Balancing Short- and Long-Term Goals

By Sonia David

ANA

Toni Clayton-Hine, CMO, Americas, at Ernst & Young LLC, has spent her career driving growth for major B2B brands, including Xerox and CA Technologies, through storytelling and innovation. We recently caught up with the marketing veteran, who will be speaking at the ANA Masters of B2B Marketing Conference this month, for a preview of her session with Penry Price, VP of marketing solutions at LinkedIn.

Q. You will be presenting on the topic of brand to demand. What will attendees learn from this session and be able to apply to their own day-to-day efforts?

I have some great new research on how marketing contributes to the growth agenda. We are going to talk about how to balance short-term business requirements and long-term branding. This is something that EY is very focused on, and we are excited to talk about how we are leveraging LinkedIn as a brand platform and to drive our targeted demand gen efforts.

Q. How does your marketing team approach the challenge of building long-term brand success while scoring wins in the short-term?

Our main goal is to ensure we have content and tactics that engage across the entire customer lifecycle, and to create a list of KPIs that measure impact based on those different goals. For example, we have an extensive global brand survey that measures awareness and preference by country, business unit, and title, looking at consideration of both clients and non-clients. For short-term goals, we use more typical demand gen KPIs like pipeline and engagement.

Q. How do you think brand to demand will evolve over the next five years?

More usage of technology to target, segment, personalize, and drive better engagement with the brand and the products/offerings.

Q. What career lessons did you put into practice upon joining Ernst & Young?

Like most enterprise B2B companies, EY has historically focused on face-to-face events and sponsorships as their primary marketing activities. Having covered both small/midsize business and B2B2C marketing, in addition to large enterprise, my first goal was to integrate digital marketing and marketing automation to complement our local efforts. With our new marketing automation tools, we are now creating end-to-end, multitouch marketing campaigns that have moved from offering/product first to issue first, industry specific, and insight driven.

Q. What does a B2B marketer need to succeed in today's business landscape?

Have an "always be learning" mentality. There are so many new ways to leverage technology and creative story-telling to connect with current and potential customers. It's important to continually scan the market to see how others are cutting through the clutter and what you could incorporate in your own business to drive greater impact.