An agenda for audience-led marketing

As B2B marketers we all want to understand our customers better and be more responsive when it comes to how we engage with them. But are we ready to make the changes that being genuinely audience-led requires of us?

This is a question that we started asking ourselves at Symantec a few years ago – and the answer has involved reinventing much of how our marketing function operates. We’ve joined up different channels and sources of insight, but we’ve also built much broader collaboration outside the walls of the marketing department itself. Marketing has become too big a deal to be left solely to marketers – and if we are to build genuinely audience-led strategies, we need to focus as much on empowering other teams to talk to our audiences as on doing so ourselves.

Over my time at Symantec there are four changes that I’ve seen make a huge difference to our capacity for audience-led marketing. They’ve involved fairly fundamental changes to the way that we work – but they’ve helped to deliver a more responsive, real-time enabled, and more ROI-focused business in return:

The biggest change that we’ve made in the structure of our marketing organisation has been joining up social with our other paid and earned media teams. Bringing these marketing functions together means that we now use the data and insights that we gain from social to inform our display advertising, for example. We’re building more of a content component into display, and we’re better able to amplify the approaches that succeed in the social space.

One of the great advantages of distributing content on social media is the wealth of usable data that it generates. We’ve taken steps to integrate this with our overall audience segmentation, adding to our existing buyer personas with layers of data around how each segment responds to different forms of content. It’s helped to create much richer, social personas that add depth to our segmentation and help us to be more granular and tailored in our approach.

One of the biggest challenges that we’ve faced as a B2B marketing team was handling the announcement that Symantec would be split into two companies. It was impossible to predict precisely how our different audiences would react to this news – and so we planned a real-time response, using our global social media listening team to monitor the conversations that people were having. We pre-planned a range of potential responses and we developed a scoring system to help us make real-time decisions about which blogs and content to publish. However, we also recognised that there’s a limit to how far pre-planning can take you on such occasions. We were very aware that we may need to change tack based on the response we received – and so we had the right teams and skills in place to develop new content in real-time if necessary. Knowing when to apply a real-time approach to the conversation helps a company like Symantec to increase our brand relevancy and in this case, to turn a potential negative into a positive.

I’ve always believed that marketing shouldn’t be confined to the marketing department. When you’re seeking to be more audience-led in your approach, it’s important to take in insights from all of the people engaging with customers on a daily basis, often face-to-face. This is why it’s hugely important to integrate social selling with marketing strategy. And it’s why we’ve put a focus on empowering sales to create and distribute content on our behalf. It’s not just sales that marketing departments need to build closer links with, though. We’re working with other centres of excellence such as technical support and HR, to build up a common view of the customer journey. Sharing insights with these teams, and equipping them with marketing tools, helps to make us more agile, more collaborative, and ultimately more audience-led.