Leapwork’s Beatrice Askaner on why focus is a CMO’s best friend

B2B marketing is a complex beast. There are a million and one things you can try and do to engage audiences, different strategies to follow, disciplines to uphold, channels to leverage or technologies to invest in. The crowded space can make it seem like you need to be everywhere at once – but in the latest episode of Digital Communicators, Leapwork CMO Beatrice Askaner argues that focus is a virtue for B2B marketers.

In such a crowded market, doing a thousand things in an unrefined way will simply be drops in the ‘sea of sameness’. Instead, Beatrice is a firm believer in understanding and executing a few select things really well. But what should those things be?

While that will always differ from business to business, there are a few things that are always worth focussing on. Understanding your customers may seem obvious, but many brands don’t, particularly in B2B where you have to marry up the more complicated benefits of your product to the real needs of your customers. Without this understanding, value-based messaging is either impossible or completely ineffective.

And value-based messaging is a key focus for Beatrice and Leapwork, the platform for easier low/no-code test automation. Before Beatrice’s leapt into the world of B2B marketing, she had started out her career in advertising. Perhaps this is why Beatrice, and Leapwork, are so focussed on clear messaging that highlights the unique value of the brand compared to competitors.

Beatrice says this focus on messaging was just as key during Leapwork’s recent series B funding round. She says ‘the main thing is to double down with your founder team on is – why do you exist in the first place?’  Revisiting this claim to existence is vital when it comes to the PR and marketing of such funding announcements. It forces the brand to come back to why it exists in the first place, and uses this to drive the story around funding and why people should sit up and take notice.

Another crucial tool for getting the attention of consumers and the media according to Beatrice – a strong PR partner. Although economic outlook is looking uncertain for many, Beatrice firmly believes that the brands that ‘hunker down’ and cut back on so-called expendable initiatives like branding and PR risk losing visibility and hurting themselves more in the long run. There is also a big opportunity for brands that continue to invest in these things to capitalise on a temporarily less crowded market.

With PR specifically, Beatrice believes it has two fundamental benefits that mustn’t be understated. One is that it allows you to reach an audience that exists beyond your core channels like your website or social media. The other brings us full circle back to that focus on value-based messaging. PR demands that you frame and focus your brand messaging in the right ways in order to make an impact. In Beatrice’s opinion doing this is incredibly impactful for the brand as a whole, and ‘a strong PR partner really challenges you on the best way of doing that’.

If that last part sounded in the least bit biased, you can listen to Beatrice in her own words on this, and many other topics, in the latest episode of ‘Digital Communicators here: