Episode Description
- Global Marketing: Understanding cultural nuances and balancing global reach and local relevance.
- Data Privacy Dynamics: Navigating the complexities of GDPR and ethical marketing practices.
- Creating Lasting Impressions: Strategies for building long-term demand and awareness in a crowded marketplace.
- Zsuzsanna's Content Creation Journey: From building a personal brand to influencing industry trends.
- Web Scalars Market Entry: Insights into Nokia’s strategic approach to engaging with top-tier networking companies.
- The Future of B2B Marketing: Discussing buzzwords, purchase intent, and the importance of aligning marketing and sales efforts.
Join us as we uncover successful B2B marketing strategies across borders, ensuring your message resonates with the right audience at the right time.
Zsuzsanna Blau on LinkedIn
Summary:
In this episode, Zsuzsanna Blau, head of marketing and digital demand campaign management at Nokia, discusses the unique challenges of global marketing, particularly in the telecommunications sector. She highlights the importance of understanding regional differences in buyer behavior and content consumption. Zsuzsanna shares insights on navigating GDPR compliance and emphasizes the need for authentic, value-driven marketing. She details a successful campaign aimed at web scalers, which focused on providing bingeable content experiences to facilitate self-education among decision-makers, ultimately enhancing collaboration between marketing and sales.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast for B2B marketers that is anything but pharosIQ’s podcast. Each week we dive in, talk a little bit about marketing, talk a little bit about what's happening in the space, and most importantly, inspire with creative ideas from our B2B marketing experts and campaigns they've run in the past that were just different, creative, innovative, and un pharosIQ’s podcast.
pharosIQ: Bye bye. So this week really pumped to have Zsuzsanna Blau. And I've been working on that, right? From a pronunciation, Zsuzsanna comes to us as the head of marketing and digital demand campaign management for Nokia's 3. 3 billion growth engine, primarily supporting their cloud and network services, software business.
pharosIQ: She works at the intersection of brand. And product with a really strong focus on digital channels, content and marketing innovation. She's been in the space for 20 years driving growth in both startups and really large enterprise settings. So she knows how to navigate both sides of it and all the unknown through that discovery.
pharosIQ: And her favorite buzzwords for 2024 are zero click marketing, all bound hero pipeline and ecosystems. We might dive into a few of those as we jump through. So welcome. Welcome Zsuzanna.
Zsuzanna: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
pharosIQ: Awesome. You, to be 100 percent transparent, are the first A global marketer that I've had on pharosIQ’s podcast being based out of Europe.
pharosIQ: So I'd love to dive in a little bit to some of that for our more international audience who's joining us as well, right? In a global role, what challenges do you face that you think just like North America or U. S. marketers just don't face?
Zsuzanna: I don't know if there are many that one region would not face at all, but there are maybe some obvious things like certain topics may be more interesting in some regions than others.
Zsuzanna: That could be because of geopolitical situations or cultural differences, and then there are I don't know. I don't know. certain tactics that seem to work better in one region than another, but don't quote me on it because what works for me may not work for you and vice versa. So we obviously, so when I say we run global campaigns, that means that we don't necessarily localize a lot.
Zsuzanna: In some regions, we don't localize at all because telecoms with Nokia, a leader in the telecommunications infrastructure and networking equipment industry. And so in telecoms, really, the main language is English period. But of course, we may do some localizations here and there where. Especially in Asia, for example, Korea, Japan, those could be areas where it makes sense for us to do translations.
Zsuzanna: We try and be efficient as possible, obviously, and localization can cost you a lot, right? Because it's not just translating a single ad, but then you'll have to translate your whole landing page or website, all the content that go into it. So it can be quite the project. But what I can tell you, for example, of course we had in the, in 2023, for example, with the energy.
Zsuzanna: crisis. We had very specific programs in, say, Europe and Latin America that were all about our network sustainability solutions. But we didn't run those programs in North America or the Middle East because those were not hot topics over there. Or there are certain Tactics like we do private roundtables, meet the boss sessions that work really well in Latam or in certain parts of Asia, for some reason, it seems to be easier to get senior executives and decision makers to actually commit to a 90 minute private roundtable than in, say, again, North America or Europe.
Zsuzanna: And probably the reason for that is because those executives in North America and Europe are chased a lot more often. They are on a lot more companies radars.
pharosIQ: Do you find buyers buy a little different in different geographies? Do they research different? Do they have different trusted sources? Or is it generally universal?
Zsuzanna: Generally universal, but there may be small nuances. Of course, there will be regional publications or regional influencers, the analysts, the publications, and the in betweens that may have influence over buyer decisions in one region, but not in the other. Also, I think cultural differences play a role as well.
Zsuzanna: Like you can imagine, Asia is extremely hierarchical, so you may have a 28 year old CTO slash founder in them doing their own research about something, but you would never have that in Asia. They will have their subordinates do research for them. Yeah, so that's a big difference.
pharosIQ: That was, I found her a bit different in Europe as well, too.
pharosIQ: Yeah, Europe, the title of head of is more common than you would see in North America and something versus etc. How do you see that as well? Or is that just me outside? Yeah, I
Zsuzanna: think titles are funny like that. There are more and more titles and depending on the company. They may mean the exact same thing.
Zsuzanna: You could be a VP somewhere, especially when you're comparing smaller to larger businesses, right? Like a VP or CMO at a startup could have literally zero team members reporting to them, but a VP or CMO at a large organization may have thousands. And. For example, my title as head, I've had up a function globally, and then in other companies had would be way further down the hierarchy.
Zsuzanna: So that can be confusing and challenging when you're trying to figure out your buying group members.
pharosIQ: Have you seen that meme, like with the David Beckham and Victoria Beckham, where it says I'm the CMO and then he goes, really? And she goes, okay, I'm just the one person in marketing. Like it's from that documentary they had.
pharosIQ: So yeah, it's happened to pop up in my beat.
Zsuzanna: Was it Jason Lampkin from Sazter who said that the CMO is the CEO anyway?
pharosIQ: Amen to that. So GDPR and other data privacy things popping up globally, right? How is that, how is that affecting how you're attacking the market globally? Or is it or not?
Zsuzanna: Yeah, of course it is. So there are various data and privacy acts outside of GDPR. GDPR that global marketers need to be aware of the California act. There's one in Brazil, Singapore, UK, and I'm sure there are many others, but they all influence how we can collect and process and handle or manage personal data that we collect.
Zsuzanna: And for a brand like Nokia, right? Nokia takes, obviously it takes pride in being a recognized. World's most ethical companies year over year. So non compliance is out of question. So we need to be on top of our game and we need to understand these and there are compliance officers within the, within our company that even within marketing that we can go to, to make sure we are always updated on the latest.
Zsuzanna: I find it funny that I sometimes just reading some LinkedIn posts or videos from self proclaimed influencers where they give advice on things like why spend money on acquiring contacts when you can just use Zoom info. That is dangerous. It may be right in Maybe the U S or some certain parts of the U S and I'm sure PharosIQ, you'll have an opinion about that, but as a global market marketer, definitely not.
Zsuzanna: No, I cannot just export a list of contacts from zoom info, put it in my automation platform and start spamming them. No way.
pharosIQ: And there's also the question you brought up Nokia's level of just because you can. Does it mean necessarily that you should write that also, right? Like the thing that's always gotten me a bit.
pharosIQ: And again, the quote unquote influencer segment is that the minimum viable thing that you have to do to remain legal or compliant shouldn't be the threshold. And I believe that I love that whether you're North America, Europe like getting that agreement. Getting that handshake that says, Hey, you gave me something that I wanted a piece of content or something.
pharosIQ: And in exchange, I'm going to give you my email address and my phone number and you can market to me. That agreement is an important one. And I think it's important on both sides of the fence as a buyer, right? You're giving your contact information and that's a fair trade. But as a B2B marketer, we have to hold.
pharosIQ: our side up of that equation. And once they, once we have that agreement, we have to bring the goods, good content, good quality, good, and not just pass that person over to sales to get spammed. So I think that's the, I read a lot about like the tactic is broke. This doesn't work. The content syndicate doesn't work.
pharosIQ: There's B2B marketers. At about a 500 million annual scale who make it work really well. And that's because
Zsuzanna: it only doesn't work if you're not using it, so you have to have the right objectives and goals and understand what it can help you with. And if you just use a single asset, download as a lead and sending it to your sales department, of course, no, it won't work properly.
