Written By: Abhijeet Mukherjee – Head of Marketing: Crayon Software Experts India
- How do you think businesses should now approach their marketing strategies post the pandemic? What has been your strategy for the same?
I think it is all about perspective. In a positive light, the pandemic has presented an opportunity for businesses to reset their marketing strategies. There is hardly anyone in this world, who has not been affected by the pandemic. Hence, business messages, at this point, cannot be strictly profit-oriented. People’s lives and welfare must find priority. It is time organisations and businesses adopt a more human-centric approach in their messaging.
Crayon Software Experts India has its roots in Norway, and hence we generally follow a people first policy. We have now reinforced this as our primary message to our stakeholders, ensuring them that we will be there with them in all their highs and lows, and together we shall navigate this crisis period.
- How have digital platforms played a role in your marketing activities?
Try imagining a pre-digital world, where we all have to observe social distancing? In a world so used to a digitized life, this is simply a nightmare to even think of. It’s a great relief that we have all the digital tools in place today, and communication with anyone is just clicks away.
Earlier, the meeting grounds for businesses were events, trade fairs, partner meets and exhibitions. Suddenly, all of that had to be moved online. Though it was a challenge at first, soon everyone got accustomed to this digital proximity, and today most of the corporate world is working online and remotely.
With the help of digital platforms like social media sites, media websites, different apps, online conferencing and collaboration tools, we are not only accessing information, but we are also getting a chance to keep our communications intact and constant. It is the digital platforms that have helped us to keep our businesses running.
Social media sites like LinkedIn have helped us to keep our stakeholders informed of our every progress. Email marketing, online media activities, online meets and conferences have kept us busy throughout, and we have received a very positive response from our partners and customers. We have also registered high online traffic coming to our website during this pandemic. It proves that people are constantly seeking information online, and hence businesses today cannot ignore the role of online content sharing. I will only say that digitalization is the biggest boon we have, and without it, we all would be lost ships.
- What were the challenges that you faced in the marketing processes?
The overall marketing function across organizations are still trying to find its ground in this pandemic situation. Businesses across verticals are doing scenario planning, conserving cash and slashing all unnecessary or non-critical business expenses. Naturally, this has also affected marketing budgets.
As I have already mentioned, this is a time of crisis, and everyone is keeping their purse strings tight to stay afloat. Hence, a consistent sales-oriented marketing strategy seem to be a sound plan for us. Also, crisis management has become crucial, and we need to send out messages considering the sensitive nature of the pandemic’s impact. We cannot be calling up people to promote our products or solutions without understanding what personal crisis they might be going through on the other end. It is the stark truth of the situation.
And yet, we did navigate through the worst of this phase. We used all possible channels available to convey our message of solidarity with our partners and customers. We have taken out initiatives for mental health wellbeing for our employees, during this time. We have been extremely sensitive, especially during the first few months, with our communication strategy.
What are the different strategies you have undertaken to expand your partner ecosystem?
Partners play a major role in our success to ensure that when organizations plan to move from a traditional business approach to a digital one, we are there to help them throughout their digital transformation journey. We work closely with our partners to identify new advantages, sales opportunities and generate business leads. From the beginning, we carefully guided, supported and trained our partners with different training and certification programs. We ensured that partners are equipped with all the tools and skill sets required to go and pitch in the market.
To attract partners, we use Crayon’s real-time competitive insights platform to enable sales to win more deals, improve marketing performance to break through crowded markets, and inform product and executive strategy to build and launch winning products.
To keep our channel community updated on recent tech innovations, we come up with frequent Webinars, eLearning courses, Knowledge sharing sessions, Newsletters, Spiff programs, Educational & Awareness drives, Certification drives, Social media marketing, Workshops, Virtual Events, etc.
- What are the marketing activities you initiated in the last few months?
Despite all the overall setbacks and slowdown in business across the industry, we at Crayon Software Experts India made sure to keep the business momentum intact by sending out regular updates to the industry on our current business progress, on new collaborations, media coverage, new hiring, awards and recognitions as well as organizing online meets, chats, and conferences. There have also been several recognitions and awards that we have received that testify to the strong marketing role that we played even during the pandemic.
Our go-to-market-strategies these times had seen many initiatives like Webinars, Virtual Customer Round Table’s, Media Led Initiatives, Virtual Partner Round Tables, Content Curation, Digital Campaigns, Partners CRT’s, PR & Corporate Communication, Promos, Sales Enablement Tools, Crayon Thought Leadership Interviews, JGTM with OEMs, lot of Social Media Marketing, Media Visibility being rolled out.
We now also have a completely revamped global website that reflects minimalism and a simplified user experience, with more clarity to the flow of information shared.
We were also adjudged as the Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management (SAM) Managed Services. It is the second consecutive year that Crayon was a Leader in a Gartner Magic Quadrant SAM report, and the second time, Crayon has occupied two of the Global Leader positions.
