Marketing Engagement Summit 2022: The key highlights

Despite the cold weather and train delays, over 300 people made their way to the Marketing Engagement Summit at London’s Victoria Park Plaza on the 8^th of December. This year, the summit welcomed speakers from world-renowned companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, Adobe, and TTEC, among others.

What is more, the event took place alongside the Sales Engagement Summit, allowing attendees to move between two halls and hear from even more organisations, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Evotix, and Seismic.

A RICH PROGRAMME

The Marketing Engagement Summit featured numerous topic streams designed to help the event’s delegates improve their businesses’ marketing strategies. More specifically, the speakers discussed the future of marketing, the multichannel customer journey, and how to transform lead generation through customer personalisation.

As Engage Business Media’s Editor, I had the privilege of attending the majority of the talks at the summit. Although there were many remarkable presentations, the ones I found most captivating addressed all-weather marketing, data, and the importance of uniting teams.

SHOULD WE INVEST IN MARKETING DURING BAD TIMES?

In the past two years, businesses have faced challenge after challenge. Trying to cut costs as much as possible, many companies decreased their marketing budgets.

In a twenty-minute presentation on all-weather marketing, EMEA Lead Jennifer Shaw-Sweet from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn highlighted that marketing is most important in bad times. Expanding on this, she pointed out that the most successful investors know that bad times offer the best buying opportunities. To further emphasise this point, Shaw-Sweet quoted the Marketing and Advertising Professional, Peter Field:

“Brand advertising is not about profiting in recession, it is about capitalising on recovery.”

Subsequently, Shaw-Sweet advised businesses to increase rather than decrease their spending on marketing during challenging times. Acknowledging that this is not always possible, she noted that even maintaining spend and recycling old ads would result in growth.

DATA ANALYTICS ARE KEY

In an exclusive interview last week, TTEC’s VP EMEA Head of Marketing and Market Engagement Chantal Reed discussed data, stakeholder and sales leader alignment. The biggest takeaway from her fireside chat became evident when Reed stressed the importance of data:

“How do you find the right person at the right time with the right need? Data is how you do it.”

Reassuring smaller companies, Reed pointed out that bigger budgets do not necessarily equate to better performance. Moreover, she highlighted that speaking to customers and accumulating data is free.

Paolo Negrini, Head of Marketing, Ops, Tech and Analytics at Adobe, echoed Reed’s views later in the day. Stating that analytics “help massively”, Negrini advised companies to have weekly reviews that track targets, campaigns, and channels.

Aside from discussing analytics, Negrini addressed how he brings together the different departments that he manages. According to him, different departments should find a common ground, define common terminology, and identify targets.

"SALES WORKS THANKS TO MARKETING"

Also highlighting the importance of uniting teams, Microsoft’s Sales Enablement Coordinator Emanuele Zucca stated that “sales works thanks to marketing”. Zucca shared this view after explaining how Microsoft has enabled sales through peer learning, training, and content marketing.

The idea that sales and marketing teams should work closely was repeated on multiple occasions by speakers from both summits. For this reason, the two events were held on the same day, allowing attendees to benefit and learn from both.

Further echoing this point, event host David Hicks shared his key takeaways:

“Both streams of the conference highlighted the increasing need to integrate marketing, demand generation directly with the sales, conversion and onboarding of new customers. This seems especially important now as marketers “need to do more with less” so anything that shows how marketing can directly drive incremental sales and improve retention needs to be a focus for 2023.”

Considering that the two summits attracted around 30 speakers, it is important to note that the above points give insight into just some of the main highlights. Over the next few weeks, we will delve deeper into the event’s topics through podcasts, webinars, and interviews.

Read more about the Sales Engagement Summit here.

Register for the 2023 Marketing Engagement Summit here.

By Svilena Keane, Editor at Engage Business Media