I had the pleasure of joining more than 200 B2B marketers this week at the annual Business Marketing Association conference in Las Vegas. There were valuable panel discussions on topics like measuring marketing effectiveness, sponsorship marketing, managing agency relationships, and many others. Two of the highlights for me were the keynote addresses delivered by Eduardo Conrado, Corporate VP of Global Business & Technology Marketing & Communications for Motorola (that's quite a title!) and Judith Sims, Oracle's CMO.
Eduardo's address focused on the ways Motorola is leveraging Web 2.0 to reach government and public safety buyers, but he shared a lot of information about how he has structured the marketing organization for maximum effectiveness. Judith shared some similar information from Oracle. One of the key learnings I took home from both presentations was the power of a unified voice - unified across product lines, across geographies, across channels. Judith talked about the impact they have realized by planning carefully their marketing efforts for optimum impact. Instead of running disparate ad campaigns, events, online campaigns, etc.; they pool all of these channels around the most promising opportunities to reach and engage a given audience. One example was a recent conference in New York where the key decision makers in one of their vertical industries were going to be gathered for a week. Oracle recognized this as an opportunity to have a real impact on this industry, so they had "Oracle cars" pick the participants up from the airport and return them to the airport at the end of the conference, had Oracle billboards and airport ads strategically positioned, banners in the hotel, etc. And this was NOT an Oracle event - I thought it was brilliant.
What are you doing in your organization to make sure you approach the marketing with a unified voice? I know we're thinking about that very question here at Community Analytics.
