Case
Philips Innovation Services
Digital Transformation in high-tech B2B. Find out more on how Philips Innovation Services has built a future proof marketing team.
Digital Transformation in high-tech B2B. Find out more on how Philips Innovation Services has built a future proof marketing team.
How we did it
The need
Philips Innovation Services (PInS) offers companies worldwide access to Philips’ high-tech expertise and experience across eight key business areas of competence (KAEs). All of these areas receive support from a central marketing team, which found themselves faced with new challenges in the changing B2B marketing landscape.
In recent years, the role of such teams has been shifting due to the upsurge in the impact and importance of online and digital. The traditional focus on presenting a company as attractively and persuasively as possible is no longer enough. Now, a quantifiable contribution to corporate growth is increasingly expected, including clear targets in terms of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) that are generated.
Where to start? How to make this giant leap? The marketing team needed both the capacity and specific online expertise to make the necessary transformation to performance-driven marketing on its own. By adding the right interim marketer(s) from Tech to Market, the new team was ready to take on this challenge.
Today’s online marketing field is so broad that you have to pick your team (priorities) wisely. A winning team understands the opportunities of online marketing and is able to prioritize based on business relevance.
The assignment
PInS gave us a tough one: accelerate our digital transformation with hands-on online marketing support as well as strategic advice. The focus should be on reaching out to the businesses and instigate online initiatives and improvements. Behind the scenes, the PInS team worked hard on the ‘online engine’. A super engine generating high quality leads, measured throughout the entire marketing and sales funnel.
"Our issue wasn’t that we couldn’t get content online – we had lots. What we needed was analytical abilities to measure and improve performance, and generate more leads. Tech to Market’s support turned out to be a very important contribution to our marketing team."
Director Marketing & Digital at Philips Innovation Services
The approach
Over the last year ‘digital transformation’ has become a top ten buzzword. What does it actually mean when you’re in marketing? Why should you care? And how to take crucial, but small steps forward? This has been our approach…
PInS already had a respectable online presence, with good attention paid to content. However, this presence was mostly built on somewhat traditional marketing perspectives. Not taking into account all the extra layers, like the use of online data and implementing the right technology stack, that you have to get in place in order to increase online impact.
Step by step, the total process of content creation for online marketing has been upgraded. From optimizing content relevance to keyword research to technical optimization. After having set the fundamental processes for content creation and reporting, the team was able to define specs for a new website. PInS defined the business requirements, the online needs and handed over the product ownership to Tech to Market. We teamed up with the in-house professionals and finished the website in time and ‘on spec’ using Scrum as method for agile project management.
In order to closely involve internal stakeholders in this process, we implemented Google Data Studio dashboards for reporting and performance analysis. Tech to Market now provides the PInS team with monthly reports to drive digital transformation across the company.
The results
Within a year, the PInS marketing team was reaping solid results, including:
- Steady growth in the number of MQL
- Increased website traffic via owned, earned and paid channels
- Improved quality of web traffic (lower bounce rates, higher conversion)
- A smooth digital transformation across the business indicated by higher involvement and activity levels
- Online marketing best practices were created with a positive impact on internal knowledge, inspiration and team drive
"A sales colleague told me they're so busy following up on our marketing leads, they don’t have time to get outside. Well, that’s the type of complaint a Marketing Director likes to hear"
Director Marketing & Digital at Philips Innovation Services
Insights
More content does not equal more impact
Democratizing data drives company wide involvement
Embrace changes in the field of marketing but pick your priorities wisely
Eat, Sleep, Test. Repeat.
Next Steps
'Working with Tech-to-Market helped us realize that content is not enough. If you put a great article online, you’re just sharing great information. Content has to be part of a bigger online strategy in which the customer is enticed to the point of contact. You also need to be able to measure and confirm whether your actions have an impact on business results. Together, we developed an online dashboard to track performance throughout the marketing funnel.'
Director Marketing & Digital at Philips Innovation Services
'Recently, we updated the dashboard to Google Data Studio which ‘democratizes’ data and increases involvement of the Philips Innovation Services experts. Those experts don’t have to wait anymore to hear from us how their pages are doing. They can see for themselves in real time. It’s very stimulating to see how your content is performing versus others! People own the online process more, and that’s good. Marketing is not a department – it’s a verb. We all have a role in promoting our company.'
Director Marketing & Digital at Philips Innovation Services