Ruta Pole, Omniva's long-standing head of marketing and one of the TOP 20 most valued marketing managers in Latvia, will be speaking at our upcoming B2B marketing seminar in Riga and will share a lesson on B2B crisis communication in the midst of the COVID pandemic.
What are Omniva’s expectations to their marketing department?
Our main goal is to deliver happiness, both on an internal basis and as a direct value proposition to our customers. We do everything to make our senders and receivers happy. Our marketing is built around positive emotions. Omniva is the category leader in Latvia and we intend to keep that position.
Omniva is both a B2B and a B2C company. How does B2B differ from B2C for you?
B2B or not, we aim to provide excellent customer service, but B2B is more about building loyal relationships. It’s our main KPI here.
But it’s not always up to marketing to influence the customer experience. A single mistake made by the IT department is able to ruin all your communication efforts.
Yes, that is a global issue, which is partly solved by very direct communication. Our main KPI for most segments is our NPS score. We need to secure good communication between our salespeople and business customers, be upfront about the technical issues we’re experiencing. There is always a solution to every problem.
How do you define loyalty at Omniva?
Winding back a little bit, we are actually just in the process of redefining our strategy on a pan Baltic level and business customer loyalty is an important chapter in these efforts.
Overall, deciphering loyalty brings us back to the customer journey and understanding the motivation behind each stage on that journey. It starts from the awareness phase, then there’s the direct touchpoint with Omniva and how seamless these first interactions are in the early stages of our cooperation, up until running actual operations and providing efficient support in case they have any issues or questions. All of these steps combined create a holistic experience which then converts to loyalty.
Interested in hearing more about how Omniva runs B2B marketing operations? Join us in Riga!
What’s the role of marketing in supporting B2B sales? How are these functions aligned at Omniva?
The company’s overall strategy plays a key role in coordinating, not just marketing, but sales as well. Both are focused on identical objectives and don’t need separate coordination, but a joint preparation and execution. If there are any disagreements in the process, it’s a sign that the strategy is lacking or the goals are not clear for us. It has been working quite well for us thus far.
Usually the first step on this journey is for the marketing department to generate awareness, but as we have 100% awareness already – that goal is absent in a way. So the next step is to make sure that our potential business customers are aware of the additional services we provide. Services that set us apart from the competition (checkout, fulfilment, storage). And then of course there’s lead generation, which is driven by a very simple request from the sales side and a mutual brainstorming that needs to happen regularly. If they say that they need more leads – we do our best to generate those, which is made quite easy thanks to our impressive service offerings. We create a marketing plan and fulfil those requests.
What’s the role of social media in this mix?
When talking about B2B, for some reason it’s always about LinkedIn. We’ve done several campaigns on LinkedIn and it doesn’t work for us – we are unable to communicate with potential or even existing customers there. We, as private individuals, are looking for information or inspiration from other companies, but it doesn’t work for the company as a whole. I personally was very surprised when these results came through.
Saying that, we are running B2B lead campaigns on Facebook and it has proven to be a very good tool. I know it’s been said before, but I really dislike the idea of business to business, it’s people to people. We all look into TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram for inspiration or entertainment. We have interviewed some of our business customers and asked them about what they do in their free time. it turns out they are looking for food recipes on TikTok. So if your company is able to catch their attention with good visuals and messaging during these leisure moments – they will remember that. Next time you can already approach them with a direct offering.
All in all, social media plays a huge role for Omniva, because we work mostly with e-commerce companies and all of them are on social.
Want to learn more from companies like Omniva, EY Baltics, KPMG and Printful? Join us in Riga on June 8th.