Magic and genius at the service of customer experience Base camp / Preparing for change B2B Digital Marketing Maturity So, today, I'm going to talk to you about B2B digital marketing maturity. Why is this important? It often helps to explain successes and failures in major marketing transformation projects and why some companies are struggling to get to the top of the digital marketing game. I've done dozens of projects and I deduced that there were a certain number of compulsory stages, compulsory building sites that you have to go through to successfully complete the transformation. And skipping one of these sites often means that you're going to have problems a bit further on. How does it start? Quite often, these transformation sites are initiated by a change of direction, an impulse from shareholders who want to shift the company towards more customer experience. Moving from mass marketing to engagement marketing The first task of this base camp, before starting the climb, is to be convinced that a successful customer experience is the key to success for tomorrow's businesses, and that in marketing, it's achieved through engagement marketing. That is to say, switching from a marketing that's often quite pushy, quite self-centred, focused on its offers, to a marketing that's going to try to get people to come to you, your prospects and customers will initiate conversations. And this should be shared with management. Reaching an agreement between management and the teams on the strategy to be followed It is now time to convince management on the strategy to follow and to share with them the different work sites that you will go through. Convince them to release a budget and explain to them that this transformation is not going to be linear. The results will not necessarily happen right away. There will be ups and downs. So, it's important to really convince them from the start and to educate them on the path that the company is going to go through, so that there are no surprises in the future. It's good to try your hand, to test the mechanics with free tools, but at some point, you have to get management on board. Auditing and correcting your data quality One of the first and often forgotten sites of this base camp is to take care of data quality. You're going to extract data, often from the salespeople's CRM for which the quality of the data is not necessarily optimal; duplication problems, problems with how the fields were filled out, inaccurate data for which you will greatly suffer the effects when you're going to do your first marketing campaigns. So, my advice: take the time to enhance the data, deduplicate and map your data set. Define your KPIs and your 3-year budget plan. And finally, in this base camp, it is very important to have an accurate vision of where you are in your current marketing position, to get some figures to set credible goals in one, two, three years, and share with management, in the same way, a three-year budget plan, a credible and serious budget plan that won't just include technology, but also content policy, all the worksites that we're going to see. The risk is that in one year, in two years, in three years, management might get back to you and say: "Is this marketing transformation working?" And you might not know how to answer if you haven't set a goal in the first place. Next building site: