my clients, which I hope you'll be able to apply to your own businesses, to focus your marketing strategy over the next few months. Tom Fishburne, the marketer, shared this cartoon right at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the first lockdown. And I absolutely love his work, but I think this is one that a lot of us can relate to at the moment. And as Jade's already referenced, in crises, marketing budgets are often one of the first things to get slashed. But with the continued uncertainty and reduced resources, it's really difficult for us to know where we should be prioritising at the moment. One of the most useful tools I found recently is the Boston Matrix, which those of you who are familiar with it will know that the principle is that you should have a balance of services at any one time, some which require a little investment and some which require more significant investment in order to secure your business success. And in this example, taken from a recent client workshop I carried out, we identified Service A as the main cash cow. It was a longstanding service, providing a reliable return, despite having low growth, relatively. Service B was a slightly newer product and newer service. It was growing faster than Service A and delivering a good return. But Service C was the dog here. It was the one that was delivering a relatively low return for the amount of time the client was having to spend servicing the clients. So we identified Service D as a potential new service that would appeal to a segment of the audience that the client had grown over the past year from switching from offline events to online events. And what's really useful about this model is that it maps onto the product lifecycle, making it easier to rationalise the spending and how you budget, how you split your budget. So in this instance, it was clear that we needed to continue investing in Service A to drive those profits, take some of the investment away from Service C so that we could free up funds then to channel into Service B for more growth, but also to research the potential of that Service D. And we could take that risk in knowing that we had a balanced portfolio. It's important to note, obviously, this model is only a snapshot of the current situation. It doesn't take into account things like market attractiveness, other external market factors, which you should also consider. It's helpful in terms of making decisions about what to prioritise and how to split the budget. But of course, first you need to decide what your overarching budget is going to be if it hasn't been set for you. And while it's understandable and often it's been unavoidable over the last year that we've had to have budget cuts, it's now, there's definitely a sense now that this is the time to start investing again for recovery. So if you're looking to scale up aggressively or you're just starting out, then as a general guide around 12 to 20% of the projected revenue is what we would recommend. If you're more established, you probably have a good client base already, you've got some of your processes set up, then you should really aim between five to eight percent of your turnover. Although the recent CMO survey, the most recent one, it was around 10 to 11% for B2B. But of course, the most accurate method, the best method is the objective and task method, where you base your budget on what you need to do to achieve your objectives. So in terms of defining those objectives, it's really, really important to cascade them down from your business goals. And you need to do this first in order to know what it is you need to focus on, which tactics you need to invest in. So say for example, you want to achieve 100,000 in the next financial year, you've identified through product portfolio analysis that around 30k of that needs to come from new business, that becomes your marketing objective. The sales objective then is to sign up 10 new clients, assuming that an average client is worth around 3,000. And then your communications targets are based on how many inquiries you think you'll need, whether that's based on past experience, or you know, you're going for that sort of assumption to achieve that conversion rates, and also how many you need to generate awareness among. Once you've decided this, it's much easier to make decisions about the volume of activity you need and the type of activity you need, because obviously different, if you've got 10 people that you need to sign up, or 100 people, they're going to need different tactics depending on the resource levels. So understanding your target market is what will help you refine that marketing mix further. And you know, while we don't know what the long term impact is going to be on customer behaviors and feelings and values, there are definite shifts in the last 12 months which are likely to stick with us. And certainly, for the next next year, expect at least our client's engagement touch points are going to be significantly different to what they've been in the past. And while some businesses are happy working on an intuitive understanding of their target markets, it's which is fine when you're small, and when you're working in close proximity. It's much more difficult to develop that shared understanding of what your customer needs. When you're working remotely, and you've got a larger number of employees, a much more dynamic way to approach segmentation during pandemic situation is needs based segmentation. So this is an example from another client project that I carried out recently. It was really difficult to identify any meaningful differences between gender, age, business sector in relation to their client base, their target audience base. And so we were able to identify instead three distinctive sets of needs that the business could service to make those identifiable. And we were then able to go back in and