Tuesday 20th November was the inaugural evening for FINITE, a new community for marketers working in B2B Technology.
Over the course of the next year, we plan to expand the community so that it includes more meetups, private dinners, research and conferences, with members sharing the latest insights, trends, advice and ideas to become more effective marketers.
Hosted at WeWork Shoreditch, the evening was arranged into specific, digestible blocks of time so as to give attendees the right balance between learning from a specific case study, talking with their peers, and well, eating pizza.
The format of a FINITE evening consists of two speakers, talking for 20 minutes on a personal area of expertise. This is followed by a pizza and networking break, before a panel conversation in the style of a fireside chat, chewing the fat so to speak, on specific challenges in B2B Tech marketing. Our first guest speakers were the formidable Andrea Clatworthy, head of Account Based Marketing at Fujitsu and Simon Schnieders, founder of BlueArray, a specialist SEO offering.
First on stage was Andrea Clatworthy from Fujitsu, the multinational information technology equipment and services company, or as she called them, the company that does ‘big I.T things’.
Andrea was sharing her success story of how over a three year period, she implemented a company-wide strategic approach to Account-Based Marketing. She shared her revolutionary ideas from dropping lead generation (you could hear an actual gasp in the room!) to investing time in fully understanding the customer by treating them as a market in its own right.
With an evolving digital landscape that seems to affect us all and changing buying behaviour, she advocated the advertisement of solutions to problems so that customers come to you, together with a digital co-creation approach to formulate transformational outcomes by bringing together a dynamic ecosystem of inputs from multiple perspectives and digital technology. In a truly eye-opening and fascinating way, she further emphasised the importance of enthusiasm, creativity, energy and having multiple areas of specialisation to our crowd of eager B2B tech marketers.
Next up was Simon, from his own SEO ‘Consulgency’ BlueArray (a cross between an agency and a consultancy), providing an insight into the strategies they utilise. The advice he streamed was focused and tactical, from targeting the belly and tail (comical terminology for mid/low search volume) to how to gain C-suite influence over purchase decisions and how search starts with generics and not brands.
Brain Food.
After an interlude of pizza and networking, finally we brought together all of our guests, further introducing Beatriz Montoya (Digital Marketing Manager at B2B insurer Simply business), Darius Groza (Marketing Content Manager at new logistics, shipping and delivery firm, Weengs) in a Q&A to explore their diverse perspectives and approaches to B2B marketing and the issues they have come across. Stimulated by Alex Price, founder of FINITE & 93digital, this lively discussion sparked debate around the importance of SEO, what KPIs are applied at one’s business and whether the role of the marketer currently has too many expectations thrust upon it, reading out a live job description to emphasise the sometimes ludicrously long list of expectations companies want from just one individual.
By 8pm, proceedings were being wrapped up and most people were on their way home. We had crammed a lot of quality content into those 2.5 hours and heartened by the many calls of ‘See you next time’, thus finished the first FINITE evening.
https://twitter.com/EmmaMoly/status/1065002963675033604
Planning is already underway for our next evening, in early February 2019. If you would like to keep informed of any FINITE future plans, do leave us your email address below, and we’ll send you notice of our upcoming calendar.
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