Agenda

DAY ONE

The Ignite you know and love. Featuring five content tracks, plus a keynote stage, on day one you’ll learn how to optimise your marketing resources, get the very best out of your budget, and get back to the office inspired and ready to go.

DAY TWO

A chance to develop and action ideas you came away with on day one. Choose between a day of workshops, roundtables and head to heads with the two day pass, or a full day of  expert training sessions with the two day pass with training.

Day one tracks

Day two session formats

This is your chance to learn from the very best. Hear from the biggest innovators and disruptors in B2B marketing on how they are changing the game, looking to the future, driving their strategy, enhancing their team’s output and delivering some truly impressive campaign results.

This stage will deep-dive into what’s new in B2B, what’s coming soon and how we can shape what great marketing looks like in the future. But innovation doesn’t just rely on new tech or solutions; this stage will look at how marketers can use new ideas, thinking or processes to transform results.

Marketing is acknowledged as the primary driver of business growth by progressive companies - be that net new customer acquisition, territorial expansion, or product/service launches. This stage explores how marketing can maximise its growth impact, using the skills & technologies at its disposal.

How do you create and deliver great B2B marketing campaigns? That’s the question that this stage will seek to answer, examining the key elements required to generate outstanding results and maximise effectiveness, and exploring inspirational case studies and testimonials.

B2B marketers are more brand-focused and savvy than ever before, with buyers expecting consumer-style emotional resonance, empathy and credibility. This stage will examine what B2B marketers need to do to meaningfully appeal to their many audiences whilst balancing the needs of brand and demand gen.

Marketing leaders have never had a clearer opportunity to influence corporate strategy. This stage explores the challenges that leaders face to not only succeed in delivering excellent marketing, but in working with C-suite peers to drive their organisations forward.

Training courses are included in the two day pass with training. There will be three all-day training courses running concurrently on day two. This is your opportunity to boost your knowledge of core B2B topics, taught by seasoned experts. Choose from ABM essentials, content marketing and B2B copywriting.

Discuss experiences and learning points with a small group of peers, creating a mixing pot of unique perspectives. You’ll have equal standing in the discussion, and come away inspired and ready to develop new ideas.

Take part in a problem-solving workshop with peers and experts. You’ll be identifying challenges, generating ideas, making decisions, and developing actionable solutions to bring back to the office.

This is a chance to learn about a specific hot B2B topic. You'll have an hour and a half to learn from one of our experts, think university lecture style. Plus, there will be audience involvement and a Q&A.

Sessions and schedule

More sessions to be announced soon.

9:15 AM

Antonia’s session draws from her book Transforming the B2B Buyer Journey which challenges the traditional funnel, offering a new way of thinking that accommodates the many nuances in buyer behaviours. Attendees will get insight into reappraising channels and content according to buyer needs, and tips on assessing brand, gauging ROI, choosing/using tech and resetting the relationship with sales.

You will learn:

  • New way of flexing strategy, content, channels and metrics according to buyer needs
  • How to work through what your brand is doing for you at each stage and ROI aligned to buyer process
  • Ideas about technology, relationship with sales and how to improve your own skills  
9:45 AM

Drawing on his eight-plus years as an analyst with SiriusDecisions and Forrester, along with the reams of data he and his research team at 6sense have been collecting and analyzing, Cunningham lays out a vision for dramatically more productive B2B revenue teams - teams that are aligned on the three critical axes and powered by practical applications of AI. In this session, you will learn what has gone wrong in B2B, how AI fixes it, and what the future looks like powered by AI.

You will learn:

  • What are the three axes of B2B revenue production
  • Why simply getting better at status quo processes won’t lead to alignment
  • Why AI is the key to moving from information overload to intelligent alignment
  • How AI underwrites the three critical axes of alignment
  • A vision of future revenue team productivity

 

10:15 AM

Sales enablement was identified as the #1 trend in B2B Marketing’s 2023 trend tracker research – and in the context of fluctuating economic headwinds and associated uncertainty, that’s hardly surprising. But although it’s great for marketing to be in demand by the sales team, are marketers actually getting sales enablement all wrong? Is there more to sales enablement than just another same-old content asset, or bottom-of-the-funnel gimmick? Is it, in fact, an opportunity for marketers to think more strategically about added value throughout the funnel? And if so, what does that look like?

