Rachel Smith | Service Provider Marketing Manager Rebecca Dicker | Small Business Marketing Lead
It can be complicated and costly to set up a new, secure IT infrastructure, especially for Small Businesses; they’re facing budget constraints, skills shortages and the same cybersecurity challenges as large enterprises. Service Providers (SPs) are well placed to meet some of these challenges by providing expert assurance to manage and monitor the network, with a single and flexible purchasing model.
In April 2019 a project group was formed, dedicating specific focus to accelerating the growth of Cisco Small Business with (and through) our Service Provider partners. Over the last couple of months we have developed an integrated, strategic marketing plan. The plan focuses on 4 key areas:
We’ll be able to share more detail at a later stage, but in the meantime, we’d really appreciate your insight. Please help us to understand your awareness of Cisco's Service Provider business, by completing the survey below, so we can use the insights to help inform our activities.
Complete this survey by 30th June
Charlotte Sturman | Small Business Content Marketing Lead, EMEAR
The Small Business (SB) Segment Marketing Team are delighted to have continued our influencer work from Cisco Live! Barcelona 2019 with renowned Small Business entrepreneur, investor and former ‘Dragon’s Den’ (a.k.a. ‘Shark Tank’) star, Piers Linney.
Firstly, following on from Piers’ insightful keynote at CLEUR, we didn’t want our audience who couldn’t be there in-person to miss out – so we recorded a shorter version as a Cisco Expert Talk (or as I like to say, Cisco’s version of a ‘TED’ talk!). In 5 Key Small Business Growth Factors, Piers talks about how to scale for success and reduce risk in the ultra-competitive Small Business landscape.
In the SB team, we’re really lucky to be able to work with closely with our architecture and sales teams. In Q3 we created some fantastic influencer video content for our audience, addressing key Small Business challenges. In partnership with Piers and Hazel Burton from EMEAR Security Marketing, we filmed part one and part two security-focused Facebook Live videos in London, the first from Old Street Roundabout and the second from the Cisco Meraki office – which have received 4.5K views between them! We were also able to catch-up with Piers and Hema Marshall from UKI SB Sales at our Cisco Innovation Hub Mi-IDEA in Manchester, where the pair discuss in part one and part two videos the Small Business technology landscape – from networking, to cloud computing and collaboration.
And if that wasn’t enough, we also recorded the first #SBspecial podcast with the (in)famous Justin Woolen (over 1,165 plays so far!). In this inaugural episode, Justin talks with Piers about how to run a network that is fit for both his house and a small business environment – yes, really!
Finally, we couldn’t leave out our Tech Connection for Small Business, our one-stop resource from small businesses to gain inspiration, education and learn more about the latest technology trends – so check-out our Q&A article with Piers, discussing how enterprise-class cloud IT is now within the reach of small businesses.
We can’t wait to develop our Small Business influencer work in Q4 and into FY20…this is just the beginning!
Piotr Szymanek | Partner Marketing Manager
Research company Forrester predicts that by 2023 CMOs will spend almost 150 billion USD on digital media in US alone. Their report also reveals that 62% of B2B buyers say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list — based solely on digital content. Sounds like new era of marketing is already here.
And then… there is reality. In FY18 only 18% of partner SQLs in Poland were driven by digital activities. Partners say that digital marketing is not their thing and they are not willing to invest into it.
So where did this optimism for shift into digital marketing go?
Based on discussions with partners’ CMOs, Sales Directors and even CEOs, we identified some bottlenecks of marketing transformation into digital:
In Q1 we made a decision to start an initiative called Partner Digital Academy to address those pain points and focus especially on delivering practical knowledge to help partners start their journey into the world of online marketing.
What is Partner Digital Academy exactly? It is a series of all-day events for CMOs and Marketing Managers from Partner & Disti companies, where external experts and professionals share practical knowledge in different areas of digital marketing, rather than just talk trends and high-level ideas.
First edition of Digital Academy was launched in February, with a 6-hour agenda focused on:
The event was run by IDG, leading IT publisher in Poland, whose business model is rooted in content creation and generating base of engaged IT professionals. IDG professionals presenting were Chief Revenue Officer, Head of Video Production Dept, Head of Delivery.
