Cisco urges partners to breathe in digital marketing 'oxygen'

Cisco's CMO Karen Walker urges partners to get on board with "equalising" and "change-making" technology

Cisco is offering its partners a raft of materials and resources to encourage them to embrace digital marketing, branding the trend as "oxygen".

At Cisco's Partner Summit in San Francisco, the vendor's chief marketing officer Karen Walker delivered the final keynote, urging partners not to ignore the trend.

"Your sellers only have so many hours in the day," she said. "Your customers are demanding 24/7 support. That's not humanly possible. So that's where digital marketing comes in and at Cisco and in our team, we are infusing digital into everything we do - it's our oxygen.

"If you think about your own buying experiences as a consumer - whether it's Airbnb, Uber - it's a fantastic, simple service and experience. The business buyer is going to expect exactly the same - that same simplicity. By 2020, a buyer will come to you for the experience [you give them] versus the product or the price."

She said after asking partners what they need help with most on marketing, they said that finding out how Cisco is boosting its own brand was important, followed by info on what investments it is making internally and in the channel on digital marketing. Finally, partners asked for more details on how to tap into Cisco's demand-generation engine, she said.

"Let's begin with where your customers begin - your reputation, your brand," she said. "I love my job. Can you imagine how difficult it is to be the CMO of Samsung right now? You have to protect your reputation and differentiate it.

"In the old days to build a brand you needed to do a lot of TV advertising and you needed to do big events - really, really expensive. So this is the promise of digital marketing - it's an incredible equaliser and a change maker. Whether you have a massive organisation or just one person - digital marketing can help you scale and be more effective than ever before."

She said in May, Cisco launched its own digital marketing campaign, which although featured one TV advert, mainly featured a wave of activity online, on social media and via videos.

"We have 3.5 times more social impressions than we've ever had in history and we were the first B2B [firm] to trend globally on Twitter," she said. "And according to Interbrand, we put $1bn of brand equity onto the Cisco brand. That's really cool."

With that in mind, Walker said Cisco is taking what it learned from its own campaign and sharing it out with the channel.

Can you imagine how difficult it is to be the CMO of Samsung right now? You have to protect your reputation and differentiate it.

"We will provide you with the customer contact information to make your demand-gen really fly," she said. "We will create for you a suite of demand-gen assets. Everything for digital, social media, email, videos, banners. The key thing here is it's pre-baked - you guys don't have to do it. It's already there. We're promising this content will be real time and the best Cisco has. You don't have to worry about it.

"We want to make this as easy for you as possible. Tomorrow, your marketing leader will have a personalised email that will give them all the links to what you've seen today, links to Partner Marketing Central, and we will give you all the demand-generation assets - everything that has been launched and announced this week."