Zsuzanna: But if you use it well and you understand its limitations and where it can really help you, then. It'll work.
pharosIQ: It's really hard to communicate to your buyer these days. There's so many different places and the cost to reach them in those places is only going up, right? Hitting them on social is only getting more expensive.
pharosIQ: Finding them on searches is only getting more expensive now that AI and people are searching in different places. So the, I've always loved the gated content syndication plan, like building that marketable database. Via email is almost like it's like a community that you've built. It's not an actual community like pavilion, but it's a little community that you can exchange ideas back and forth with.
pharosIQ: And if you do it well, you bring them really quality content. People will remember when I need this networking services or equipment, or I'm thinking Nokia. Cause. Zuzana brought me so much great content. She's the first person that I remember, but it's really interesting. It's, and let's be, I can also tell you as well as well as I do that, like companies put spam traps into zoom info and other platforms like that.
pharosIQ: And they do that purposely. So you don't go out and buy. 23, 000 contacts, 17 cents a record, plop them into an automation system and just blast blast the spam can.
Zsuzanna: Exactly. And yeah I fully agree. I feel like B2B inflation is a real thing. It definitely takes a lot more of everything to win more channels, more touch points, more contacts, more.
Zsuzanna: Content more F fatigue, you have to be much better at targeting. Your consumers are much more demanding. And all of this is leading to an increasing amount of content, different formats, different platforms, different channels, and they all need to be produced faster and more cheaply than ever before. So it, it can be very daunting and it is definitely hard to get seen out there for
pharosIQ: sure.
pharosIQ: It's the technology advances of automation and AI. Are almost causing again. This is my almost causing more of a challenge than the solution, right? Because it's so easy to automate an email sequence. And now with a it's even easier to automate the whole flow, right? Where I've seen. Some vendors are working on tech that where if a lead hits your system, it'll send it into an automated AI flow, and it'll just start chatting with them and all that, right?
pharosIQ: But it's so much content. And again, the quality dips because it's automated or because it's AI based that now your buyer's inbox is just exploded.
Zsuzanna: That's exactly why I always say that good marketing, regardless of advances in technology and tools and new shiny things, which I always love I love to test new things and try and iterate and everything.
Zsuzanna: But you have to. Go back to the basics. People buy from brands that are, they know, love, and trust. And so in order for you to get them to know, love, and trust you, you really only have to do one thing. Okay. You have to be nice. That's a really good strategy, but show up consistently with content, free content.
Zsuzanna: Stop. In my world, I don't like to gate content unless I really have to. So showing up consistently with free content that informs, educates, or entertains. So in short creates value for them and creates memorable experiences. That's even better. B2B brands, and I'm not going to lie, Nokia, we suffer from this as well.
Zsuzanna: We are usually. Not as great at creating super edutaining, entertaining content that will leave a lasting impression and create brand recall, right? That's all we really want in marketing. How do I create a lasting impression, evoke emotions, make sure they'll remember me when the time comes, when they are ready to buy.
Zsuzanna: There are stats about the fact that at any given time, there's probably about three to five percent of your target market or ICP. In market, which means that if you're only targeting those, then you're going to be missing out on the other 95 ish percent of buyers that could buy from you in the future, shorter, longer term future.
Zsuzanna: And so this is when building demand comes into the picture. Even if they're not ready to buy today, if you're going to leave lasting impressions on them, and if you're going to inform and educate and entertain them, they'll remember when the time comes
pharosIQ: and that aggregate cost of acquisition is lower, right?
pharosIQ: If you,
Zsuzanna: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. If
pharosIQ: you attack people before they're ready to buy, they'll eventually have a problem. You can get in front of them cost effectively early. Trying to capture at the bottom of the funnel where your price is five X, right?
Zsuzanna: That it costs about 50 percent more today to acquire a customer than it did five years ago.
Zsuzanna: So it, yeah. So the better you are at creating demand around you and building awareness about around you, the cheaper it will be in the long run to convert them.
pharosIQ: Yeah. Keyword long run, right? Like really great marketing is a long game. The moves you're playing now, especially in some cases that you have long sales cycles come into fruition nine to 12 months from now.
pharosIQ: And unfortunately most executives don't see the long, it's hard to sit down in front of the executive and be like, Hey, I need 500 K and I'm going to get you 2 million. But I'm not going to get to you tomorrow. I'm going to get it to you early 2025, right? And set expectations. But speaking of you mentioned how the company has to have that edutainment factor and all that, but I'm seeing a trend to where not necessarily just the company, but the employees of the company.
pharosIQ: And you're a great example, right? Your social media presence. There are a ton of people who are connecting Zuzanna. And content and then thus Nokia and great content, right? So and as a marketer, it's fairly rare, right? You would think that marketers would be the first standing up on social media to be to have these personal brands.
pharosIQ: And it's fairly rare. Why have you decided to be active and jump in that kind of ahead of your peers?
Zsuzanna: Great question. I guess I've always been opinionated, but so I tried to embark on the road of content creation a couple of times in my what 17 years on LinkedIn now I, wow. LinkedIn has been around for a while, but I was never consistent enough or lasted long enough.
