Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Ertan Benzes, EMEA and India digital marketing director, on the art of demand generation:
Carlota Pico 0:12
Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico, your host for today’s show, and I’m excited to introduce Ertan Benzes who is EMEA and India Demand Generation and Digital Marketing Director at CHEP and he’s been in the company for over 30 years. Yes, 30 years! Okay, Ertan, welcome to The Content Mix and thank you so much for joining us today on the show.
Ertan Benzes 0:40
Hi, hello, pleased to meet you. Pleased to be here.
Carlota Pico 0:43
Pleased to meet you as well. So tell me about your journey. 30 years in the same company, that’s so impressive, what’s it been like?
Ertan Benzes 0:50
It’s still great. Yeah, I mean, I started in this company more than 30 years ago in IT and most of my background is system analytics and IT and at one moment, I moved into a commercial role and then into marketing. So since seven years I’m dealing with marketing and demand generation. And it’s actually the culture in this in this company, which helps or which makes you feel comfortable. And as well going different ways. I mean, people change these days jobs from one company to the other, because they want to do something new. But within CHEP, it gives you the opportunity to do this in the same in the same environment but always learning something new every day. It’s very dynamic, agile company, and I enjoy it since 30 years, every day.
Carlota Pico 1:44
Wow, what are some of the different roles that you fulfill that you’ve fufilled at CHEP?
Ertan Benzes 1:49
Well I mean, I was in IT, so I developed systems in, in the early 90s, in within CHEP for, for Germany, for Europe, and then when I moved into commercials, it was for European key accounts. So I was dealing with the sales departments, and helping them to analyze and d run analytics and help them in the commercial decisions. So this was the time when I really stepped out of my comfort zone. I mean, it and commercial is usually a completely different universe, you know. And so in the beginning, I felt uncomfortable, but the company helped me very much and was very supportive from them, and I grew up in this role. And after a while, I’ve been asked to take over marketing in Germany and did this since seven years on in the marketing environment. So since two years, I think, three years, demand generation and digital marketing, which combines perfectly my IT background, and this is what I mean it combines perfectly IT background from the early days now into marketing and with the commercial in between it helped me to understand as well the business financials and all these aspects. And that’s something which is absolutely great.
Carlota Pico 3:14
You’re actually one step ahead of me. I was gonna ask you about how your former roles that help you excel now in your current role, but let me take it to another level. So let’s say you had to hire somebody for your current role, what type of skills combined what qualities would you look for in that person?
Ertan Benzes 3:34
It would definitely be someone who is very strong in the in the digital world, but combined with commercial skills, you know, these days, it is not important to tell how good your company is. That’s something everyone expects from you, when you run a business that you are good in what you’re doing it is more that you have to understand your customer, you have to understand the buyer. And this is where I would look for how good is this person to put himself or herself into the shoes of the of the prospect of the customers of the buyer.
Carlota Pico 4:12
Okay, very interesting. So who is your buyer? But let’s first define CHEP. What is CHEP in a thirty second elevator pitch?
Ertan Benzes 4:19
Okay. So, CHEP actually what we are saying is we see us as the invisible backbone of the supply chain. CHEP connects people with their life essentials and we do this according to Barrons Magazine, as the most sustainable company on this planet. So we have been named as the most sustainable company in on this planet in the simple way, we provide pallets to the consumer goods industry, and so they can deliver their goods to retailers in a sustainable way. And we run this what we call an a share and reuse model so we rent them to them and we collect the pallet and you can do this worldwide. So a company who is producing probably, goods in Australia can put their goods on pallets–on blue pallets–in and send them over to Europe. So our products are all blue. When you go next time to Carrefour, to wherever, it is–Tesco or whatever– when you see blue pellets, these pellets from CHEP.
Carlota Pico 5:25
Okay, so it’s a b2b company.
Ertan Benzes 5:27
It’s a pure b2b company, and we are making sure that goods are moving in in a seamless way.
Carlota Pico 5:34
Okay. Okay. So then let’s talk a little bit about your proudest moments at CHEP. What have those been, and if they can tie nicely back to your current role as digital marketing director, that’d be fantastic.
Ertan Benzes 5:46
Yeah, no problem. No problem. I mean, when I when I took over demand generation and digital marketing, there was actually no big digital marketing activities present at CHEP. This was three years ago. The first thing I’ve done was to implement a marketing automation system, which helped us to manage all campaigns and digital marketing activities. Because as you can imagine, marketing teams are not–from resource wise– they don’t have a lot of people. So you have to learn to be very effective in what you are doing, and manage and leveraging systems for it. This was one of the things I’ve implemented. And we are running now all our campaigns and digital marketing activities through a marketing automation system. And what we’ve done as well, we consolidated social media channel. We had before I took it over, we had in each country, an own LinkedIn account, as many companies know that, you know, you all of a sudden they pop up like a mushroom, and you have 6,7,8 accounts on LinkedIn and nobody knows who they are owned by. So what we did we consolidated and we moved from 24,000 followers within 24 months to 190,000. followers on LinkedIn.
