One of the things I love about looking at the clean slate of a new year is 365 days of possibilities. Part of what gets me excited is taking one idea, focusing on it, and then putting it into practice little by little. Huge change all at once can be hugely overwhelming. But what I find is that huge change really comes from the accumulation of taking many small steps, whether it’s becoming more open minded to the ideas of others or how you change the way you think about the work that you do as a marketer.
In 2014, I was lucky to spend a lot of time talking to top B2B marketers who I always feel live at the head of the comet and blaze the path for others. While there’s many facets to their success, I realized that focus is a big part of it. So here’s a list of 12 things I learned from 12 top B2B marketers – just one to focus on each month for 2015:
- Kathy Button Bell, CMO, Emerson – Simplification. From empowering customers to empowering employees, Button Bell talks about how great marketing is really about great simplification. Much of her focus for 2014 was on simplifying the brand across the enterprise, from the website experience to industrial design. That takes a lot of determination to breakdown silos, lead and facilitate collaboration, drive cohesiveness and collaboration and all the while elevating the impact of marketing along the way.
- Linda Boff, Executive Director, Global Brand Marketing, GE – Marketers need to be good translators. It’s not enough to be excellent at marketing. You have to be excellent at driving growth for your enterprise. And the only way to do that is to communicate and then demonstrate the impact that marketing can have on the entire organization – starting with the executive team. In order for a brand to create a consistent experience, marketing has to step up and be the ones who create a core platform to telling the story and then ensure that it’s consistently told from every corner and in every way. Marketers have to be the ones who can talk about what growth looks like, translate it into how that applies to every facet of the business, and then make that come alive through experiences for employees and customers.
