Longstanding campaigns. Consistent messaging. Team collaboration.
These are just a few of the things that local tech leaders rely on to make their marketing strategies effective. And they all revolve around the need for brands to pivot, express themselves and make an impact.
For brands, marketing isn’t merely a means of showing the best of what their company has to offer. Rather, it allows them to resonate with their consumers and reach them in places where it matters most.
For SteelSeries Chief Marketing Officer Kathryn Martinez, understanding its target audience is central to perfecting its marketing strategy. That’s why the company is always searching for new social media platforms and experimenting with ad types on apps like TikTok and Snapchat to broaden consumer engagement on a global scale.
Whether you’re working within a well-established tech titan or a spunky startup, having the right marketing strategy can help you reap both short-term and long-term benefits.
Built In Chicago caught up with three local tech leaders to learn how they tackle effective marketing within their own organizations.
What they do: Camelot Illinois is the technological arm behind the Illinois Lottery. The company’s work provides funding for schools, local businesses and special causes.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
Being on the marketing team for a brand like the Illinois Lottery means things are changing every day. With jackpot amounts updating with each roll and new games or instant tickets launching every month, our team produces a lot of content. Aligning on the strategy and plans across all channels is always important, but providing consistent and relevant messaging is something we strive for. This helps us streamline internally but it also ensures consumers are getting clear, consistent messages across the consumer journey.
Before we launch any initiative or campaign, we align on a key look and feel with messaging to support it. Our executions stem from that key visual while allowing for enough flexibility for the communication to change based on where the consumer is in their journey. This allows the right message to reach the consumer based on relevancy while still retaining consistency across the campaign.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
We always start with a solid foundation where all parties are aligned behind the strategy and objectives that are laid out. This can often be challenging when we’re tasked with overcoming several barriers to achieve our business goals and we need to prioritize and align on communication objectives. Marrying our communication priorities with the right media channels to deliver those messages ensures that our marketing efforts are as effective as possible.
Before we launch any initiative or campaign, we align on a key look and feel with messaging to support it.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
Our 2020 holiday campaign was our most recent and successful campaign. We typically get a boost in sales around the holidays as people buy instant tickets as gifts for family and friends. But knowing that there would be hesitancy to shop in stores and that people’s gift budgets may be smaller due to hardships caused by the pandemic, we took a different approach, shifted our strategy and aimed to be a beacon of joy during the holiday season. This came to life in our TV spot, which featured the mischievous yet adorable hamster, Claude. With a new boyfriend moving into Claude’s owner’s apartment, our hamster couldn’t help himself from scratching up his new roommate’s belongings. In the end, the boyfriend repairs their relationship by providing a holiday instant ticket from the Illinois Lottery. We extended this idea across retail, paid and owned channels with the message, “Joy to the scratchers.”
The campaign contributed to a notable increase in holiday instant ticket sales from last year, as we saw our highest sales since the 2017 fiscal year. Our TV spot also performed stronger than in previous years, especially in tracked categories such as “attention-grabbing,” “humorous,” and “unique.”
What they do: iManage’s AI platform enables organizations to understand and activate the information that exists in their business content and communications.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
I have always been passionate about developing a highly collaborative cross-functional team while engendering confidence and enthusiasm in others. So for me, the key to effective marketing starts with a great team, or what I like to call “team-manship.” As a group, marketing offers arguably the most diverse set of talent of any other function, from highly creative designers and relationship-builders in PR to deep analytics of marketing technology. Each individual plays a critical role, and with everyone working together in unison, the team can optimize its impact in the market and within its own business.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
“Outside-in” is our watchword. To be effective, you must listen and understand your customers’ requirements and have the commitment to deliver real business value that drives customer success and measurable business outcomes.
With everyone working together in unison, the team can optimize its impact in the market and within its own business.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
We recently finished rebranding the entire business. It just hit the market this month, so it’s too early to see actual results, but the journey itself has been a roaring success. What made it a success? First, I owe it to market research. When you are steering the ship, you must invest in the data to prove the direction and we did just that. Second, leadership involvement played a large role. Getting senior leaders across the business involved in the journey was critical to our success, so it was this idea of “our brand, our vision” instead of a marketing initiative. Lastly, capturing the hearts and minds of the entire business was tantamount to our success. From the culture survey that shaped our brand archetype to the all-hands readout on the market research, each employee has been part of the journey and can share in its success.
What they do: SteelSeries develops hardware and software for the gaming industry, offering products like headsets, controllers and keyboards.
What does effective marketing look like for your team?
For marketing to be effective, it has to do several things. First, it should build affinity for the brand, meaning that it reinforces the brand’s essence and core values. Second, it should engage and resonate with the intended target audience in meaningful ways. Third, it should have a basis in universal insights that transcend language and borders to give it a global reach. Fourth, it should be 360 degrees so that all of its components collectively surround the consumer to increase impact and scale.
When possible, effective marketing should be based on longstanding, repeatable campaigns, which enable them to build equity with consumers while keeping the new executions fresh and relevant.
What is the key to making your marketing efforts more effective?
The key to making our marketing effective starts by checking what we as marketers know and like against what the target audience says is important; in other words, what the consumer says they like and what’s meaningful to them.
Listening to what consumers say as well as what they don’t say — what they tell us through their consumption habits and practices — can inform insights, messaging and tactics for effective marketing efforts.
But it also has to do with using data to validate what’s working, whether that’s CTRs and view rates in digital advertising, subs and followers on our owned social media platforms, or promotional coverage in-store at key retail and e-tail accounts.
Our marketing is also effective because we’re constantly testing new ideas including new social media platforms, ad types such as short-form ads on TikTok or Snapchat and creative executions like filters on Instagram.
And finally, it’s effective because there is a shared vision throughout the organization of its purpose, the insights that led to it, and an appreciation of how to bring it to life across channels and in countries around the world.
Marketing should build affinity for the brand, meaning that it reinforces the brand’s essence and core values.”
Tell us about a recent campaign or marketing initiative that was particularly successful.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of SteelSeries and, to celebrate, we developed a campaign called “Glory Story“ to tell the history of SteelSeries, including the reason our brand exists, our innovation stories and our strong esports heritage.
The campaign consists of six spots versioned out in ad formats ranging from .06 seconds to 60 seconds depending on where they will be viewed. It was created through the use of our game world characters and translated into over 15 languages, including English, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, Czech and more.
The story was based on insights that are universal to gamers around the world. It engages with and delights consumers while also educating them about who we are as a company and a brand.
And to make it a 360-degree campaign, we overlaid influencer activation, esports tournaments, retail activation, PR components and significant social media builds to make it comprehensive.
We’ve now done YouTube brand lift studies in nine countries, and the campaign has crushed benchmarks set among consumer electronics brands on all measured attributes, including ad recall, brand awareness and brand consideration, which tells us that it’s effective.