Carlota Pico 7:15
Wow. Was that organic growth?
Ertan Benzes 7:17
Yes, purely organic growth.
Carlota Pico 7:19
And how did you achieve that through content? What type of content were you posting that attracted so much growth?
Ertan Benzes 7:25
It’s mainly sustainability. So people love stories about sustainability. It is really what what drives…Our business is sustainable, our whole business model, because it is a circular economy model of share and reuse, it is a sustainable model itself. And we have a very strong position on this, then all the things we are doing in corporate social responsibility. And as well on employee branding, and being a good place to work for. And all these combinations boosted the follower base. And the topping of that was providing white papers and insights about supply chain efficiencies, as you can imagine, our products are going through the whole supply chain. And we have a good overview on what’s happening on this planet when consumer goods are moving from A to B. And so we’ve got a lot of experts.
Carlota Pico 8:29
Okay, well, I was on your LinkedIn profile and I want to read out a sentence that I found really amusing. It reads as follows “LinkedIn is not Tinder, don’t start a conversation with a selling pitch.” What are a few best practices then for starting a conversation on LinkedIn?
Ertan Benzes 8:49
Yeah, I came to this to this point because when I when I spoke to sales people…I mean, I’m…people reach out to me in LinkedIn, on connecting to me every day, okay? So they say, Hey, can I connect to you and say, okay, that’s great, someone once be in my network. And the next thing you get is, Oh, we can offer you this product. And I think, come on. I mean, that’s, that’s not the purpose when I accept a connect request. And so I do trainings internally here on social selling. And this is one of my favorite phrases, saying “LinkedIn is not Tinder.” So don’t expect on the first day that you can talk about marriage, kids and everything you know. Just try to engage. And what we came up is with eight steps in the social selling. First, you search for the right people, then you follow these people, okay? Listen to them, understand what they’re telling, what they’re talking about, what is their problem and what is on their agenda. And then you can start to command. And then once you start the command, you can think about, can we add value to them, to this person? And after that, you can start to interact on reaching out to this person, trying to engage. And because then you you have built up kind of a pause to the connection. And at the end, you start networking and recommend things you think which makes sense and may help this person. This is how we start conversations in LinkedIn with connections.
Carlota Pico 10:35
Okay, but that seems like a lot of work. What about if you need to reach out to 200 people? How can you follow that process with 200 people in mind. I mean, it’s basically a full time job.
Ertan Benzes 10:48
Well, you don’t do this by…you do not do 200 people at one go, I mean, this would be quite unrealistic. So usually you have, let’s say, 10 people a day, five people a day, I don’t know. And then you do this on, usually, you can do this by having probably half an hour a day, one hour a day, and you pick the best ones out, because at one moment the LinkedIn algorithm creates a dynamic on your account, and you start to pop up in the same Halo room, you know, where you are moving. And that’s where you have to get into that.
Carlota Pico 11:26
Okay, let’s leave this conversation back to demand generation. Could you define it for us? And also, how’s it different from lead generation?
Ertan Benzes 11:36
Actually, demand generation sits above lead generation. Lead generation is the ultimate goal of demand generation. So you want to create a lead at the end of the journey. And demand generation is actually not something very much known in Europe. And even within CHEP, I’ve been asked sometimes, okay, What the hell is demand generation? And people usually think it is marketing. And it is embedded in many companies this is discipline is embedded in marketing. But within CHEP, we separated it. It means we put demand generation/digital marketing into one team. And so our areas of taking care are the social channels, web pages, search engine optimization, everything, which is paid, organic, campaign management, nurture campaigns and all the things. So this is where we take care and if I were to define demand generation, I would say we help business to be more efficient by designing campaigns and combining it with all the digital channels.
Carlota Pico 12:40
Okay, so basically, demand generation is to generate a demand, it’s when people or companies still don’t know that they need that product, that service. Right? And so you’re in the discovery phase, you’re informing them?