These were some of the questions that were addressed by members of Propolis (B2B Marketing’s community intelligence platform) in our spring swarm to address a pressing issue facing the industry. In this session, we’ll reveal why marketers need to rethink sales enablement to achieve its true potential, and how to maximise the impact of both sales and marketing teams. And we’ll reveal how to make this happen, with practical tips and lessons from the real world of best in class sales enablement.
We’ll discuss:

  • Marketing’s role in enabling and driving new thinking around sales enablement
  • How to achieve sales and marketing alignment
  • What activities and behaviours to stop doing, and which to accelerate
  • How to set realistic goals and achievable objectives
  • What to do next, and where to begin
10:45 AM
Morning break
11:30 AM

The pace of change and the wave of new technologies it brings can leave marketing departments scrabbling to use a very new shiny tool that appears. This can lead to a feeling of constantly playing catchup and a messy, disconnected, patchwork approach, both with technology and more broadly. The key to avoiding this is to “Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution” We do this by thinking big and creating a coherent end to end user experience, the Tangible Hypothesis, then starting small and testing often. The Tangible Hypothesis helps the Marketing Department engage with the rest of your organisation, breaking down silos and helping to bring about cultural change.

Key takeaways:

  • How to navigate the current wave of disruptive technological change
  • The importance of user centred design and a tangible hypothesis
  • Thinking big, starting small, testing often and scaling fast

The Community Index is the latest feature in B2B Marketing’s community for B2B marketers – Propolis. This index surveys thousands of the world’s most senior B2B marketers, with the aim of understanding more about their team structures, budgets, ROI, actual contract value, and performance metrics. Using our ‘always-on’ approach, this tool provides near real-time data on the marketing metrics that matter to every marketing leader.

Join this session with David Rowlands and Nick Eades to understand more about how The Community Index works, and what we will be able to learn from the very first data we collect.

This session is a must-attend for anyone looking to:

  • Understand how much budget most B2B marketers actually have to work with.
  • Get clarity on which services, strategies and technologies marketing teams are spending their money on (and which they’re not).
  • Discover what the average customer lifetime value is for B2B organisations.

If your budgets have been slashed, reduced or frozen and you are facing an internal battle to champion the value of marketing then this session is for you. In this fireside chat, Cara draws on her extensive client side experience to look at how we can all adapt and adopt new approaches to help meet your challenges.  We will be looking at how short-term tactics can help you change from being a cost service center to becoming a long term growth partner in the business.

You will learn:

  • Why marketers need to take a pragmatic approach today more than ever!
  • Why we need to be REALLY clear on the role of marketing in our organisations and why a cookie cutter approach just won’t work 
  • What exactly is pragmatic marketing?
  • Why is it a challenge? 
  • Top tips that you can deploy tomorrow

Our organisations are dense with data and information – some of it much loved and much used, some of it inaccessible, forgotten and gathering virtual dust. AI provides an opportunity to bring this intel to life in B2B brand building.

Can AI re-animate your data and provide useful insights from virtual audiences? Can we use AI to streamline processes around brand development? Could AI make data accessible and useful to everyone in your organisation?

Join two of Bray Leino’s leading digital specialists to explore how AI can realise the hidden potential of what you’ve already got, helping you make better brand decisions more quickly.

After our talk you will know how AI can:

  • Provide different ways to navigate and make sense of information
  • Be a proxy for customers, providing useful approximations of their needs
  • Help streamline decision-making in brand and communications

Intent data may not be new but using it effectively isn’t easy. We’ll show you how.

Join Carmen Overton, Global Head of Growth Marketing at Atos, and Andy Johnson Head of Client Strategy (Hut 3) to see how intent data was used to reveal opportunities in key accounts and prospects in a combined ABM and new logo initiative. The result? €249 million of pipeline and a deal value of €71 Million.

And hear from Ruth Oakey, Global Marketing Director at Eckho who will take you through their demand programme, in which intent is being used to identify key new markets and opportunities.

These two real-life examples will demonstrate how your marketing team can use intent data to achieve phenomenal results.

This session will give you insight into:

  • How to extract the value of intent data from campaign activity and align it with sales (no more working in siloes!)
  • How to repurpose campaign material across buyer stages within multiple campaigns
  • How to use ‘intent engines’ to grow opportunities in new markets
  • How you can use intent data to create more opportunities than traditional demand/lead generation campaign activity.
12:05 PM

Is it a skillset? Is it a job title? Or is it a new piece of martech?... or is it something else entirely?! RevOps is being widely hyped as the future for many B2B organisations, offering many and varied opportunities and advantages. But what exactly is it?! How does it work? Who should be responsible, and (most important of all) what does it mean for the existing marketing team and leadership? Not for the first time, there’s a chasm between awareness and understanding in the B2B community, and consequently we’ll be looking to address these very questions in this session. It will provide you with everything you need to know to understand new aspect of B2B, and whether it’s something that may be right for you and your organisation. 

"I can't hire, I can't fire." This is the very real challenge facing managers and leaders in organisations today. The double whammy of a headcount freeze + anyone who leaves won’t be replaced . And yet the same demands for growth and innovation are ever present…

So, where does the opportunity lie?

