About Jonathan Broadley
Jonathan Broadley serves as the Marketing Director at Planixs Group, a tech company specialising in providing real-time liquidity management solutions to banks. His role extends beyond traditional marketing responsibilities to encompass broader business growth objectives. Jonathan is tasked with enhancing the company's maturity and developing a robust growth engine. His duties involve not only building the brand but also refining the value proposition, strategizing market entry, and managing demand creation and capture, covering a diverse range of strategic areas essential for the company's expansion.
How has Planixs' marketing strategy evolved to support the company's growth objectives?
Our marketing strategy has significantly shifted to align with our company's growth focus. Previously, the business was primarily concerned with perfecting our solution and ensuring successful customer implementations. Now, with our product reaching maturity, we've transitioned to a growth-oriented approach.
Marketing is no longer just fulfilling requests from sales; it's viewed as the engine of growth. We're now tasked with enhancing the company's maturity and developing a robust growth engine. This involves not only building the brand but also refining our value proposition, strategising market entry, and managing demand creation and capture. To support this evolution, we've implemented practices that enhance collaboration between sales, marketing, and internal subject matter experts, which has been crucial in aligning our efforts towards growth objectives.
Our target market is quite niche - we focus on banks, particularly their Treasury Departments. Often, potential clients recognise they have a problem but aren't aware of the potential solutions. Therefore, we need to proactively reach out to them and educate them about our offerings.
"Marketing is no longer just fulfilling requests from sales; it's viewed as the engine of growth."
"For me, ABM is about relevance. It's about slowing down to conduct thorough research and thoughtful consideration of what message will resonate."
You've mentioned adopting an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. How has this impacted your marketing efforts?
An ABM approach suits out growth plan as target a specific niche market with a high-value solution. A significant part of our strategy involves educating our clients, especially traditional banks that often operate on outdated systems and solutions. Our goal is to shift their mindset towards managing their data and moving to real-time visibility. Previously our approach to ABM took a long time to execute and was very manual, which was justified because each deal was significant. However, this approach proved incredibly inefficient. In January, we started using Cognism, which significantly changed how quickly we could launch campaigns. We've expanded our outbound marketing efforts significantly, thousands of prospective customers now, not just hundreds, and it's proving to be more effective. For me, ABM is about relevance. It's about slowing down to conduct thorough research and thoughtful consideration of what message will resonate. It's about understanding what will make a potential client see our organisation as valuable and worth engaging with.
What are the key metrics you use to measure marketing effectiveness?
The primary metric we focus on is the generation of new business opportunities. Given the high average value of our deals, we don't need to pursue a vast number of opportunities—just significant, high-ticket ones. So, generating these opportunities is our foremost goal.
The second key metric revolves around conversations. Our field is complex, as is our target market within banks. There are specific groups we aim to engage, and each group requires a tailored conversation. These conversations are vital, as we often deal with prospective clients who are initially unsure of their needs.
The third metric helps us guide our broader marketing efforts to fuel conversations and, ultimately, opportunities. This involves monitoring engagement with our LinkedIn live streams, webinar attendance, and website traffic. While traditional metrics like website visits are less relevant due to our niche target audience, we pay close attention to indicators like bounce rate and pages per visit.
How do you see the role of AI and technology shaping B2B marketing in your sector?
For us, AI is not yet profoundly transformative, particularly in content creation. Our niche market requires us to pioneer original content, which isn't something AI can easily replicate due to our unique and innovative approach.
However, AI has been extremely helpful in accelerating our research for content development. It assists us in creating a content plan quickly—reducing what used to take days or weeks into just a couple of hours. This efficiency is a significant win for us.
We use AI more like an assistant. For instance, we might run something through ChatGPT to see alternative phrasings or to check best practices on unfamiliar topics. We're cautious with it; it's not at the heart of our marketing efforts.
In terms of other technology, we've been utilising a data provider that incorporates intent information, which has proven really useful. Intent data is not perfect—it's more of a guideline. For example, if we plan to reach out to ten banks in a week, it helps us determine which ten to start with and has helped boost our conversion rates when used to inform our outreach strategies.
If you had an unlimited budget, what investments would you make to enhance your B2B marketing efforts?
The one thing I would invest in more than anything else is building a community. Our target market is small and well-defined, and there's a strong interest among them in knowing what others in the same sphere are doing.
Sharing knowledge has proven to be quite powerful, even in the short time we've experimented with it. For example, hosting a few roundtables has shown me the impact of fostering community within this niche sector, which isn't currently being done very effectively.
So, I would definitely invest heavily in community-building. Initiatives like mentorship schemes to facilitate peer support, thought leadership events, and roundtables would be my focus. Establishing a strong community where we play a central role could dramatically transform our marketing efforts.
"Sharing knowledge has proven to be quite powerful, even in the short time we've experimented with it."
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About Planixs
Planixs is a leading technology firm that specialises in real-time treasury solutions for the banking sector. The company focuses on enhancing financial institutions' liquidity management capabilities, providing them with the tools necessary to monitor and manage their financial resources effectively and efficiently. Planixs' innovative software solutions empower banks to make informed, data-driven decisions, optimising their financial performance and compliance in a rapidly evolving market. With a commitment to technological excellence and customer success, Planixs continues to be at the forefront of financial technology advancements.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
6sense are changing the world of marketing, one customer advocacy programme at a time. Ready to transform your business?