sort of draw on some of that thermographic data and some of those demographics to build out customer personas. But by starting with needs, it gave us a really good opportunity to shape the product around specific groups of needs. It also meant that we were able to make recommendations based on messaging like better targeted messaging and the balance of messaging depending on the size of those segments. So you can also use that needs based analysis. If you're carrying out an internal communications campaign and you want to understand how to reach employees, it can be really useful to use it to look at colleagues needs. Or conversely, if you want to look at your client base as it stands now and look at a better engagement strategy, you can also use that model to break those down. Once you've developed a good understanding of your target audiences, it's much easier to see which mix of tactics are going to be the most efficient. So if we go back to that marketing objective to achieve 30K from new business, this funnel shows which tactics we've chosen to employ at each stage to move buyers through the journey. And it summarizes those objectives at each stage. And it's a simple but really effective way to visualize the overarching marketing plan and keep track of those core KPIs. And then using the objectives, you can identify and assign a simple value to each new prospect and lead. So if you need a 10 inquiries for each new conversion, as in this example, the value of each lead would be £300. Subsequently, the value of each prospect to each to generate those leads would be around £60. So this isn't an exact science. Obviously, there's lots of hidden costs like consultancy, design, software and so on. But it can be really helpful to have a bullpup figure against each of these levels to justify the investment at each stage. And it's also helpful, I found, for clients to see the value of each team member's contribution. So, you know, when people are going out and having conversations with potential clients, it's difficult for them to see the value of that. But actually, when they break it down like this and show the value of those conversations as a whole, it can be really powerful in pulling the whole team together. You can also assign a value here to a loyal client. So just to demonstrate the importance of retention tactics. So while the objective here is 30K within a year, actually within three years, if you retain 80% of those clients, it's going to be worth £78,000. And that can be really powerful in showing the benefits of investing in retention strategies. By breaking things down this way, you can also monitor, you know, which areas are going to need more investment. So if you're getting really good conversion rates, but you're just not getting the reach you need to generate enough leads, then perhaps you need to realign the budget to put more into a paper clip or advertising campaign. So it can be really helpful in terms of monitoring how you split the budget across tactics as well. But ultimately, by laying it out with financial terms, you're able to make a more persuasive business case to increase your marketing budget. Or at the very least, you can convince those holding the purse strings that instead of needing revenue for marketing, they actually need marketing for revenue. So I'm very pleased now to be able to hand over to Sameer, who's going to talk to you some more about data analytics. Thanks, Georgie. Hi, everybody. I am Sameer Rahman. I am one of the directors of the Royal Mint. I'm the director of Insight, have been a board member for the CIM Wales. Previously worked with quite a few CIM people and currently a fellow of the CIM. Very gladly, I want to continue where Georgie has left off in terms of the segmentation work. So I want all of us as marketers to basically stand above and beyond the business leadership because we see marketing in a very tactical way most of the time. And understandably, so marketing has got a role to play at every level. But I'll show you some of the examples today and give you some of the tips, essentially, for all of us to think how marketing can develop new businesses. So just look at this slide in terms of just an example of some companies, all household names, some of them recently cropped up. And I work in the data space and I look at different data sets day in and day out with people, some people understanding data is important, some people doing a lip service to it, but not really understanding how important data has become for marketers. So let's pick one example. Let's pick Uber, which is number eight in this slide. And I've done data source. What do I mean by that? So how can marketers develop a business? So Uber, think of Uber as a business, we might have all used Uber at some point in our lives. Uber's business model is based on one data set, which we all use, which is Google Maps. If you take that one data set away, Uber would not exist as a company in its current form in the business model that it currently is. And the funny thing is that that data is not even owned by Uber. So Uber is basically a multi-billion business based on one data set owned by Google and data that we provide to Google. So this is what I'm trying to distill today in my presentation, a sense of realization of how important data sets are. Data sets don't just improve marketing performance at a tactical level. Data sets help new products, new businesses, new products, product lines. And there are numerous examples which we can share. For SMEs and for B2B businesses and smaller businesses, data can be scary, saying, no, all those stocks of big data scare me. I don't have the capacity. I don't have the skills. I don't have the technology infrastructure. Basically, I would rubbish all that. And I would say small data rather than the big data is much more important. It's a quality of small data. I mean, one of my friends always says it's a governed small data puddle, which is more important than a data swamp. So there are loads of free data sources. I mean, have a look at your leisure on data.gov.uk or Office of National Statistics. To tell you what, under this very stressful COVID situation, the country strategy has been led by these free data sources. So we don't have to pay a lot. We don't have to access go helter skelter to access a lot of data. Most of the stuff that Georgie was mentioning in her segmentation, things like behavior and attitudes and disposable income and retail indexes and all of that, all of that data set is available. And no matter which company we work in for the Royal Mint, for example, when I joined the Royal Mint, we did not use any of these data sources. Now all of these data sources are used to write from price setting to to forecasting, to business planning and everything. So just go away after this this session and have a look at some of these data sources which can come in useful. And obviously, we are here to help if you need any more further advice on which ones are more suitable for your business. So again, continuing from where Georgie left off. And this is where marketers really come to the fore. And this is where we as marketers should really be justing coming up and say, we are the ones who can identify business opportunities. So let's take an opportunity with companies like which offer buy now pay later services like Clona. You might have used them before. They've got a coverage of thousands and thousands of retailers. There are competitors like clear pay and lay by, for example, M&S. If you buy an M&S, you'll have clear pay on that. So it was, I mean, the inflection point is quite important for from a data perspective. So when I cited the example of Uber, Clona has got a very clear storyline. And if you think about it, quite a simple storyline, actually. So basically, the market trend is was credit is becoming difficult. And this is probably a year or two years has been becoming difficult ever since the 2007 financial crash anyway, but credit has been becoming difficult. But as consumer, the trends, if you see in the surveys and regularly published government surveys, it's consumers are still wanting to buy stuff. The retail price index pre COVID was not going down. So while credit was squeezing consumers will still open to buying stuff. And I said internal trends, obviously, all of us work in a different company, but internal trends, certainly from from the company that I was working in was suggesting consumers just want to buy more, they don't have access to money. And we see this in the Royal Mint day in and day out, they want to buy more of our products that just don't have the money. And they just don't have, they don't have the money, and they don't want to pay interest on the money that they borrow. So obviously, that opens up a huge market gap. The market gap is a provider which which comes in offers free credit for small amounts and offers great instantly. So this is how the data inflection point works. You start off with the market data, you look at consumer data, you look at internal data, and then you create a market gap. That's a story. And that's the market gap you exploit as a business. So all I was, I was saying, while Georgie and Jade complimented on how marketers can use brand and segmentation, I am raising us as marketers above that and say, we need to build new businesses. We need to think about marketing, building businesses and products. So that's that part. The other part is quite tactical. So coming up to again, Georgie's point and some stuff that Jade was mentioning around finance language. This is more around how do we measure and what do we link to business outcomes? So KPIs. So again, I mean, we'll pass on these slides to you. But as Georgie was mentioning, all the KPIs and how do we measure the success of marketing has to be linked to business goals, has to be understandable, has to be useful. I'll present some key examples. So the two triangles that you see currently most organizations and I can say certainly majority of which I have worked in the past, measure on the current on the left triangle, while the others, the ambition should be on the right. What's the difference between the two? On the left one, you have a lot of campaign measurements. How has my email performed? How has my social performed? And you have an executive dashboard saying, what is my total profitability and review? There is no connection between your executive dashboard and your campaign performance. So how do I illustrate what I mean? So this is the brand. So Jade talked about brand positioning. How will you measure the brand? And as you go above that pyramid, you go from what I call vanity to sanity. So in the bottom, you've got how many people saw my ad, which is the awareness and reach, which marketers are very good at. So they will always have reach and frequency and things like that. Then you've got influence and engagement. Did the brand actually change people's mindset? Which is a psychographic stuff that Georgie was talking about. And we measure that as a survey and things like that. And then if you go up, then that's the real crux of what finance directors will ask us. How many people, what did people actually do after seeing my ad? Did you change behavior? And that is where the vanity, the sanity, the vanity takes converts into sanity. So this is how we should measure it. We should measure the reach and frequency. Normally marketers will present a report with reach and frequency only. What I am recommending is we present a brand whenever we're measuring a brand or any other report for that matter. We present the reach and frequency. We present the survey in terms of the awareness and the mindset change. And then we'll link that back to how many people landed on the website and what did they actually do. So again, like the free stuff, I mean, this is not a session about CRM. The reason I put in CRM is most of the CRM tools, the free version of them, give you this facility to have that this sort of reporting setup. Hence, a lateral advantage of using free CRM tools is not just lead and contact management, but also to develop this kind of reporting. So you can sign up to these, any of these tools where they've got limited capabilities in terms of free version, but they do give you good reporting on their free version. And that will help you achieve that sort of brand pyramid or reporting pyramid that I suggested. Obviously, time is limited. There's lots of stuff that, that we free tools and tips and tools that we can give you in terms of how to measure and how to make advantage of your data. But you've got my contact details and everybody's contact details and we can, we can share a lot of other stuff with you later on. At this point, I'll pass it back to the CRM events team for questions and follow-up session. Okay, that's great everyone. Many thanks for your insights. If you'd like to connect with Jade, Georgina or Sumir, you'll see their Twitter and LinkedIn contact details on screen. And if you're enjoying today's webinar, remember you can use the hashtag CRM events on social platforms. Okay, so now we're going to have a short 10 to 15 minutes Q&A session. And as a reminder, you can still submit any questions in the question box on your control panel. If your question is for a specific member of the panel, please include their name. Okay, our first question is for Jade. Jade, what can brands do to combat negative publicity caused by a couple of high-profile incidents from years ago that continue to be raised by haters online? It sounds like this is coming from the heart of this question. Nice easy one to kick us off then. I think, I don't know the details of this example, but I think SEO strategy has got a massive role to play with this sort of thing. So if we've got long-standing negative brand association or anything that's taken place, I think it's about building a really good future fit PR strategy that looks at what do we want to be known for and how can we essentially move the perception away from this negative attention we had? And that goes further than marketing's role as much as I believe marketing is throughout the whole business. That's actually looking at well, why did this come about? Have we changed as a result of it? And what can we do in our PR strategy and our communications to make sure that we're not only combating the negative associations, but we're replacing them with the truth of our business? I always believe as well in apologising where something has gone wrong. A lot of companies can get that wrong where they're not actually apologising, such as we're sorry that people felt this way. Actually, if something's gone wrong, we went wrong and here is what we're doing to change that. If your challenges that say, for example, your Google listings are showing quite negative PR from years ago, really would highlight talking to an SEO specialist and looking at how you can produce fresh content that can override over time that negative associations. But overall, I would say the biggest thing to look at is, is there a fundamental issue within the business that hasn't changed since that nasty PR experience? I wish you the best of luck, because that is a really tricky one for a marketer to combat and getting the buy-in from the board and the rest of the business on that and getting some very good external partners to help you. Good PR companies will be able to tackle this type of thing. So, yeah, hope that answers the question. Okay. Thank you, Jade. A question for Georgina this time. I think it's specific to one of your slides, actually, Georgie. Does your budget include fixed costs and therefore staff? Or is it purely variable spend on activities? Yeah, it's a tricky one. It wouldn't be the core fixed costs. I would only suggest it if you get to include staffing costs, if you're going to be outsourcing for particular marketing-related services. But sometimes there are some costs that need to be split across the marketing budget and other like HR and so on. So, it depends on the situation, really, and whether it's specifically for a campaign or, or not, I would say, I probably need a bit more information to answer that. Okay. Sameer, which is more important, quantity or quality of data? Quality, as I said, small data, well-governed, high quality data is much more important. It requires a lot of capability. It doesn't require a lot of cost to churn that data into data into insights. So, quality to me is always more important. Small data is always more important than big data. Okay. Thanks, Sameer. I think I've got another question for you here. In these uncertain times, do you think that long-term marketing strategies are a thing of the past? Should we ever think again of three-year or whatever strategies? I think the keyword is adapt. I mean, as everything, I mean, if you have got your pulse on the data and the market and all the data inflection point that I mentioned, if you look at those trends, then that is what we as a country are doing day in and day out. We can see that from the COVID strategy. There is no long-term strategy. It's a plan to adapt constantly based on changing consumer needs, based on changing market needs, and in a COVID scenario, based on changing scientific needs. So, there is no, I mean, long-term planning is not a thing of the past, but long-term fixed planning is a thing of the past. You have to adapt. You still have to plan long-term, but with a variability of adapting to every time the data and the position changes. Okay, thank you. Georgie, a question for you. I hear far too often our operations and service may be slower than normal during this COVID period. In this new marketing world, do you think companies are expecting to return to normal, or are marketers expected to propose new ways of working? Oh, that's a tricky one. I think there's certainly signs that the market is, marketers are looking forward optimistically, budgets have been increased for the year ahead. So, there's certainly some optimism, but I think in terms of ways of working, we're still going to be working remotely to a large extent, but at least the next year. So, I think there'll be some patterns of working that will continue beyond this flexibility, probably a balance between remote and office working. So, I think the best thing that marketers can do is really just keep track of what's happening right now and review it every few months, as Samir was saying as well, just to make sure that we're meeting those current working patterns at the time. I hope that answers the question. Okay, thank you. Jade, a question for you. How do you justify investment in marketing when the directors say operations are already too busy and have too much work? We don't need more leads. Well, that's a really interesting one that I hear quite a lot, and I had that as a similar challenge when I was running the marketing for a PLC, a big manufacturing company, and that is often based on the assumption that marketing is only about attracting sales leads. We had a similar situation where lots of leads were coming into the business, but there was then a bottleneck that we couldn't meet existing customer needs. So, marketing really adapted and shifted its focus to go in. How can we look at systems and processes to better serve existing customers? How can we make sure our feedback mechanisms are improving their experience with us? Ultimately, and the CIM's own definition, let me see if I can remember this from my time on the CIM board, is marketing is satisfying customer needs profitably. So, by having those conversations with that particular board about what is it this company needs to achieve? How do we make ourselves more profitable? How do we better meet our customers needs? And then aligning marketing activity with that, that will be the way to get success from marketing. But again, it is very much a myth that marketing is only about generating leads, and we're so often pressured into that box of how many leads do you get in that we think we're being successful when I learned firsthand in my junior role in a PLC that we have to really shift all focus away from just being focused on getting leads in. I hope that's useful. Sameer, a question for you is what techniques do you recommend to convert data into insights? It depends. I mean, that there's lots of dependencies in them. It depends on what the outcomes you're trying to drive. It can be, I mean, with a simple visualization, there are various simple tools like Power BI and Tableau and Looker and ThoughtSport. If you're looking to forecast, then there are different techniques called, I don't want to be overtaking here, but there are techniques like regression and things like that. So I think it's very much what outcomes you're looking to drive. If you're looking to predict, if you're looking to, again, predict an outcome, such as that outcome will happen or not happen. We've heard in the COVID scenario, we hear about techniques called R-Factor, which is basically the regression, which is how aligned R is, how likely it is for the next COVID infection to happen or not. And in business settings, we use the R-Factor as well. So that's a technique. Again, that's a technique called logistic regression, which is used to figure out the probability of something happening. So probability of your business going bust, probability of your product lines, we're having a great take-up and all that. So I think for the person who has asked that question, I can have a separate conversation as to what exactly the outcome they're trying to drive from the data, and I can give them a suggestion on the right technique. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Simi. I've got a question, not specific to any panelists, so feel free to chip in. So when you are looking to help new companies with their marketing and branding, where would you start? I'm happy to jump in and kick off. We're all on the same page, just because we work together a lot. We really want to start with what does the business need to achieve at a top level? Where is this business going? What's the vision? What is the mission? What are the business objectives? So really start in there and then building a strategy off the back of that. What I tend to find with our clients, with my clients, is that one of the easiest gaps to identify is often lack of coherent marketing strategy. So there may be a marketing strategy, but we find it's divorced from the business strategy, which is in the earlier example I gave about the marketing team being focused on leads, where the business is focused on meet some fulfilling customer needs. So we often find that to be the case and also lack of brand positioning. So not being able to clearly communicate as a brand, here is why us, not them. That tends to be the biggest one. And so that lack of brand positioning, then really looking into how do we then inject that creative interpretation of our brand positioning to make a difference. Exactly what Samir said about how do we change behaviors and make actions happen so that we're not just looking at reach and awareness metrics, just because someone saw you doesn't mean they did anything about it. And then absolutely moving into Georgina's, what Georgina covered about that pyramid of how to get from prospect to sale to retained clients. Okay, I don't know if Georgie or Samir wants to add anything to that. I think it's... I think it's really just getting at that overall picture as well of the marketing environment that the business is operating in. So as well as understanding