The goal for this session is to help delegates think about - what is the experience we are trying to create in order to maximise productivity/ performance?

In this session we'll...

  • Explore the current reality of teamwork in a post-Covid world - virtual, hybrid, distributed, at a desk, out in the field - we want to meet you where you are and hear from you.
  • Share an overview of The Achieve System with examples of how Achieve concepts can be applied to build happier/ healthier more productive teams and organisations
  • Incremental versus explosive growth? We'll walk delegates through a "connect to possibility" exercise.
  • Live Q+A sharing top tips for getting your team primed for growth in 2023/ 24

It’s no secret that generating demand and pipeline is becoming increasingly difficult.

The B2B buyer journey is complex and fraught with personal risk, B2B buyers are increasingly doing their research ‘out of sight’ of solutions providers and vendors face an intense battleground for share of voice and share of wallet. 

This session will reveal how to rethink your demand generation for the modern era, including:

  • Simplifying the buyer experience
  • Account scoring vs lead scoring as predictive models
  • How to harness the power of first party buyer insight and account intelligence alongside intent data
  • Bridging the gap between digital and human selling
     

This session explores how, through brand resilience, organisations can enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction, employee engagement, and reputation, ultimately leading to sustainable growth. Benefits for delegates: a greater understanding of brand resilience, its components, and a framework that they can follow to assess how strong is their own brand resilience.

You will learn:

1. Why brand resilience is critical in a volatile environment

2. Brand resilience is a key driver for consumer satisfaction, employee engagement and brand reputation

3. Framework to follow when assessing your brand

4. Actionable insights on how to shape greater brand resilience in your organisation

If you’ve ever waited for a copywriter to respond to a brief, you’ll understand why marketers are so excited about ChatGPT’s ability to generate lifelike prose on virtually any subject. In seconds. For free. But can an AI chatbot really write effective B2B marketing content? Yes… and no. Copywriting specialist David McGuire will clarify exactly what bot-written copy can do for you (and what it can’t) as well as provoking some thoughts about other areas of your marketing content where generative AI might just be about to change everything. He’ll also share the results of a test where human writers, ChatGPT, and AI-writer combinations all tackled the same B2B writing task – and reveal whether this synopsis was written by a person, or a bot.

You will learn:

- The strengths and drawbacks of AI-powered writing

- Where ChatGPT fits into your own content strategy

- How human and AI writers can work together

- Key pitfalls to avoid with AI-generated marketing copy

The big key takeaway for this session is:

To have better clarity about whether AI-powered copywriting could be right for your marketing

 

12:40 PM

What is needed to run a successful B2B marketing campaign? There are arguably several components that make up the foundations of a winning campaign, but at the heart of it should be quality data, efficient processes and end-to-end transparency. And this can be layered with intent data to provide an even deeper understanding of potential buyers. In this discussion, we will be sharing their industry insights on how to execute revenue-generating campaigns, what works and what doesn’t, and how technology can enable better management of partners and ultimately better results.

AI is already taking over some of the tasks delivered by in-house content teams, saving time, effort and money. At this rate, AI Assistants might soon feel like team members. 

Both exciting and concerning, right? But when we’re heading for a world of mass hyper-personalised content how else might small B2B marketing teams keep up with the big boys? 

Content manager Ben Lee and his team have been experimenting with AI at Bidwells for nine months, ensuring that tools such as ChatGPT are working FOR them, not against them. 

Ben shares his learnings from delivering AI content internally and externally, and argues that small B2B teams should think bigger NOW by fully exploring the new opportunities presented by AI. 

You will learn about:

  • How AI tools can help small teams operate like big departments 
  • How content creation can be streamlined using transcription tools and ChatGPT
  • Why you should think twice before pushing the button  
  • How to use AI to share knowledge and frameworks across your content team 
  • Where to allocate skills and resources alongside AI
  • Where to invest your own time in preparing for the AI future

Marketing evolves constantly, strategies and teams need to be agile, focused and resilient. How do you inspire your people to deliver their best work and, innovate? How do you convince your senior stakeholders as to the value of your marketing investments and returns?

Jordan has had extensive experience managing miniscule to pretty hefty marketing budgets, with small and large teams with varying skill sets. Success lies in having the right objectives and the right approach in building a team that can liberate content, bring your proposition to life and drive growth. 

Once you have set your strategy how do you ensure that you remain focused and above all relevant with key influencers and media? Your internal stakeholders? And most importantly your team?

Jordan will share her insights on what KPI's you need to identify to deliver optimal performance across your marketing metrics, outputs and productivity, whilst tuning up the perfect team to help you innovate and answer the ‘so what’ on ROI with the exec. Leaving you time to breathe and watch your marketing grow.

