The focus on SEO would be high in 2021; the keywords are being looked at more sharply in line with traffic patterns, aligned to specific geographies.
Anoop Karumathil Melethil, Associate Vice President – Marketing, Maveric Systems
For a large part of the year 2020, we had been sharply focused on promotion and outreach of our brand promise of Accelerate Next. While the original intended channel mix was spread across both physical and digital mediums, the pandemic pushed the majority of our initiatives in the digital direction.The results have been very promising with successful brand recall and brand promise reinforcement being achieved across key segments of our target customer community.
The singular focus on brand promotion and nurturing will continue in 2021 as well, with an aim of accentuating brand recall multifold. Crafting the brand promise and driving maximum value at every touchpoint requires discipline and a willingness to invest the resources required to embrace the challenge and rigor of working through the right marketing mix. Achieving this would hinge to a large extent on the ability to work with a larger ecosystem comprising of customers, employees, influencers and community to understand brand perception through surveys or audits, brand promise acceptance and course-correct based on the insights gained.
Data-led marketing campaigns
The role of marketing analytics in enhancing campaign effectiveness has always been known. It has grown in prominence over the last one year on account of an increased uptake of online channels. Over the course of 2021, we will enhance our focus on analysis of data from marketing programs and channels, use this to understand customer journeys, buying behavior, thereby creating personas and mapping them back to contextualize marketing assets for better effectiveness.
For instance, information on leads from campaigns will be cross-referenced with navigation patterns across web pages to understand how content can be more personalized. Heat maps across web pages will determine page performance and this information can aid page modifications as well as A/B testing before go-live of the page.
With increased rigor in compliance initiatives like GDPR/CCPA and enhanced usage of browser privacy technologies, there is also a strong need to be aware of the ongoing impact to MarTech stacks. As a technology brand, we need to stay on top of these changes and implement analytics initiatives without losing focus on data privacy. Moving towards an engagement mechanism purely based on subscriber preferences and acceptance would be ideal.
Account-based marketing
Our growth strategy is premised on sharply focusing on a specific set of customers, gaining deep insights on their challenges and driving multi-level stakeholder engagement for exponential impact. Getting this right has seen our investments repeatedly result in rock-solid relationships and an increasing collaboration in our customer’s transformation initiatives.
We will extend the same strategy to our marketing initiatives in 2021 through account-focused initiatives that integrate deep ongoing research, contextualization/personalization, behavioral analysis and high-velocity marketing campaign execution using the right channel mix.
Deployment of agile marketing principles for these initiatives will be highly instrumental in making faster course corrections based on intelligence derived from account teams. Ongoing analysis will also enable us to identify customer’s competitor and technology landscape while mapping and showcasing our capabilities and content, with an aim towards resolution of these challenges.
Content drives conversations
The content deluge and subsequent digital fatigue as an outcome of the pandemic has underlined the twin needs of building the trust element of the brand and repurposing content based on audience appetite. Leading surveys indicate that over50% of the respondents stick to the sources they know and trust. Buyers, on an average, consume 3-5 pieces of content before they reach out to suppliers. Given this, we will look at capitalizing our two decades of banking domain expertise to create powerful artifacts addressing customer challenges and banking technology landscape evolution.
Further, to garner better engagement and better conversion rates across the marketing funnel, we will be focusing on repurposing the content to make it easily consumable. Increasingly, we are seeing instances of a marketing initiative translating to multiple content assets, e.g., a webinar leading to video recordings, blogs, articles, whitepapers, even to the extent of the videos being refactored into independent modules that are easily consumable. Content marketing would also be strengthened by in-depth analysis of the type of content that customers are looking at and catering to the need through personalization based on audience reading patterns.
The focus on SEO would be high in 2021, the keywords are being looked at more sharply in line with traffic patterns, aligned to specific geographies. We shall also focus on increasing the element of interactivity in the overall content mix.
All In all, the focus on digital marketing initiatives will continue to gain prominence. We have been witnessing positive traction across all initiatives done through the digital channel. Interventions such as webinars, podcasts, digital events have seen increased success and we are looking at capitalizing these channels on an increased basis. On one hand,having hyper-focus on these channels and aligning to topics that are on top of mind for target audience are seeing increased engagement,and on the other, we are also seeing a maturity when it comes to managing such digital initiatives especially the virtual events and roundtables. The uptake of digital channels has increased on account of the pandemic and will continue to do so.
