Print.IT Reseller - issue 53

PRINT IT RESELLER.UK 45 James Pittick, Director of B2B Indirect Sales, Canon UK : “Businesses are evolving to a more service led approach, as they recognise the need to engage with customers and prospects in a new way. If partners want to diversify and grow, then it’s critical that customers receive a seamless digital user experience. “At Canon, we help partners to navigate this evolving marketplace by helping to define their target audience, find their true USPs, define their value proposition and create their digital and social marketing strategies. Canon has also invested in a team of Business Generation Managers who support partners and help to create demand for their products and services. This is done through a number of key initiatives, such as providing insightful content, digital marketing and social selling. Modern businesses need to be able to differentiate, and stand out, in this always-on, fast-paced, digital world.” Zana Gradus: “Creating a positive digital experience for our customers is an essential part of our customer service. Our customers tend to be time-poor so we use our social media to share the essential updates that IT professionals need to know about, hopefully making their days a little bit easier. In terms of email and content marketing, we share original thought pieces on subjects such as GDPR, which our customers find useful and share. We're also looking into an account based marketing approach so that our content marketing works to support our account managers even more, whilst providing a more tailored experience for our clients and prospects.” Mark Smyth: “Vision actively promotes digital transformation as a compelling way to improve efficiency and remove labour intensive process in the workplace and it’s an important next step in managed printing, utilising the MPS as the foundation. “We do use social media generically and also direct marketing and it’s important to consider the current changes in data protection – the GDPR will impact this approach quite significantly. We have recently updated our client portal and that’s fast becoming an alternative method of communicating with existing clients.” Adrian Low: “The rate and pace at which technology is advancing is unprecedented, and I think any business that doesn’t make the move to digital will get left behind. Everything is digital, people have instant access to a world of information right at their fingertips, so a massive part of being online as a business is ensuring that your customers’ digital experience with you is seamless, by doing things like reinventing your website, as previously mentioned. “Email marketing is a tricky one. If your email campaigns actually offer tangible benefits to customers, or add value in any way then great, but if done poorly they can be counter intuitive or even reductive to your customers’ experience – which again, will impact customer retention. Social media is just another way of enhancing the experience. People can communicate with businesses instantly using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and it gives that business the ability to be more engaged with their customers, which ultimately makes the process more streamlined.” Simon Hollister: “It is massively important as part of a unified CX strategy that has the ability to feed these channels directly into an integrated platform. Hollis is developing ongoing, tailored and proactive content and social marketing strategies to get closer to customers, both new and existing, and drive more appropriate engagement.” Scott Walker: “As a business we’re lucky to have a very forward thinking and pro-active marketing team. They manage the social media presence for all of our divisions and design bespoke messaging for use on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and direct marketing. Beyond that, staff are encouraged to create detailed LinkedIn profiles where we can write our own content and share existing media. “The thing with referrals, is that a lot of businesses are afraid to ask for them. In my experience, if you’re afraid to ask for a referral, chances are, it’s because you’re not providing a great service. We encourage ALL our customers to refer us to connections. If we’re providing better technology, saving them money, making their processes more efficient… why wouldn’t they want others to get the same?” www.paebusiness.com www.purposesoftware.co.uk www.brother.co.uk www.kyoceradocumentsolutions. co.uk www.xerox.com www.riso.co.uk www.oki.com/uk/printing www.canon.co.uk www.systemstechnology.co.uk www.visionplc.co.uk www.midshire.co.uk www.hollistechnology.co.uk www.zenoffice.com If partners want to diversify and grow, then it’s critical that customers receive a seamless digital user experience VOX POP James Pittick Simon Hollister