You will learn:

  • Start with your Strategy. How to set the right objectives.
  • How to achieve buy-in from your key-stakeholders and those lovely sales guys (they are your friends).
  • The importance of investing in your team to build competency and passion. Happy teams live the dream.

In this interview, the CEO of FKG Dentaire, Didier Devaud, will share his insights and experience as a rare combination of both a CEO and a former CMO.

The interview will be structured as a conversation with questions sourced from Propolis members, and Didier will discuss what makes for excellence in a CMO, the qualities he looks for in his CMO and marketing team, and the role of brand and technology in his expectations. He will also address the high turnover rate of CMOs and discuss potential gaps between the functions.

The interview aims to encourage audience engagement and questions, with ample time provided at the end for discussion. This interview is relevant for senior management across all sectors, markets, and regions, as well as for C-Suite executives, aspiring marketers at all levels, and those seeking professional growth and development opportunities.

You will learn:

  • A deeper understanding of critical CMO skill-sets required to perform this ever-demanding role: primacy of critical thinking above tactics.
  • How to identify possible gaps in expectations between the two roles.
  • The significance of brand to both CEO and CMO to achieve highest levels of professional performance.
  • The significance of CRM, ABM, AI going forward.
  • How to build a marketing team to cover the ever expanding marketing remit.
  • How to ensure alignment with sales.
1:10 PM
Networking lunch
2:00 PM

As we sink into the realm of "do more with less" in B2B Marketing, the shiny sirens of generative AI content are all around us. But the way to rule your content kingdom is not artificial. It is a hybrid of humanity and technology that can effectively attract, engage and pull prospects over the line to become your customers.  But what does this art and science B2B marketer look like and how can it make our content smarter, more meaningful and powerful? That's exactly what B2B marketing pro Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing will share in this session. You'll learn how to wear the new crown of content and rule your B2B marketing Kingdom in 2023 with trusted, best answer content that is data informed and optimized for the experiences buyers are looking for.

Google “B2B TikTok” and you won’t find a lot. Head to TikTok and look for B2B companies and guess what? You won’t find a lot. So why did Colt Technology Services decide to expand its presence there? Because they saw where they could add value. Jake will share how Colt developed a bespoke approach to the channel to receive on average 1k views per video, without one lip-sync or viral dance in sight!

You will learn:

  1. How to lean into the unknown and try new things
  2. Why using diverse people will increase your viewability
  3. How to create low-cost high-impact content

 

Sales and marketing misalignment is a persistent problem that costs organisations an average of 10% in annual revenue (IDC). According to Forrester, B2B organisations with aligned revenue engines grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. So what’s the problem?

In this interactive talk, Dan Swift taps his 20 years of sales experience to provide marketing professionals with a clear understanding of how to align with sales leadership to drive execution in the field.

The results? A connected and empowered enterprise that breaks through noisy industry chatter and transforms the organisation into one that buyers want to do business with.

You will learn:

  • How to bridge the alignment gap between marketing and sales
  • Strategies for engaging and activating sales leaders and their teams, including incentives, training, and leadership
  • How your sales team is the key to realizing ROI on your content and event investments
  • The real role of technology and data in driving a successful go-to-market strategy
  • How to extend brand reach in a measurable and meaningful way—and how not to

Key Takeaway:
Everything you need for internal alignment and explosive external growth is already within your grasp—no new expensive technologies or painful process rip-and-replaces necessary.

We’ve become confused!

We are living in times of consumer, business and marketing crisis. We are either swaying towards cutting marketing budgets, turning to short-term activations to meet sales targets or chasing the latest shiny and new metaverse technology. Now is the time to bring clarity back to marketing and helping businesses and their brands grow, focussing on the fundamentals, not the fads!

In this session for senior strategic marketers, Robyn Pierce from The Croc will challenge your assumptions on your annual paid media investment and guide you with proven principles on how to build more bang for your buck.

Buyers have changed – and so has the buying cycle. That mean lead funnels are more complex than ever before, and more easily prone to slowdown or blockage, with budget holders finding numerous excuses to stall, procrastinate or even just abandon their plans. What’s more, the current economic climate is only acerbating this trend, reducing confidence in new investments, let alone to make bold business decisions.

So what does good funnel management look like in 2023? What can marketing teams do to maintain the flow of leads to sales, and re-energise buyers who may have lost confidence or motivation? Most important of all, what can marketing leaders do to maximise the ability of sales teams to convert and drive revenue? That’s what we’ll be discussing in this roundtable, featuring first hand insights from Barbara Massolin, Principal Account Based Marketing Manager AEC, North Europe from Autodesk, plus Propolis Ambassador and serial B2B CMO Georgie Gilmore and Helen Kensett, CRO at CogniClick. We’ll discuss:

  • What are the most common causes of pipeline congestion, and how do you overcome them?
  • What new behaviours are buyers exhibiting in 2023, and how can leaders align marketing and sales activities with these?
  • How can you identify and prioritise the hottest or best leads and ensure sales teams are able to focus on these?
  • What role can interactive content plan in accelerating pipeline, and how is this different to traditional formats?
2:35 PM

If the marketeers of the past could see the tools that we have today to help us do our jobs they would be in heaven – either that or they would run for the hills overwhelmed with it all.