what they want to achieve is understanding what are the conditions that they're operating in at the moment. And again, looking at competitors from a brand positioning perspective, but also just from understanding like the wider opportunities that are available. So there really is a lot to be done early on in really getting to grips with what the situation is, what the challenges are, but also what the opportunities are. Because there are often things that haven't been considered that the business can take advantage of and actually cut down the amount of time and money they're spending on marketing often. Because I think one of the biggest things I come across is that a business is trying to do too much because they think they need to be on all these channels and they need to be doing everything. And so by stripping it back and really understanding what it is they need to be doing and we can get them to a place where it doesn't seem so overwhelming. It's much more manageable and there's a clear road map for how to get where they are to achieve in those business goals. Okay, thank you. We're sort of running out of time slightly, but I'm just going to have one more question for the panel in general. So question for all is, any advice on how to overcome marketing burnout when your sector and sales has been dramatically impacted by the pandemic? So who would like to answer that first? I can go first. So again, marketing burnout, again, my main idea was, okay, what you need to redefine the function as in marketing. First, my first port of call is for most companies that I've worked in, marketing is seen, I mean, for the viewer who has asked this question, introspect what marketing was and marketing is and marketing could be. And that's a good way of starting. If your marketing is having a burnout, is that because the whole business sector, for example, you talk about retail and hospitality and travel and tourism, they're all having a burnout. So that is not because marketing is having a burnout, that is just symptomatic of the market having a burnout. But then even then, if that market is having a burnout, it will be marketing who will lead them out of that burnout. So it's clarifying the marketing's role for the future and for the present. And the role that it has to play to lead the sector out of the burnout is what marketing's role should be, rather than how can we use the budget for communication strategies. Those come after once you've redefined marketing's purpose. Yeah. And just to add to that, I would say that this is where the role of marketing becomes about shifting and evolving. And we've seen a lot of companies not shift and evolve to environmental factors completely fail. And so I don't know, the obvious one is Blockbuster, they didn't adapt. So they didn't survive. But actually really looking at how we can change proposition in line with a change in market, well, what is it that our business can do? What are the current needs? And how can we better meet that? So how do we shift our brand positioning? It could be that there's an entirely new offering we haven't thought of. And actually a lot of the companies I consult with, they were hit really hard by COVID. Some were better off, some remained the same and some were really hit to the point where offerings did not exist anymore. And they were then faced with a bit like what Georgie said with the diagram of the different services. Well, do we need to invent some new services? Do we need to enter new markets? What needs can we meet? So I think that highlights further Samir's point as well. Georgie, did you have anything to add to that? The only thing I'd add really to that is that I think marketers have a really important role to play in internal communications at the moment as well. So I think that if there's a case of pulling together as a team and getting focused on what's next, then I think internal comms, internal marketing is a good area to focus on at the moment. If there's less external that you can do, it's just about bringing it back and starting to develop some of those greater understandings of your clients so that as we progress through this and recovery comes, we'll be in a much better position then when the market opens up. So I think it's difficult to stay optimistic, but just taking that stock take now and spending time actually reviewing your customer personas or developing them if you haven't got any, and working with your team to build that shared understanding of your goals and vision is really going to help. I think that internal point is so important because if your customer's expectations and needs are shifting, a huge piece of work is about setting up your people to respond to those shifting needs because otherwise they can completely alienate. If they're doing things the way they were versus the way things need to be done in shifting conditions, I think that's such a good point. Yeah. Okay, great. It's really sad advice. Thank you. Okay, so unfortunately we've got you more time left for further questions. So thanks again, Jade, Georgina, and Samir, some great questions and some great answers there. So that's all the time we have for our session today. I'd like to say thank you to Georgie, to Jade and Samir for today's presentations, Sierra and Wales for organizing the event, and I thank you to you for attending. We do hope you found it interesting and worthwhile. Our next webinar, it's rest sharing Scotland's stories is on Tuesday, the 23rd of February, at 1 o'clock, hosted by CIM Scotland. You'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll be able to find out more information and to register for the session. Once again, you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we'd really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback. So on behalf of CIM, can I thank you again for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day.