Zsuzanna: It takes, I'm not going to lie. It takes a lot of effort and time to create content constantly. And so I come from a. Startup SMB kind of background before I joined Nokia, right? And that's, it's when I joined Nokia 2016. So now eight years ago, so when I realized what you just said, that there weren't many voices at all for marketers like me in B2B, especially in large matrix B2B organizations, especially women.
Zsuzanna: So now there are plenty of B2B SaaS marketing influencers, but usually, and they give excellent advice, but a lot of that advice is really hard to interpret and understand for marketers who are working in really highly complex, like hundreds of products. Solutions, high, super high deal value, really mainly sales driven organizations.
Zsuzanna: It's really hard for us to actually implement most of those devices, even if they sound amazing and your God knows that they are right. You just can't. So the more and more I talked to vendors and other marketers after I joined Nokia, the more I realized there was a gap. And so I started, being more intentional developing my voice about five, six years ago, really understanding what are the main challenges.
Zsuzanna: And I started. Getting invited to events and webinars. COVID happened and so it all fell back. And then quite frankly, it was at the end of 2022. I out of the blue, I got not, it was a peer nominated award that I won for future tech B2B CMO, which I'm still extremely honored about. But that's when I really realized that what I had to say was.
Zsuzanna: Valuable enough for others to actually want to hear more. And this is when I promised myself, okay, I will try to stay consistent this time. And I will do this at least for a year. I'll try. Is it gonna give me like pleasure to do this at least for one year? So we are now on month eight. It's definitely giving me pleasure.
Zsuzanna: I've. I've been lucky to meet a lot more people and had amazing conversations, which all makes me better at what I do. I would have never had the chance to learn from the people that I've been able to learn from had I not started this.
pharosIQ: That's very cool. I agree. It's one of my favorite parts. People have like the podcast.
pharosIQ: It just, I've been on a ton. I have them and it's just great to just meet people and see different perspectives and talk to different folks and all of that, awesome. We've reached the big moment of the podcast, right? We're talking unbe to boring. Tell us about a campaign over any part of your career that you ran.
pharosIQ: That was unboring. How was it unboring? Was it successful? Was it a win? All of the good stuff. And we've had both, we've had we've had big wins and we've had big flops on beat a boring. So it's okay to have both. Cause I think that the audience can learn from either way. So what are you saying?
Zsuzanna: I, one that I'm really proud of for sure is when I was as to help us enter at, this is at Nokia, enter the web scalers market.
Zsuzanna: So these are the companies, the hyperscalers and the web scalers that run their business on the internet. And have huge networking needs. So you can think of the most obvious, the Amazons, the Googles, the Metas and Apples, but also all your social media companies, the streaming providers, the Netflix's, the Spotify's, the Uber's, the data center companies, and others.
Zsuzanna: And that was a brand new market for us. And the average Nokia buyer before that was a 55 plus white man in, on the C suite who is used to making decisions in a very specific sort of way. We know this person, but. At these web scalers, the decision makers are a very different breed. It's what I mentioned earlier, like a founder CTO at a company like this, at a unicorn, who's 28 years old, for example, they have very different content consumption habits.
Zsuzanna: They will not fill out a form. They will not answer emails from sales. They will not pick up the phone. They won't fill out forms again. So how do you actually get through to them? So we had to find a way to market. To those that invented the bingeable on demand world. Ooh, that was a huge challenge.
Zsuzanna: And so what we did was we were, we wanted to find a platform that would let us help accelerate their self education phase, because that's. Pretty much everybody wants to be able to be left alone. Let me do my own research. We know that about 70, 80 percent of the buyer journey today is done on your own work in your office or at home.
Zsuzanna: You do your own research. You look up all the different review sites, even if you just want to buy a gadget, but imagine buying a car or a really expensive watch, you'll do your research. Of course, you'll do the same when it's a multimillion dollar business or even billion. Our goal was to find a way to actually really help accelerate that self education phase for them without any gate and provide bingeable content experiences.
Zsuzanna: And so we partnered with a company called PathFactory. They have this content, Delivery and intelligence platform, which I love. And I think I've been a loud enough advocate for ever since really, which really allows you to build like playlists, like content tracks, and then you are able to serve forms when.
Zsuzanna: Only when the time comes based on their engagement. So you can, for example, set up time and say, I only want to show serve my form if they spend at least 20 minutes, or if they spent enough time on at least three of my assets or whatever, you can customize your rules. And so that's how we started actually.