There is no denying that the ever-evolving marketing technology and service provision has so much to offer and continues to do so, but how do we, B2B marketeers, navigate our way through all these solutions? Unless you’ve got an unlimited budget -come on who has that?- you must prioritise according to your business needs.

This talk will go through the importance of being true to the phrase that “marketing is the heart of the business” by doing a complete assessment before jumping into bed with the best-looking solution. It will then look at building a roadmap that enables you to run projects and campaigns whilst building a sustainable marketing function. Finally, implementation cannot be done without advocates – therefore this talk will also give hints and tips throughout on how you can effectively work with your stakeholders to continue to move forward.

You will learn:

  • How to assess fit for a new marketing tool/tech for the business.
  • How to build a roadmap that enables a sustainable marketing function
  • Winning advocates to help your roadmap succeed

This session will draw on Dan's experience as Marketing Director at Demica: beginning with a team of one (himself) and growing to eight people and seven figure budgets in two years. Dan will share the key lessons he learned about how to bring people into a team, create a high-performing culture and show the rest of the business the value of marketing and the respect it deserves.    

You will learn:

  • How to unify a team around purpose
  • How to build marketing credibility in a sceptical organisation
  • How to make instant impact
  • How to justify the "long" as well as the "short"

According to the IPA’s Bellwether Report, brands’ investment in market research is in decline. Many observers have questioned whether the much of the research that is carried out is ill thought out and not helping achieve customer orientation. 

However, it is these nuggets of insight we get from being oriented towards the customer that, when combined with the position of the client in the market, help to deliver a successful campaign where the messaging is timely and resonates with the audience needs. 

Featuring a live client Q&A, this session is hosted by Editor-in-chief at Marketing Week, Russell Parsons, and features Corporate Development Director at Arden University, Caroline Evans and Account Director at ReallyB2B, Clare Rhodes. They will share how Arden University and ReallyB2B worked together to turn customer research into valuable pipeline and new business revenue. 

You will learn:

  • How to use customer research to identify and emerge into new markets
  • Simple yet effective research methods you can use in your business
  • The principles of DiSC profiling and how it can improve your segmentation
3:10 PM
Coming soon

Customer marketing is an often untapped loyalty, advocacy and growth stream in B2B marketing, with companies now beginning to understand the huge opportunity existing customers hold for their business. I'll present and discuss on creating, building and executing a customer marketing growth strategy, the areas to focus on and how departmental cross-collaboration can help your business thrive.
You'll learn:

  • How to build a successful customer marketing plan 
  • The keys area to focus on for your customer marketing strategy 
  • Channels, outputs and departments to consider 
  • How to build metrics and ROI into your activities

Marketing has always been on the forefront of the “new and shiny” be it technology, strategy or methodologies. Although exciting, too often the hype and vanity matrix take away from the core of marketing i.e., to create and drive awareness and ROI for the organisation.
 
Content is King but more often than not content is created without clear purpose or a plan for consumption or distribution. And when it comes to distribution the buzz words take over, terms like ABM and Intent are thrown around without understanding how to truly leverage them and build programs that keep the CMO, the CRO and the CFO happy at the same time. 

This session will cut through the jargon and help create a clearer understanding of content strategy from creation to syndication and help create clear roadmaps to higher RoI and a robust funnel- leveraging account and intent based marketing tools and strategies, ensuring they deliver consistent and dependable value.

Join us for an insightful session as Hotwire UK CEO Jeremy Lucas and Global Head of Data Matt Oakley delve into the transformative power of emotive data in PR and marketing. In this new era of dynamic communications, they'll explore how real-time analytics can fuel adaptive storytelling, creating conversational campaigns that pivot and move with audiences. They'll discuss how this innovative approach anticipates audience interests, crafting messages that resonate deeply and drive engagement.

The session will also feature a panel discussion with clients from Honeywell and GoCardless, who will share their experiences and successes in leveraging data in their marketing and communications strategies.

3:40 PM
Afternoon break
4:15 PM

What constitutes a world-class B2B experience for the C-Suite of tomorrow? In this keynote, Merkle  B2B’s Senior Account Director Kayvon Mesbah and Senior Research Executive, Kim Arend, represent these future decision-makers. They will break down the need-to-know insights from their major global research study; The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index; and uncover how to think differently and win business with the C-Suite of tomorrow, today.  