First edition was highly evaluated by attendees, especially the hands-on parts. In post-event survey we also learned that Cisco is the only vendor on Polish market to deliver such initiative for partner companies.
April’s edition of Partner Digital Academy focused on Social Selling in B2B and was led by industry expert and consultant – Łukasz Kosuniak, former B2B Marketing Head at Microsoft. Based on feedback received from previous edition the focus was set for hands on knowledge:
During those two events we have trained over 18 partner companies and disties, including 1&2Tier partners. We already see that there is a change of mindset not only towards digital marketing but marketing role in general, as our “graduates” generate brand awareness among customers and attract new customers and opportunities.
A side effect of our initiative was also creation of platform where CMOs and marketers from competitive companies were eager to share openly their concerns, experiences and knowledge. If progress depends on openness I believe that we are on the right track to bring in successful digital transformation in Poland.
Darya Yukimenka | Strategy Planning & Operations, Germany
Carola Kaurisch | Director’s Assistant Darya Yukimenka | SPO Every 4-6 weeks a new speaker from our team (Katharina Beer, Mirielle Theis, Julie Gums, Annett Ehrlich and more to come)
Mein Marketing & Ich stands for joint expertise in marketing topics shared across the German Cisco organisations.
In 2019 we’ve started a knowledge sharing forum for Marketing topics with the aim to share what’s hot and new in Marketing, which activities we are driving, which tools we are using and most importantly how it all helps our business to improve day by day.
Focused around our Germany-all audience we provide every 4-6 weeks on a Friday a dedicated slot with high relevance to our sales colleagues…. The format is fun, open and had an interview style to it which really helps to drive an open discussion.
By this we not only share expertise but help marketing and sales colleagues to get to know each other better, understand the functions and learn who the subject matter experts in marketing are.
Next up in June is “The Bridge to Germany – how we evolve the global campaign content to become locally relevant” with Annett Ehrlich.
One of the most important outcomes out of these sessions is not only the content and the shared knowledge but a dialog between sales and marketing and all colleagues becoming more openminded and getting to understand each other’s functions better. We see increasing participants numbers (around 70 attendees per session) and more engaged chat box and sales requests after the sessions.
You can find recordings (in German) and slides in our Marketing Community here
Stefan Duschek | Partner Marketing Manager and Collaboration Audience Expert Germany
Elisa Maria Agnetti | EMEAR Digital IT, Ilaria Cacciatore – EMEAR South Marketing IT
Collecting account data and predicting customers behavior and journeys are key success factors in modern Performance Marketing. In EMEA, 4 regions executed different pilot projects by using a predictive analytics platform called Prelytix.
The scopes of these pilots in Italy, North, UK and Germany were Account based Marketing by targeted paid and social media campaigns and account monitoring, collecting accounts insights for sales as well as behavior driven demand gen initiatives.
Overall objectives of all these 4 pilots were demand identification and creation as well as optimization of existing marketing activities.
Here are the first outcomes and recommendations:
Programmatic ad buying has changed the face of online advertising, but there’s still confusion around what it actually is. Together with Christian Beeking our new Paid Media and Advertising expert and the German Partner Marketing Team we invited partners from Germany, Austria and Switzerland to join 3 sessions to explore how programmatic media works.
We covered topics like: What is programmatic advertising with regards to paid search, paid display and paid social? What are the right channels? What is a good invest to start and we showed how to invest the money. We also shared insights in how to find the right agency. We covered about tools, KPIs, optimization and measurement to get the best out of it. In the last session we showcase best practices and open up for more questions and next steps.
The overall idea behind these 3 sessions is to combine know how from our subject matter experts like Christian and provide great insights to our partners in order to coach them. We had 150 registrations overall and a very low no show rate of
<25% which showed us that this is a hot topic and very relevant to our partners. Every session was a 45 mins presentation and 15 mins interaction and Q&A. The feedback we received by chat, email or direct message was outstanding. Best indicator for us that show’s that these sessions matter is the huge amount of interested and detailed questions during and after the session.
In the future we plan more of those coaching sessions for our partners with digital marketing-topics. We plan to schedule across Germany, Austria and Switzerland to reach all German speaking partners without borders and maybe event scale at some point to EMEAR.