Ertan Benzes 12:54
It depends. I mean, you have two phases that it’s one is awareness, and the other one is acquisition. Obviously, it depends on ways in which, in which areas the company or the country will go. And within CHEP, we have different stages in our environment, we are in some countries, we are quite good, established long, since a couple of years, there were a couple of years in the UK. We are since 45 years, I think it’s been, and in Spain and France, 40 years. And in some others, we are new. So it means in some areas, you have to build up the awareness, and then to create the demand that people understand which problem you’re resolving. And in some others, you have to talk probably more about enhanced solutions of making a supply chain more efficient. This is where we are, where we’re moving in.
Carlota Pico 13:50
Okay. And then in terms of generating leads, that’s the next step after demand generation. Like once you’ve generated an interest, that’s what you want to attract that lead to your product, to your company, to your service?
Ertan Benzes 14:04
Exactly. That’s correct. That’s correct and you try to understand where in the buyer’s journey this lead is. And then through the digital activity, you get you try to attract this leads to to your product, to your service.
Carlota Pico 14:21
Okay, so let’s put some of this theory into practice. Could you zoom into a demand generation campaign that you think is a great example of how to do a right?
Ertan Benzes 14:33
Yeah I can do. As I said, our main messages–because our business is very sustainable and we our business model is very sustainable–we, the most successful posts and campaigns are always on sustainability. So it means what we are doing is we are preparing the posts for different countries, maybe in different languages as well. We are able through social media management software to execute them at the same time, and to link them to our back page. And behind that, with all the digital technologies you have in digital marketing, on tracking the behavior of your audience, you can understand what’s going on, and how to approach to new leads. So these sustainability parts are very, very successful. And quite recently, we have launched the campaign for what we call “Promotions store solutions.” So it means when you go to Tesco or Carrefour, you see promotions on the floor. And in many countries, our palates are under these promotions, and we help them to be more efficient. And there is right now running a campaign–paid and organic–in eight countries on this, and we are working with leveraging lead gen forms and gated content on a chapter comm. page. And yeah, so really following the the flow of the of the users and the visitors.
Carlota Pico 16:14
Okay. So the internet is full of websites of channels of different ways to distribute your content, right, and your audience is everywhere. So how do you know what website or what channel is going to be the best fit for your campaign for a demand generation campaign?
Ertan Benzes 16:32
I mean, we are, we are a pure b2b company and so there are not very much areas you can go into. So LinkedIn is definitely for sure that the main channel for us Twitter in some countries, because you have to understand how Twitter is used in some countries. And the thing is, in b2b, the buyers are either in Google searching for solutions for their problems, or they are as well in in LinkedIn in hearing and reading what their peer is doing and how they resolve these problems, because they have the same issues. And that’s why we are there. YouTube is a very important channel for us. It gets everything, it gets more visual. And Google for sure, as well. It’s through Google ads and Google SEO optimization is a core of success.
Carlota Pico 17:33
Okay, how do you incorporate data into this entire strategy?
Ertan Benzes 17:38
It’s actually a good question. You have so so much data you can incorporate? I think the difficulty is that marketing people, digital marketing people, they fell in love on what they can analyze, and I don’t know, click rates, likes conversion rate, you name it. I mean, that’s crazy what you can get out of it with all the graphics. But at the end of the day, the key element is how you link this data to the financial of the company. Did we win new customers? What is the growth rate? What is the time to win? Do we accelerate in winning new customers? And these are the core questions they’re asking because they can understand what it means. For them, it means nothing if you say, Hey, your post had 300 likes. What does it mean? I mean, Bill Gates, if they post something, or if you post something, he gets auto note, but probably 40,000 likes. So it’s all everything is in relation. It doesn’t mean anything for your CEO or CFO to tell them how many likes they had. So data aside, it’s good to take the right decisions operationally. But linking it to the company’s objectives and strategic initiatives, you have to find the link to each other.
Carlota Pico 19:09
Okay, that’s excellent advice. Because a lot of marketeers don’t know how to get upper management, higher management to buy into their strategies and into their ideas because they’re speaking to upper management from a marketing point of view and with marketing language, right? But they’re not necessarily then defining it according to the business objectives: like these many likes, or these many views will equal this much business. Because at the end of the day, companies are run by money. Yes, they’re run by people but if there’s no money behind it, there’s no company.
Ertan Benzes 19:44
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it helped me very much that I worked in commercial before because then you’ll learn the language and to keep your eyes off them, which counts, you know, to what matters then.
Carlota Pico 19:57
Definitely. Do you have any other demand generation ideas that our audience can incorporate into their own strategies?