Why is this important? The B2B landscape is constantly evolving, and Merkle B2B’s latest research shows that 49% of B2B decision-makers are made up of Millennials, an increase of 17% year on year, as well as a significant increase in the number of Gen Zs influencing buying decisions. These generational cohorts are the leaders of today, and tomorrow, and their expectations are on the rise. So what makes them tick? 

Join Kayvon and Kim as they delve into the findings from Merkle B2B’s survey of over 3,600 B2B buyers, distil what matters most to these generations, and where they are currently underserved (therefore providing you with further opportunity to win their business).  

In this session they’ll:

  • Reveal the specific decision drivers that are essential to winning over these influential cohorts  
  • Highlight opportunities to close the performance gap 
  • Explore the impressive commercial outcomes of performing well against these decision drivers 
  • Examples of brands who are delivering against millennial expectations

Join us and understand how you can evolve your customer experience to win-over the C-Suite of tomorrow.

5:30 PM
Networking drinks reception
8:55 AM

Please note that this training day will run from 9am to 4pm and is only available to two day + training ticket holders.

Before COVID struck, lots of B2B marketers were using content marketing to fill the top of the funnel. As we continue to get to grips with a new marketing landscape, content marketing has a new purpose beyond brand awareness, to building trust and loyalty. For many B2B brands, it’s now critical to demonstrate brand purpose, support the customer experience and develop long-term customer relationships. 

Content marketing is at the heart of most successful B2B campaigns but if “you’re not changing behavior for the good of the business in some way, you are just producing content, not content marketing,” says Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute. We explore what it takes to produce effective content marketing and what you can do to avoid the most common challenges – cutting through the content overload, only thinking tactics and delivering to internal requests without having a joined-up strategy.

In this practical interactive training course, we’ll reset your content marketing strategy to make sure it aligns to shifting business goals and the current pain points and challenges of your target and existing customers. We’ll help set your brand apart from the competition and add value to your customers, your sales team and your business.

What you will learn on this content marketing course:

  • Set clearly defined, achievable content marketing goals
  • Auditing what’s working and where you might need to make some improvements 
  • How to reset your content marketing strategy  
  • Using customer and business insight to find your sweet spot 
  • Why you need to understand your customer pain points and revisit them regularly 
  • Personalising your content to your target customer 
  • How content marketing can support the entire customer journey from top of funnel all the way through to adding value to customer relationships
  • Why there has never been a more important time to develop sales and customer enablement for a truly digital sales journey 
  • How to adapt content for account-based marketing 
  • Examine the activities needed to support your content marketing – from asset creation to distribution, tools and tech, and internal briefing so your content marketing meets your goals.

Please note that this training day will run from 9am to 4pm and is only available to two day + training ticket holders.

Done correctly, ABM is a hugely effective sales and marketing strategy.

In fact, 87% of marketers using account-based marketing say it delivers the highest ROI in their mix.

This in-person account-based marketing training course will provide you with a highly practical overview of how ABM works, what it looks like in practice, and how to adopt and deliver it successfully in your business.

The ABM Essentials course is one our most established courses with over 250 delegates successfully trained by Faculty ABM expert Robert Norum over the last three years. ABM Essentials does exactly what is says on the tin. It will give you a complete walk-through of all the fundamentals that you will need to get ABM embedded in your organisation’s approach to marketing & sales. 

What you will learn

The ABM Essentials will give you a complete grounding in ABM and how to get it up and running in your organisation. You’ll learn:

  • How to pitch ABM to your organisation
  • How to get executive buy-in and sales engagement
  • How to segment and select accounts
  • The six-stage ABM process for 1:1, 1:Few and 1:Many ABM programmes
  • How to use research & insight effectively
  • How to develop your strategy & messaging
  • How to measure your ABM programme effectively

Please note that this training day will run from 9am to 4pm and is only available to two day + training ticket holders.

The ability to write with impact – and to give objective feedback on written content – is a key skill for B2B marketers at all levels.

Where most effective B2B content formats are text-based, better writing means better results. And this course will give you confidence and skills – with B2B-specific examples – to take your writing to a new level.

In this practical in=person training day, leading B2B copywriter David McGuire will share a clear, structured approach to writing and reviewing professional B2B marketing copy – creating content that delivers on your objectives.

David is creative director at Radix Communications, the UK’s largest copywriting agency dedicated to B2B marketing content. He writes for B2B brands like Microsoft, Oracle and Mitsubishi on subjects as diverse as engineering processes, human resources transformation and cybersecurity risk.

At Radix, part of David’s role is to help mentor and train the next generation of professional B2B copywriters – giving him a practical, workshop approach. He’s also an experienced presenter, hosting both the UK’s national copywriting conference and the “Good Copy, Bad Copy” podcast.

What you’ll learn: Key skills to tackle five essential B2B content formats

This is no generic writing course. With 15 years’ dedicated B2B writing experience, David has created this course to address the real issues B2B marketers face – like how to:

  • Write with authority and power, and avoid common B2B mistakes
  • Make technical subjects clear and compelling – without “dumbing down”
  • Obtain better quality content from stakeholders and writers
  • Succeed in popular B2B content formats, including blog posts, emails, and web copy
  • Humanise your brand through smart use of voice and tone

You’ll leave with an armful of practical tips you can apply straight away – that are nothing like the English lessons we learned at school.

9:10 AM

Social media, political tribalism, increasingly sophisticated online advertising, a pandemic and more have combined in recent years to create an entirely new creature - something we're coining The Brave New Buyer. This buyer: wants to buy on their terms (gone are the days of the cold outreach email); relies on peer advocacy and online reviews; is sceptical when it comes to brand communications; and wants to buy from brands that aren't having a negative impact on the world - whether that's socially or ecologically.

So, how are B2B marketers adapting their strategies to meet the needs of this new buyer? Kicking off Day Two of Ignite London 2023, we'll be hosting a community sprint - (A programme of discussions in which marketers collaborate to find solutions to a key industry challenge) - to find out just that. We'll be asking how you're evolving your marketing strategies, the challenges you're facing, and the opportunities that lie ahead. Post-event, we'll create a detailed report, providing a complete picture of how B2B is responding to the Brave New Buyer, and perhaps where a little help might be needed. All Swarm attendees will get access to this report, which includes insights from the day, and further survey analysis.

 

Interested in learning more about Propolis? Find out more here!  

 

10:35 AM
Morning break
11:00 AM

Marketing is now the most complex department inside a modern organisation. Every day, technology moves on, people learn more skills and our audiences change. That’s why you can no longer be good for just that moment. Continuous improvement is the only way to keep yourself ahead of the competition, attract talent and reach your prospects effectively.

Want to be better, faster?

In this workshop, our very own Propolis expert and COO of award-winning consultancy Intermedia Global, Karla Wentworth, starts from the roots of continuous improvement methodologies and takes you on a journey through to creating the culture for yourselves. A practical and interactive session, you will leave with some of the knowledge Karla shares with her clients and understand your next steps to continual improvement inside your organisation.

You will learn:

  • What continuous improvement is
  • A brief history of some methodologies
  • How to identify the root cause and not be distracted by the symptom
  • Examples of fantastic improvements
  • The realisation of just how much better your department can be
  • Some tools to start your improvement journey

This is an interactive session where audience participation is mandatory and only those who really want to improve should attend.

What will you learn from this workshop?

  • Feel empowered to influence positive change within their organisation
  • Know the questions to ask to better understand their organisations sustainability strategy
  • Feel confident in approaching sustainability from a marketing perspective
  • Feel confident in creating credible, compliant sustainability communications, and knowing when to push back
  • Know where to go to upskill

How to create a value-added Marketing Strategy through CX Today, many companies use value selling (Value Based Consultation) to interact with their audiences on a deeper level. But, imagine the impact on the sales process if marketing was leveraging the same concepts that makes value selling so compelling for buyers? 

What if marketers could harness the same benefits and impact metrics in their top-of-funnel activities? Imagine the improvement that would have on lead quality, MQL and SQL conversion, pipeline, and ultimately revenue? 

It is a customer-centric approach that aims to ultimately deliver higher satisfaction by prioritising the buyer's and customers’ needs and goals.

A value-added marketing strategy highly stresses a company’s desire to serve its clients and help them achieve their goals. In this session we will explore the 8 components required to create your own Value Marketing Framework and the tools to get started straight away.

In this “funshop” (think workshop but much more fun!) you will join us on a journey to discover…

  • The distinction between Fixed and Growth mindsets
  • Where and how fixed and growth mindsets show up for themselves, as leaders, and in others
  • What Growth marketing really means!
  • How a Growth mindset relates to and impacts Growth marketing including AI / automation.

So, join us and be ready to learn, apply, model and encourage relevant Growth mindset approaches every day for yourself, with your peers, teams, clients and customers to make a real difference.

12:30 PM
Networking lunch
1:30 PM

Change is never easy. As the adage goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink it”. The same applies to data. Most organisations have made significant data investments, but that often hasn’t led to their people actually using the data and generating the potential value from it.

Becoming data-driven requires an organisational focus on cultural change. Unless you secure buy-in and gain support for your ideas from people at all levels of your organisation, big ideas never seem to take hold or have the impact you want.

If you're eager to harness the power of your customer data across your whole business, but are struggling to make the progress and reap the rewards you want, this 45-minute training taster session is perfect for you. 

You can even apply the 7 steps to gaining buy-in to your marketing strategy, or other activity that requires cultural change.