Zsuzanna: And that's how we started understanding which accounts, which were the companies that were on our pages, spending more time with our content specifically. And what kind of content, what. Stages of the funnel, were they more top or bottom of the funnel content? And that's how we were able to also pull them into nurture streams.
Zsuzanna: If we had their contact information, this was really easy to share with sales. They were very Eagle. There are multiple types, at least two types of salespeople, the farmers and the hunters. I know this best, I'm not going to talk about this, but the point is in web scale, in a new market entry, you really need hunters, so they, all they wanted it was just Show me a sign that someone is actually reading about us.
Zsuzanna: They are on our pages. They are on our content and this allowed us to do that. So I was able to build a really great relationship with sales throughout this. We were able to score the accounts, the people that were on our content, understanding their priorities, topic wise and funnel stage wise and follow up accordingly.
Zsuzanna: So that made our life really a lot easier and it was a big success. Yeah.
pharosIQ: When they get the nail on the head, the connection to sales, right? And again, their sellers are still were special little snowflakes, right? And they believe that their time is magical, right? And Mark, all marketing has to do is create that belief, right?
pharosIQ: And it can be multiple different ways, right? But again, just if I'm a seller and someone says this person spent X amount of time looking at this, right? That's belief. That's why things like live events, still small, micro events and even webinars per se, the act of someone showing up to a webinar, listening to it in market, it creates that, and I think that's.
pharosIQ: That's the real connection between sales and marketing, right? Every time, every guest I've had, when they've talked about the disconnect between sales and market, it's always that belief that is the lead worth me calling, right? And again, I think sales need to do a bit better job of,
Zsuzanna: but you're right, but I also think marketing needs to do a better job in a sense that it is some kind of intent when someone.
Zsuzanna: Decides to register or show up for a webinar, but you have to be able to separate intent to learn from intent to buy, right? So there are a lot of people that just want to learn and educate themselves to be better at their jobs, but they are not going to be buying from you at least for a while.
Zsuzanna: And so back to this campaign, what was really amazing is that we were able to use this across all the channels, all the tactics, because for all your content tracks, you have a single link. So for example, I had a webinar. Great. I put that link, or multiple links. And then I was able to track who actually cared enough to go and engage some more.
Zsuzanna: Same with physical events. And I was able to do this for my partners, give them personalized, customized tracks with their logo on them. So it's a tool. Yes, but it made our job easier and it made the content experience and the education phase a lot more seamless for our. Customers are prospects and that's exactly what we wanted.
Zsuzanna: How do we enable them? This was really easy.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Key takeaway for me there and a nail on the head, right? Intent to learn versus intent to buy, right? Especially I have a lot of conversations about quote, unquote, intent data. Chatter in the B2B marketing and sales space about it right now. And I think like you just nailed the nail on the absolute head.
pharosIQ: Most of the intent quote unquote in the space does a great job of capturing people who have intent to learn, right? There are very few. One of my goals here at MRP is to build an engine that truly does identify intent to purchase over different trending. And again, it can be done. There's ways to do it.
pharosIQ: But I think that's a great separator. And I do believe I'm going to steal that. So let you know ahead of time, right? So awesome. So thank you so much for joining. It's been really awesome. I think we're going to have you on again to talk about some of those buzzwords like hero pipeline and all that.
pharosIQ: So if I hit you up in the next couple of months to dive in for part two, don't be shy. So where can our guests find you? I know you have LinkedIn. I know you have a newsletter. Where's the best place to find you?
Zsuzanna: It's definitely LinkedIn and I'm the only one with my name on LinkedIn. So you can't miss me and please do connect.
Zsuzanna: I'd love connecting with new people and sharing our views and visions and goals and best practices.
pharosIQ: Great. Can everybody connect to Zuzanna at LinkedIn? And again, I think just giving a search for Zuzanna Blau should pop up the exact right person. I promise you, for those of you listening on Spotify, Apple, wherever you're listening to, drop us a five star review, the more reviews that we have positive, the more people searching for B2B marketing podcast, we're popping up forward.
pharosIQ: We're growing our user base pretty frequently. You can reach. MRP and MRP FD. com. You can reach me on LinkedIn as well, amongst multiple different social channels on that side. So thank you again for joining. Thanks for our guests for being. Thanks for our listeners for joining again till next time.
pharosIQ: I appreciate everybody's time. Thank you again, Zsuzanna.
Zsuzanna: Amazing. Thank you for having me. See you soon. I hope
Tags:
