Lack of Digital Adoption- Biggest Challenge in The Industrial/Safety B2B Space: Christopher Foster

Our new blog series, #WhatMarketersDo, gives you a glimpse into the lives of marketers and provides you with useful tips on how to excel in the role. Thus, you get the latest trends and best practices firsthand from marketers in different industries.

This series has been conceived by marketers for marketers and its primary objective is to encourage sharing in the marketing community.

We’re really thankful to all the marketers who took the time to share valuable insights with us. If you’d like to contribute or know of any marketers who’d be kind enough to share their insights, please contact us at TeamSG@clickacademyasia.com.

Now, without any further delay, let’s move on to today’s post where we have interviewed Christopher Foster from UVEX Safety, Australia & New Zealand.

1. Please share something about your current role at UVEX & a short summary of your career leading to this role.

I am the Director of Marketing & Communications at UVEX Safety Australia and New Zealand. As the Marketing and Communications Director, I oversee our marketing strategy, planning, and budgeting. This includes formulating 3-to-5-year marketing plans that can help us align our global objectives with our in-country initiatives.

Prior to working at UVEX, I spent 8 years with Wesfarmers Industrial, where I held positions as a National Sales and Marketing Manager, and Digital Business manager for an e-commerce start-up brand called GotStock rebranded to Blackwoods Xpress.

2. Share with us some difficulties that you faced in your role & how you overcame them.

Over the years, the traditional industrial/safety B2B space has been challenged by a rapidly changing environment and a lack of digital adoption. While this should have been addressed by now, appointment setting and accessibility to customers remain part of the challenge even in the post-Covid world.

To combat this challenge, we integrated Martech software and disciplines around demand generation, thereby, allowing our teams to make the most of available opportunities and provide complete visibility on pathways to conversion. By implementing a CRM, Marketing Auto tool, and analytics tool, we were able to communicate, repeat, and report back on ROI and positive customer experience more quickly.

3. Do you have any MarTech software recommendations that have helped you greatly in your role?

We currently use SEMrush, Hubspot Marketing Professional, Hubspot Sales Professional (CRM), and Commerce Connector to align our distributor partners with customers wishing to make immediate transactions. These tools have helped us greatly in taking our marketing to the next level while allowing us to analyze and track the efficacy of the campaign.

4. What do you think are the top 3 factors that are critical for the success of Digital Transformation?

In my opinion, people, budgeting, and communication go a long way in determining the success of any digital transformation process. In today’s inter-connected world, they have assumed greater importance in the following ways.

1. People – Having skilled digital professionals that can align well across all parts of your business, sales, and operations provides you with greater flexibility to adopt a new and more aggressive approach.

2. Budgeting – Outlining expectations and goals and then understanding the channels, the tools, required talent, and budget accordingly helps you become better prepared for what it takes to succeed.

3. Communication – Continuous communication relating to ROI and what’s worked and what hasn’t will help you zero in on the ideal solution that will help you meet your target quickly and easily.

5. What do you enjoy most about your role?

This may sound a tad cliché but, the people!

Our local marketing team is always positive, driven by results, continually reviewing analytics, and making changes quickly to ensure the right outcomes. It’s always wonderful to see former and existing employees moving onto really great things in their careers on the back of their digital experiences and learnings.

Thank you Chris for taking out time from your busy schedule to share these wonderful insights with our audience. These will be immensely helpful for budding marketers.

Wrapping Up

That is all that we have for you today. Keep a lookout for our next blog as we continue to share what marketers do. We aim to cover marketers from different countries to get global coverage on what marketers do. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any marketing inputs to share with our audience or if you know someone who’d enjoy doing that.

We’ll soon be back with insights from another marketer. Till then, stay tuned!