Lucie Chiocchetti is Senior Account Manager at Marketing Essentials Lab.
How did you get started in your career? What were the first steps you took, and what piqued your interest in Marketing Essentials Lab?
My background is in visual communication, graphic design and creative direction. In the early years, I soon realised that what excited me the most about my work was all the strategic thinking that would lead to the perfect creative answer to a design brief. That’s why I soon enough pivoted to brand and marketing strategy. Being someone who loves learning and growing and whose creativity always craves novelty, I’ve worked for many agencies in London as a freelancer, which enabled me to work with many different brands and industries, learning all the various layers of business and marketing. Alongside freelancing, I’ve also worked directly with clients, helping small businesses and startups launch and grow strategically and efficiently. Becoming a mum plus the covid-19 global pandemic interrupted my career. I was pleased to meet with Marketing Essentials Lab for a new position that would help me settle, while providing me with the same level of excitement that my multifaceted approach to work brought previously.
How do you plan content at Marketing Essentials Lab?
As marketers and strategists, it is essential to understand, inside-out, the running of businesses like those of our clients. Marketing should be a direct result of what companies are trying to achieve, therefore understanding our clients’ objectives, strategies and goals is a must if we want to create efficient strategic content for them and bring in the results they need. We also need to clearly understand the dynamics of their industries and their target customers and audiences. Although many apps promise a lot of businesses that they will boost their views and audiences, there’s no magic recipe to successful marketing. We need to have a clear understanding of who we’re talking to if we want to present our clients’ messages efficiently and get them the results they need.
What is your favourite aspect of B2B marketing?
As someone who thrives on being constantly challenged, I love the complexity of it. There is also a strong sense of satisfaction when you lead and deliver successful work that helps clients hit their goals. It is a complicated process involving many different areas and levels of strategy. I like its multi-dimensional aspect as it always gives my endless idea-generating brain something to be thinking about and keeps me buzzing. It requires being agile and understanding many aspects of business, and I think it is exhilarating: you can’t possibly ever be bored.
What are the most exciting marketing content trends of 2022?
Humanisation by far. My whole career, I’ve been campaigning to managers, colleagues and clients that the key to successful marketing is to know your audience so well that you know exactly what to say to make them tick.
Marketing teams need to put in the resource, time and effort to properly listen to their customers and prospective buyers, and to understand anyone involved in the sales process. Although it is often viewed as a time-consuming process, my experience has shown me that doing this gives one of the most rewarding returns on time invested. Done properly, with good strategies and consistently, it provides everything one needs to engage with an audience strategically and successfully.
That’s why conducting regular surveys, social listening and, most important of all, physically talking to the people you’re trying to engage with is crucial. After all, we are indeed all humans, and business and marketing involve connecting with other humans.
Any advice for B2B marketing teams?
Talk to people, especially those you want to engage with on a transactional level. Get to know them properly. This is about understanding how you can genuinely engage with them, how you can help them, and how they can see the value in you. If you don’t know what their life looks like, what their struggles are, what they care about, there’s only so much you can do and you’ll just sound like another random business that has some solution to offer to some problem, like many others.
The second piece of advice I have is: give time to time. Meaning, give yourself the time to try out strategies. So many times, I have seen businesses jumping from one marketing idea to another without even taking enough time to see if the first one brings any results.
That leads to my last piece of advice: make sure you always have some metric to measure success. Whatever that metric is and what success looks like for you, you need to measure your marketing effort so that you can make the right decisions to keep on doing something or try another approach as and when needed.
