By Business & Finance 
Business & Finance Media Group hosted the CMO 100 Index launch event, a webinar titled ‘Exploring key marketing trends for 2023’
To celebrate the launch of the 2023 CMO 100 Index, which was published this morning on Businessandfinance.com, Business & Finance Media Group hosted a webinar titled ‘Exploring key marketing trends for 2023’, in association with Cvent.
The event focused on topics such as quantity to quality, the shift within the marketing mix, the importance of community and customer experience, and more.
Moderator Karen Carter, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Europe at Cvent joined panellists Siobhan Smith, Senior Global Marketing Manager at Expleo, Tara Collins, CMO of National Broadband Ireland, Conor O’Donavan, Head of Global Communications, Strategic Marketing & Events at Enterprise Ireland and Cliona Hayes, Director of Global Brand & Advertising at Indeed.
The webinar also featured a keynote address from Jerry Daykin, VP, Head of Media at Beam Suntory.
Below are some key takeaways from the event.
The shift from the margins to the mainstream
Tracey Carney, Managing Director, Business & Finance Media Group, introduced Jerry Daykin, VP, Head of Media at Beam Suntory.
Daykin discussed his work in inclusive marketing. “Trying to talk diversity, trying to talk inclusion, is no longer a side hustle,” he said.
“It’s the heart of what we need to do in our businesses. If we’re looking for growth, we need to look for new audiences, we know that people want to shop the brands, talk to them, represent them.”
The National Broadband Plan is one of the most ambitious in the state’s history
At the beginning of the webinar discussion, moderator Karen Carter noted that events of the last year have had “a direct impact as we go into building our marketing strategies for 2023.”
Tara Collins, CMO of National Broadband Ireland, the company delivering the national broadband plan on behalf of the Government of Ireland, noted that the group’s focus is delivering high-speed fibre broadband “primarily in rural Ireland, in the most hard-to-reach places.” Collins notes this is one of the biggest challenges today – “bridging that digital divide.”
She continued: “COVID showed us more than anything the benefits of having a digital society, a digitally-connected society.” She states that the National Broadband Plan is one of the largest telecommunications projects undertaken by the state and is “recognised as one of the most ambitious telecommunications infrastructure projects of its kind globally.”
The way that culture forms is changing
Cliona Hayes, Director of Global Brand & Advertising at Indeed, noted that “societal movements, fads, are all emerging and being shaped by these communities and creators in this decentralised media ecosystem.
“We’ve gone from this place where we’ve had this single message, this top-down culture as a brand that we want to dissipate into the world to this culture that is bubble up.”
COVID showed us more than anything the benefits of having a digital society, a digitally-connected society
Hayes notes that this encourages marketers to think about unique needs on multiple forums like TikTok. “It’s no longer TikTok versus Instagram. It’s TikTok versus Disney Plus and Netflix.”
She stated that the new approach is marrying insights they get from social media with insights they get from their platform, Indeed, regarding job seekers. “Fusing those insights that we get from social and data together is how we’re building our strategies. That is completely different to what we were doing a couple of years ago.”
There are more companies now with an export focus
Conor O’Donavan, Head of Global Communications, Strategic Marketing & Events at Enterprise Ireland, stated that EI has noticed more Irish companies focus on export.
“I think COVID accelerated the adoption of Digital Technologies significantly,” he said.
“It’s a global marketplace. It’s an accessible marketplace. I think more and more companies are seeing that opportunity to engage and acquire customers in new international markets that they just wouldn’t have considered before.”
Preparing for economic downturn
Siobhan Smith, Senior Global Marketing Manager at Expleo, noted that there is not a marketing team in Ireland that “isn’t working with either the same or less than they had last year.”
Smith suggests that this brings the opportunity to be more imaginative and creative in your approach to marketing.
However, she cautioned: “As a marketing leader in your organisation, it is also your job to manage expectations. What you don’t want to do is turn around to the business and say, ‘I can deliver an uplift of 20% on last year’, when they haven’t increased your budgets.
“That’s a really important point because it diminishes your achievements in previous rounds of negotiations as a team.”
If you have not registered for the event, you can do so here. If you are registered and would like to rewatch the discussion between some of Ireland’s finest marketing professionals, you can do so here.
