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In our second edition of "Digital Leaders View" Dialog Series, we have sat down with Mr. Ryoichi Takeuchi, Corporate Marketing Department Platform Group Leader at Resonac. We had the pleasure of discussing the digital evolution of specialty chemicals customers and suppliers, and how Mr. Takeuchi sees the next 5 years unfolding. Here is his perspective.
How do you see customer behavior changing with digitalization?
Our company started digital marketing in 2017 and has continued leveraging digital for the last 6 years.
We define customer reactions as number of web downloads of technical data sheets and number of inquiries generated from targeted e-mail campaigns and webinars. These are increasing every year. I feel that, especially during the period of COVID situation, the increase accelerated and it was quite remarkable.
In addition, as one of our Account Based Marketing measures, we present our product solutions to specific target customer accounts. We regularly hold webinars to introduce our product solutions, and hundreds of people participate each time. We regularly generate SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) and define those as sample delivered to customers.
These facts suggest that customers can digitally connect, gather information, and communicate with suppliers more than before, and I feel that the resistance to digital communication is disappearing as compared to previous years (especially after COVID).
What are the most important digital changes that you see on the suppliers’ side?
As mentioned above, there is a trend that customers are becoming less reluctant to connect with suppliers digitally.
Even within our company, sales or R&D people are having no resistance to connecting with customers with digital channels. And requests from those internal stakeholders to our digital marketing team to utilize digital communication such as e-mail campaigns, conducting webinars and using SpecialChem as marketing platform are also increasing.
As an important Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for our digital marketing activity throughout the year, the team is counting SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads = sample deliveries to customers) and the number of the leads is increasing. Compared to last year, our SQL increased by 27% year-to-date and our Key Growth Indicator (KGI) for new demand has also increased by 10%.
The expansion of these digital measures within the company will continue in the future, and I feel that the digital interactions between customers and suppliers will become more and more common.
What will the digital landscape look like 5 years from now?
After the pandemic, customers and suppliers have become accustomed to the convenience of digital communication, and I think this trend will not stop.
Five years from now, we will see even more shift towards hybridization, the combination of traditional and digital business communication.
Within our company, I can imagine we will collect more and more data on customer reactions to our marketing campaigns, and use it to conduct even more efficient and effective digital marketing. However, it should be noted that within digital platforms, campaigns using e-mail and webinars are just tools.
No matter how much the use of these tools progress, without effective content management based on real customer issues and marketing planning including KGI/KPI targets aligning with marketing activities, such digital tools will not be effective.
What customers require in the B2B manufacturing industry is that the products manufactured and sold by suppliers solve their issues.
The more digital use cases for communication with customers progresses, the more accurately suppliers must grasp the value provided by their products (including hypothetical scenarios), and then target those messages based on the values through different and targeted channels. I think effective digital targeting is going to become more and more important for marketers.
Mr. Ryoichi Takeuchi
Mr. Ryoichi Takeuchi is the Corporate Marketing Department Platform Group Leader at Resonac Co., Ltd. Transferred to the Marketing Department in 2015 after working in sales at the electronics-related materials department of the former Hitachi Chemical. Since 2017, he has been leading the digital marketing team and developing marketing activities. As a platform group leader from 2022, he is responsible for the continuous expansion of digital marketing activities and CRM (Salesforce) utilization within the company.
