In conversation with Nina Arundel, Director, Head of Marketing and Business Development, RSM UK
Marketing moves on: marrying digital with traditional
Nina Arundel is Head of Marketing, Business Development and Client Experience. Bringing together multiple teams, Nina specialises in creating a holistic approach to sales and marketing to harness the right expertise at the right time.
In what ways have you seen marketing and sales change over the last two years?
In professional services, marketing is evolving. It has typically been approached in quite a traditional way and can be relatively slow moving. Reaching out to prospects via email, networking at events and building relationships through third parties means it can take a while to generate leads and convert them into clients. This is especially true in an industry like ours, which relies heavily on built-up trust. But now, that is all starting to change.
The pandemic forced us to accelerate and embrace digital ways of networking and to make them a success. We immediately started hosting our events virtually, so that we could continue supporting prospects and clients with the expertise they needed to help them navigate the ever-changing situation. We also began to focus a lot more of our efforts on digital demand generation – targeting prospects at the research stage, before they would typically engage in any discussions with us.
Moving to digital relationship building has been eye opening. We’ve become more agile and targeted in the way we demonstrate our expertise to the right people as well as in the way we provide our services.
How have you adapted your channels to be where your clients are?
Embracing digital marketing has enabled us to be more visible, not just in terms of getting our brand out there but also in bringing our experts to the forefront as thought leaders. The emphasis on selling the expertise of our teams and our ability to create a seamless experience across teams for all our clients means everyone across the business is involved in the sales process. That is also why we bring our experts into the sales journey early on, so that clients start building a relationship with the people they will be working with from the outset.
Digital marketing is often seen as more distant. However, we find that our virtual activity enables us to actually build more human connections. Our experts are the focus, just as they would be in person, but we’re able to get them seen and heard by many more people. For me, creating a balance between traditional and digital marketing is about using new platforms but doing so in a way that keeps humans at the centre of the connection.
What has your change in tactic taught you?
Perhaps the biggest realisation was that switching to virtual webinars enabled us to be a lot more niche. In-person events typically require inviting an audience to attend a specific location to discuss a broad topic that has been chosen in order to resonate with as many attendees as possible, which can sometimes limit the value. Now, via virtual means, we can hold national events on niche subjects because we can reach more people. For example, where we might have previously held a seminar in Birmingham for manufacturers, we can now host a national webinar on drinks manufacturing specifically to really get under the skin of that topic.
Crucially, that doesn’t mean we are turning our backs on our regional focus. We are still creating content and hosting events regionally, by homing in on an issue or a topic that is relevant for that particular region and enabling more localised discussion and application. I believe that relevance is about more than ensuring that content has significance for people, because it can also show how our experts really understand the challenges and opportunities businesses are facing right now.
In what ways is data influencing your strategy?
Now that we have the infrastructure to be more digital-led with our relationship building, we can tap into the enhanced data this offers to make our approach more targeted. This is something I’ve been trying to build into our marketing strategy for a while, and it is proving to be invaluable.
We are able to learn more about which outreach is working, which activities are creating the most conversions and the topics that prospects and clients are responding to right now. Some of these findings have been surprising. So, I would encourage every business to tap into marketing data and insights to be more experimental. As long as you can learn from it, you can try something new and hopefully push business development to its next chapter. I use all learnings to make more confident decisions, because I know what will work.
What is the one key takeaway you have learned from building relationships digitally?
While the pandemic forced us to quickly change tack, we’ve always remained true to our roots of being considered and strategic. Rather than adopting new tools and platforms to be online and present, we’ve selectively chosen those that enable us to meet our clients where they are. This approach is central to our business. We are selling expertise, so our marketing needs to be smart and calculated. The last thing I would want is to bombard people with information when what they really want are fewer but better insights that can actually help them transform their businesses for the better.
An important lesson has been that changing tactic or altering a strategy requires a complete mindset shift. In a professional services firm where everyone has their own area of expertise and idea of what works best for clients, it can be difficult to make change a success. So, my advice would be to focus on evolving the internal mindset first. Doing so means that everyone evolves at the same pace, creating a more consistent sales and marketing journey.
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