This taster session will cover the following 7 key steps to drive this cultural change. You’ll learn top tips on how to;

  1. Formulate a clear, but “draft” vision
  2. Gain key Stakeholders buy-in
  3. Find your C-suite Data Champion
  4. Deliver quick wins to demonstrate the value and build support
  5. Make data easy to use and understand
  6. Build your team of Data Advocates
  7. Communicate to continue to generate support and inspire confidence


What you’ll gain:

  • Tools to help you think clearly about your own situation 
  • Understanding a framework that's proven to drive results
  • Ideas to help you overcome your own sticking points

The next-generation of decision makers are here. And they've come to expect much more from brands and the buying process.
So, how can you engage and deliver value to this modern decision maker?

In this session, you'll be the first to hear about exclusive research into who the modern decision makers are and what they want, from Twogether and the Financial Times. We'll delve into their dynamic landscape, and you'll be able to ask questions about your own strategies to engage this new buyer with our panel and peers.

You'll have the opportunity to:

  • Meet the modern decision maker, and understand what's shaping their decisions
  • Debate the implications for marketers and how this will impact the future of your brand experience
  • Discuss the role of creativity, content, and media to engage them

Have you ever been asked ‘What’s the exam question here?’, or needed to get to the heart of a complex problem? In this session, I’ll share three techniques to help you do just that. You’ll be honing your ethnography/observation skills, adding to your development kit box and using experience design to unearth the illusive ‘wow factor’ we’re often asked for. You’ll apply these techniques to a challenge we all have in common. Bring your curiosity and prepare for some experimentation in this highly hands-on workshop.

You will learn:

  • Three hands-on techniques for creative problem solving: Ethnography/observation. Product/service development. Experience design.
  • You’ll practice these to solve a challenge set during the workshop.

“78% of businesses that use social selling outperform those that don’t.” - LinkedIn

Social Selling isn't a new discipline. LinkedIn has dominated the topic since 2012, yet few companies have deployed successful programs that generate meaningful revenue. Unfortunately, the gulf between consistently positive data that demonstrates the power of a strong social selling program and the execution of one has barely narrowed over the past decade.

That changes today.

In this masterclass, Numentum Founder & CEO Dan Swift taps his experience launching LinkedIn's own social selling business and Sales Navigator platform to provide marketing professionals with a clear framework to partner cross-functionally to deploy, execute, and maintain an effective program.

The results? Digitally empowered employees that are able to provide better buyer experiences that foster customer loyalty, increased customer lifetime value, and drive long-term growth.

You will learn:

  • How to get all employees on brand and on message on LinkedIn to present a consistent and cohesive brand image to potential buyers.
  • How to help employees understand their individual role in the revenue engine and inspire them to proactively post on LinkedIn to educate, influence, and attract buyers.
  • How technology, content, and employee mindset play an equal role in effective program execution.
  • How to think about internal relationship capital and how it negates the need for outdated and ineffective outreach techniques.
     
2:20 PM

Join us for an exciting session focused on exploring the future of marketing ROI. You'll hear from marketing leaders as they share their challenges, needs, and pain points and how they are overcoming those to drive world-class ROI! Discover how these leaders successfully proved the need to invest in marketing by aligning their communities and experiences to their company's strategic business needs. 

Attendees are encouraged to share their own business challenges, pain points, and needs for a chance to win a fantastic prize!  Marketing leaders will provide direct feedback, valuable insights, and actionable takeaways to help you achieve your marketing goals and drive ROI.

You will learn:

  • Marketing leaders will provide direct feedback
  • We’ll provide valuable insights and actionable takeaways to help you achieve your marketing goals
  • Tips and tricks to promote experiences and drive ROI

It’s never been more important to ask the biggest question in marketing – am I selling to the right people? And with markets in flux, it's vital we think about how to best evaluate and prioritise audiences, in order to deliver the best results for our business. So, what do we do to be more effective?

In this roundtable, James O’Flaherty, Head of Global Strategy at Just Global, will start the discussion with a short presentation covering key areas to address for better audience selection, and an example of how your ideal customer profile could be adjusted to recognise the reality of current market conditions.

Topics for discussion will include:

  • Creating alignment between different teams in your business to reach the most appropriate audience.
  • The biggest challenges faced when addressing your ICP.
  • The most effective tools to use to work through the stages.
  • How you need to think about evolving customer journeys and getting more from existing content.

In this workshop, you'll learn how to unlock unconventional marketing insights using modern data and creative thinking using real world case-studies. We'll explore how insights can be found in unexpected places such as car parks, rooftops, and even cocktails. By merging data with creativity, you'll discover new ways to elevate your marketing campaigns and achieve greater success. Join us to discover how modern insight-led data can enable your next marketing campaign and take your marketing to new heights.

 

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