“If digital is king, content is queen.”– Cory Kazar
Cory Kazar is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at DefinedLogic. In the past few years Cory has been responsible for starting and growing a sales program for professional service firms. He has great knowledge of the sales tools to use for specific situations, as well as how to track and record analytical data to help improve your pipeline. In addition to this, Cory knows how to integrate these tools, along with social and marketing efforts, to effectively run a successful business development team.
In case you didn’t know, digital is king in 2019. Amazon has changed the game – they are a pure digital play ruling the world. This is forcing the leaders in every industry/vertical to rethink how they do things. The companies that are digitally focused are ruling the game, so how do you start to transition your business to digital?
Look at it one step at a time. Start with your brand. Know who you are and who your customers are. You are going to need to create a road map to make a full digital transformation make sense. Focus on how to make customer experience simpler and easier throughout the entire process.
What is the timeline for this process?
It really depends on the size of the company and how complex the company is. But the true answer is that it should never end. Technology is constantly changing, so your brand needs to constantly be evolving by having a road map for the future. What was good two years ago is no longer applicable today.
What is the ideal customer profile and how do you define it?
Define buyer and user personas by really getting to know who they are and why they purchase your product. How do they act at home versus at work? B2B prospects are just as complex as B2C prospects in terms of marketing to them where they stand. A better way to think of it is H2H, or Human-to-Human. There are no boundaries now. Work-related products and services can be marketed to individuals at home.
Find out how much time they are spending on each of these digital platforms and the devices from which they are searching.
Once you understand that, then you can target effectively. The experience is different across all social media platforms and you have to play to their strengths. Of all the platforms, Facebook has the most data available. The data is immense and therefore it is the most powerful tool for small businesses with limited budgets.
How do you address all the data & analytics?
The data can definitely be an overload even though they are trying to make it as easy to read as possible. The best advice is to get a third party to review it all. You need a fresh set of eyes to think outside the box and view it in a different light than being “in” the business.
How do you approach e-mail marketing?
It is hard. With cold outreach, you dance a fine line between spam and positive outreach. We like to break down contact lists into small buckets based on buyer persona. We then use e-mail to create conversations.
Case Study: Monmouth University
The digital experience is going to be a big focus for universities going forward, especially in the way they deliver their education. We worked with Monmouth University specifically on this. The education industry is fighting for students to come to their doors. As we started to understand what Monmouth is looking for and what the students are looking for, we found that students are starting to look at colleges at 15 years old. So you need to figure out how to market to a 15 year old student while at the same time marketing to the students’ parents. The way to market to these two different personas is completely different.
How do information technology & marketing work together?
There used to be a lot of push back from IT on marketing. Now we are seeing the walls break down and true conversations happening. If IT & marketing are aligned, the business will be able to accomplish its goals on both sides and be able to prosper and grow. But everyone in the chain needs to be brought in because this is going to affect the entire company and take time.
