If you could build the ideal multi-industry global conglomerate from scratch, scaling it to over 700 product families, would you let each one of those 700 product managers target the same customer separately?

Of course you wouldn’t.

Why then do so many enterprise brands find themselves in a similar pickle?

Three years ago, the Cisco marketing team woke up to this real-life situation. Bob Meindl, Cisco marketing director, and Jenny Hooks, Cisco marketing manager, describe the revelation in their joint 2018 Intelligent Content Conference, Beauty and the Beast: Creating the Balance Between Content Innovation and Martech Capabilities.

“Like many large B2B companies, we focused on product marketing, and each business unit would market to customers on their own,” Bob says. “To be fair, they thought about the customer, and understood the customer, but only from the very specific lens of their product.”
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“OK, Google, how do I integrate helpful chatbots into my existing content strategy without spending a fortune or frustrating my audience?”

Many brands fall into one of two traps:

• Indecision – taking the wait-and-see approach to AI-based bots while continuing to create content without a back-end strategy. This increasingly creates more problems down the road when the brand embraces AI conversational interfaces for customer relationships.
• Haphazard implementation – succumbing to the temptation to jump in, adopting and implementing tools without considering how they will scale or integrate with the brand’s overall content ecosystem.

To avoid these extremes, follow the advice of Noz Urbina, founder and content strategist of Urbina Consulting, who says a strong underlying content strategy can – and should – inform your chatbot strategy. If you’ve invested in structurally rich content, then you’re likely more chatbot-ready than you realize.

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Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. He made cars accessible and affordable to the masses through an innovative process.

Marketers didn’t invent the technology to build bots, mobile apps, games, and productivity tools, but they can make them entertaining, delightful, and helpful to entice their audiences to use them.

And marketing tech tools once available to enterprise-level brands with big budgets are now viable for small and medium-sized businesses too.

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Google’s recent rollout of mobile-first indexing proves brands willing to (once again) put users first will look better in the eyes of the search giant.

But search users have high expectations – they expect the exact information they seek to be immediately available in an easy-to-comprehend way in a format they prefer. How can you adequately put users who have such high expectations first?

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You’re the largest enterprise application software company in the world. You have 88,000 employees and nearly 400,000 customers. Your revenue last year was a smart $29.4 billion. Industry influencers are lining up, knocking on your door for an opportunity to collaborate. Right?

Well, no.

Even successful, established brands must start at the ground floor to build a B2B influencer marketing program – the same as an agile, scrappy startup.

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Robert Rose, CMI chief strategy advisor, loves to reset his audience’s brains with a truth bomb:

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

This 60-year-old quote from management great Peter Drucker reminds marketers that their work – creating demand, generating traffic, prompting social shares, or even gathering leads — is in service of this one clear goal. It’s a refreshing pause button on all the distracting possibilities available.

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