In January 2021, our very own Marketing Manager, Matt Flenley spoke to Georgia Halston of Halston Marketing, to unpack the power of collaboration and community. In this piece, Matt discusses the recent triumphs and the strategies that he deems as critical to remaining resilient, and relevant to both existing and new customers throughout 2021 and beyond.
I think the biggest thing we鈥檝e noticed is a renewed focus on communication. This goes for how we鈥檝e communicated and collaborated internally as a team, and how we鈥檝e been keeping in touch with our community, customers, partners, and those lovely people who are almost customers but not quite yet!
Keep in touch meetings were born!
Keeping in touch is quite a good phrase for this, actually, as we鈥檝e had a stronger cross-company set of conversations over Zoom, branded as 鈥淜eep in Touch鈥�, ensuring the whole team are aligned on business priorities from the newest team member to the CEO. These have been genuinely collaborative and supportive, making the internal marketing journey equally as important as the external one. We鈥檝e worked hard on internal branding of newsletters, too, to help people feel more connected and involved.
Communication is vital
Of course, for a tech company usually spending its time across the northern hemisphere, actually being in countries has been made impossible since March of last year. We鈥檇 usually have people on the ground in New York one week, and Amsterdam the next, and so we鈥檝e been talking to our event partners about how we can redistribute physical event spend into digital and virtual opportunities instead. Again, communication has been key here, looking to come up with mutually beneficial ways of keeping pre-Covid sponsorship monies assigned to events but ensuring that they return what we need in terms of market visibility, thought leadership, and lead generation.
Check out this delivered by Kieran Seaward, our Head of Sales, when previously we鈥檇 have settled for just an exhibition stand.
Sustaining economic growth is crucial
In the same spirit we reached out to local event companies to offer our help in coordinating segments of agendas and bringing along people we knew could help build their audiences through keynote appearances, for example, contributing to AI Con 2020. We recognise that it鈥檚 a really challenging time to be working, but ultimately it鈥檚 about getting there together and sustaining economic growth through collaboration, and all of that can be kicked off with an email or a phone call to ask 鈥渉ow can we help both of us to get what we want?鈥�
What have we, at 糖心传媒, been doing at a community level?
At a community level, we have had a long-standing relationship with Rosetta Primary School, a half-hour鈥檚 walk up the road from us here in Belfast. We鈥檇 usually go in and help with one-to-one reading, or developing numeracy and relational language through play with Lego, but clearly that had to change for the Autumn term 2020.
Instead, we used our volunteer time in the Marketing team, working with the school to develop an online Nativity which premiered just before the Christmas holidays; one of our team, who is part-way through his final year of a Marketing degree, also put together a virtual tour of the school to help them with their admissions for 2021.
These have been fulfilling projects that have helped with morale just as much as they鈥檝e supported practical needs in the community.
Video, podcasts, keynotes? All and more!
Lastly, we鈥檝e said 鈥測es please!鈥� to an increasing number of opportunities to do video, podcast, keynotes 鈥� you name it. Our brand has grown significantly as our team has made themselves available for these opportunities, often at short notice, for example聽Dr. Fiona Browne, Head of AI鈥檚 contribution to an episode of FinTech Finance focussed on AML and tech.
Training, training, training
I say lastly 鈥� but alongside all of this, we鈥檝e been working increasingly closely with our Sales team to better integrate all our campaign activity. We鈥檝e taken on some external training on this front聽and not just assumed we can do it all ourselves! Sometimes you need someone else to hold your feet to the fire to really make critical business-growing decisions and grow.