Ertan Benzes 20:07
What I would advise the the audience is to be aware of your Martech systems. So these days, I mean, the buyers, they start their buying journey digitally, okay? They go on the internet, it’s not like the other the old days where someone bought a newspaper and looked on the advertisements, on the trade papers and so on to find the right company, you know? It is not that way–even in private life, you don’t do this anymore. Before the internet when I wanted to buy a new TV, I went and bought a new magazine, a TV magazine and looked for the tests of what’s best, and so on and so on it and hoped that it was right. So this is not the way as it works today. And you don’t have any more one buyer. People think, okay, there is one buyer, there’s one director who decides–that’s not the case. It’s a group of people. And the position of these people and their roles are constantly changing. Okay, within a project, it can change one moment, there is a tip on the on the scale to one person. And then the other moment, if the topic changes it changes, well, the buying position, and you have to be aware of that to be able to track this, I can recommend everyone to yet review the Martech text, see if your systems you’re using–and you have to use systems in you in your environment–to combine the analytics and the data you’re getting in and have a good analytic guy who gives you a clear picture of what it means.
Carlota Pico 21:49
Okay, excellent. Well, on that note, if you could give one piece of advice to your younger self about pursuing a career in marketing, what would that be?
Ertan Benzes 22:01
Definitely, before you jump into marketing, go into sales and commercial. You have to learn their language first, because they are your most important customers. This is for b2b. Obviously, in marketing and b2c, you need to understand the consumer. But even then you have a direct customer. In marketing, leads in the consumer industry is they still have a CEO wants to know what’s going on. So you need to translate marketing language into commercial language.
Carlota Pico 22:39
Okay, excellent advice. Now moving into our set of rapid fire questions, which are basically your recommendations for our audience. To get the section started off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. So a professional role model or an influencer that you just really admire?
Ertan Benzes 22:56
I mean, it’s mainly outside of marketing. For me, it’s Simon Sinek for sure. He’s a great author and speaker. Bill Gates, for sure. Barack Obama, and Douglas Adams, who has died, unfortunately, probably years ago, but his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” it’s still an inspirational piece of literature.
Carlota Pico 23:21
Okay. Well, in the words of former President Obama, “Yes, we can!” Yes, we will survive Coronavirus.
Ertan Benzes 23:29
We will, we will indeed. He is a great, great person, I believe.
Carlota Pico 23:34
Excellent. What about a book, a publication an event or community that you’d like to recommend to our audience?
Ertan Benzes 23:40
What I definitely want to recommend to this audience is a book from Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize a couple years ago, I think he died as well. It’s “Slow Thinking, Fast Thinking.” It’s about science book. It’s a pretty science book, but it’s very good on how human beings are taking decisions and the cognitive work. It is an inspiration, definitely. Because it will help you again to transform all the digital aspects into the human behavior and to help your audience to find the right things in the business you’re doing.
Carlota Pico 24:23
Okay, excellent. Go ahead. One more recommendation?
Ertan Benzes 24:27
A second one, to add a second one is it’s called it’s a bit of a strange one, actually. It’s it’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s about again, cognitive science, about meaning reduction, recursion, and more. So it’s a very technical book, but it’s inspirational.
Carlota Pico 24:48
Okay, excellent. And last, but not least, what’s your favorite app at the moment and why?
Ertan Benzes 24:56
You know, it took me the most to think about I mean, we spoke that and it is actually, on the new Apple operating system, there is a hand wash counter. So when you have an Apple Watch, okay, it recognizes when you start to wash your hands. And it starts counter 20 seconds back down to zero. And this was what impressed me. I mean, I’m a techie guy, you know, as I said, I’m 30 years within, I’m dealing all the time with techie. It impressed me so much that I love to wash my hands now for at least 20 seconds just to see this counter, counting down. And so it’s a very simple thing, not very fancy, but if you ever have the opportunity to check this out that’s an amazing piece of science and software.
Carlota Pico 25:51
Now, Apple didn’t pay you to say that right?
Ertan Benzes 25:54
No, they did not. They did not.
Carlota Pico 25:57
Okay, so interesting. I don’t have to go buy myself an Apple Watch now.
Ertan Benzes 26:01
Oh, yeah. No, do it. I think it will get copied by by others as well. But really it surprised me. And I love it.
Carlota Pico 26:10
Yeah. I can understand why especially during Corona times.
Ertan Benzes 26:14
Exactly. That’s it, you know?
Carlota Pico 26:16
Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the The Content Mix, Ertan. It was awesome to meet you and to learn about demand generation, why it’s different from lead generation, your background at CHEP for over 30 years. I’m still impressed with that number! It was awesome to meet you again. Thank you.
Ertan Benzes 26:34
Thank you very much as well for being with you and sharing my thoughts with you.
Carlota Pico 26:38
Thanks, and to everybody listening in today, thanks for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every day, so keep on tuning in. Thanks again, have a fabulous day and see you next time. Bye!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai