CIM B2B Conference 2017

This time last week, Jonathan and I took the day out to attend the CIM B2B marketing conference at Norwich Cathedral. Wow, we couldn’t have had a nicer day to be in such beautiful surroundings, the sky was cerulean, the sun shone and the daffodils waved.

It’s the second time I’ve visited, it’s a great opportunity to get some perspective, some insight and to ‘breathe’ – as any small business owner will tell you, it can be really difficult to take a step away from the coalface, but boy, is it worth it when you do!

The event attracts marketers from businesses across the East of England and across the spectrum of industry sectors, with representatives from financial services, retail, business services, energy and creative.

We started the day with Joe Foggins, Head of B2B Marketing at Aviva who explained how they align their B2B campaign to their consumer campaign, having recognised the relationship between the two – essentially, we’re all human (most of us anyway!). Joe gave us 8 practical tips for better human-to-human marketing, marking the importance of great insights – at the outset, having a deep understanding of your audience to enable you to develop effective communications but equally, to measure performance and help to refine/adjust approaches to deliver the best outcomes (e.g. conversions/sales).

Darren Bond from Coast Digital spoke next highlighting what is all too common in many organisations – data rich/insight poor. While organisations have no shortage of information available or accessible through cheap/free online tools (e.g. surveymonkey, Google surveys, Google analytics etc.), they often have limited capability to analyse and interpret the data to support business decision-making.

Dave Richardson from Ashtons Legal took us back to basics on customer acquisition, improving conversion rates and again, the importance of measuring to help evaluate ROI and justify spend.

Lee Boswell from Alan Boswell Insurance took us through his own business case study and the challenges of creating a marketing function in a traditional organisation.

Darren Isted from Spitfire PR gave us practical tips for achieving better PR and finally, Alex Morris from Lambda gave us some lessons in biology before talking us through the basics of video for online with some really great stats, for example – did you know that 85% of online video is viewed without sound? How important are the subtitles/captions now?!

For me, the day reinforced the importance of insights for marketers. Without audience understanding how can you effectively target? Without effective measurement how do you know if it’s worked? And how can you improve?

Overall, it was a great day, well organised, excellent value for money and importantly for people like me, fantastic value for time. I will be back!

Posted by: Lisa Holt