Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Robert Dekker, global marketing guru, on the key to great marketing:

Carlota Pico 0:14
Hi, everyone, I’m Carlota Pico from The Content Mix. And I’m excited to be here today with Robert Dekker, who is Chief Marketing Officer at CPIC and has over 28 years of experience in marketing and communications. Welcome, Robert. And thank you so much for joining us today.

Robert Dekker 0:33
Thank you so much for the invitation really glad to be here.

Carlota Pico 0:36
The pleasure is ours. Robert, let’s jump straight into the interview to get this interview started off. I’d like to learn a little bit about your background, a bit about your company and how you got into your current role.

Robert Dekker 0:48
Sure. I’m originally from the Netherlands and I have originally always worked in what you could call Product Marketing and product management that was progressing throughout my career. That was then combined with a bit of business development, bit off brand marketing. And the last sort of 10 years I’ve been in international and global, you could say encompassing marketing roles looking after all marketing facets, either off a company or division. Originally, I was working very much in entertainment, some music and video industries. But later they were sort of expanded and currently working for CPQ or CPC global, which is a global operating real estate investment companies which specializes in investment opportunities in Pakistan, particularly in projects which are linked to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which again is part of China’s one road One Belt initiative. The reason why I joined the China, my current company CP was they will looking for someone with a completely different background. from anyone who’s worked with a company before someone who understands processes, integrated marketing brand strategy, and because I was looking for something completely different, and I’ve never worked for, let’s say, a relatively small company, a bit of a startup, entrepreneurial atmosphere working directly with the board and the owners, I thought this would just be a great addition to my experience. So I joined them about a year and a half ago.

Carlota Pico 2:30
What have been some of the biggest challenges that you face up until now and also some of the biggest achievements

Robert Dekker 2:36
and more specifically looking at the current company when I’m working for seebik I think the biggest challenge has been the integration of let’s call it sales and marketing because when I joined, marketing was very much Oh, you need to generate new leads for us in sales was there to capitalize on those needs. Clearly in this day and age, marketing plays a much bigger role in terms of qualifying or pre qualifying needs, giving people the right information so that when the sales teams actually get to speak to people, they are already well informed and they have a kind of idea of what it is thereafter. So you get much less cold calling situations. But that meant building trust admin building a way of collaboratively setting an integrated marketing and sales calendar and getting involvement from the sales teams in terms of developing the right content, etc. And in terms of achievements, I’d say the biggest achievement we’ve had because of that was a reduction in the costs of acquiring new leads and better conversion rates in terms of getting those leads into purchasing customers.

Carlota Pico 4:00
Very interesting. I’m a head of business development at bear content. So I’m very commercially focused. Yes, I do marketing, but I also do sales. And for me everything that I do in marketing, well, the majority of the things that I do in marketing has to have a commercial results. So it’s very interesting how yourself in a marketing role you’re attaching it to, you’re measuring it to the cost of every lead, which is me very powerful, because that’s the day you don’t have a company if you don’t have money, if you’re not making sales.

Robert Dekker 4:33
No true. But I think the division between marketing sales, marketing and sales, generally speaking has evaporated quite a lot, I’d say over the last couple of years. That’s how and that’s due to how differently customers in general even even whether you’re b2c or b2b customer, how they people inform themselves and want to know information because before they’re ready to engage in a more sales driven conversation. So you have to work much more hand in glove if you wish to, to get the right people in the right compensation at the right time.

Carlota Pico 5:11
Yeah, definitely, definitely. I definitely agree. You’ve been at sea pig for 1.5 years now and have all rows already grown your marketing team from seven to 13 almost doubled it. What questions Did you consider when growing your team? And ultimately, what roles Did you hire?

Robert Dekker 5:31
Roughly speaking, the kind of roles we were sort of investing in was either creating content. So whether it’s copy or whether it is video, but also we invested in getting more out of our sales and marketing automation platforms. In our case, we use Salesforce and particularly the marketing automation was something we wanted to invest more heavily in Because initially, of course, when you’re a relatively startup company, you acquire your customers and you you capture new leads. But then at some point you you need to make sure you have the right data, the right tools to properly lifecycle manage these, these lead shabbier database because the database grows. But if you don’t know what value there are, or who the people are you still want to engage with and what kind of information they might be after then a large database becomes kind of futile.

Carlota Pico 6:33
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the key word, which is content. It’s no secret that COVID-19 has heavily hit the real estate industry, unfortunately, how have you had to adapt your content in order to connect or better relate with your potential clients right now?

Robert Dekker 6:53
I would say in in three different areas. The first one is because initially, we were like quite heavily on, let’s call it sales events or investment seminars or face to face interactions and compensation. So we had to move that to a digital environment. But that also meant that we needed to give in much more information upfront to potential customers. So where normally speaking, people would be willing to engage in a in a sales offense or some kind of seminar with an open mind and just a slight inkling of what, what what kind of information will be given to them. In a digital environment that doesn’t work. People really want to know, right, I’m going to dedicate some time having a conversation with this person, educate me up front, so we had to invest more in almost like sales brochures with quite a lot more background than we usually would give before we get engaged in a sales conversation. But even before that, terms of our Let’s call a brand new engagements and initial lead generation. We also had to change tack a little bit were in before covering it, we were talking a lot about ourselves, why we’re different from other players in the industry, why the product we have to offer is a premium product but why you can trust us etc, etc. Now it became clear that we needed to change the topic of conversation to get people interested in the first place. So we created a lot of content about or storylines for messaging and it depends on all the channels talking about how in last decennium real estate or real estate investment has always been a safe bet risky regardless already talked about the financial crises or 2008 2009, or in the 70s or the 80s. If you look at the historic data, ultimately Real Estate has always been a good investment. So we felt it was important to point it out to people. Look, if you are in a situation that financially can afford it to invest, then real estate is still a much better investment than anything else whether it’s stocks, options, precious metals. Real estate is where it’s at. The second talking point that’s a little bit more specific to our developments but still quite rock. White in its reach is on developments are linked to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which in its sense, is part of China’s one road One Belt initiative. And irrespective of COVID these projects will go ahead and will succeed. Too many too much money has already been spent too many countries are involved. The stakes are way too high for these projects not to deliver. Yes COVID-19 We’ll probably delay a few things. But we’ve we felt it’s much more important talk about how these projects are progressing and are progressing today as we speak. And because of the rules being being more relaxed, more and more efforts and money’s being plowed into them. So it’s also about reassuring people. This is a safe bet anything related to the VRI and C pack is, is a safe bet in its own right. So, in a nutshell, we’ve spoken we speak more about the world in general in the area which we operate and much less about ourselves because it is about creating trusts and and giving people information which puts them in a position where they they have the right knowledge to decide whether or not something they want to engage further with rather than a much more sales driven conversation.

Carlota Pico 10:56
Okay, just for audience FYI. Their information. The Belton road initiative is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013. And it involves 70 countries and international organizations. And its main goal is infrastructure development and investment across those participating countries. There’s referring to your response, I think it’s good to give our audience some background information on why you think that initiative is still going to move forward despite the health crisis.

Unknown Speaker 11:31
Yes. Okay.

Carlota Pico 11:34
Um, I do want to talk about social media because your numbers are quite impressive since in CPQ, before you joined si pig, you have literally half the amount of engagement that si pig is currently enjoying enjoying. So what that means is that you essentially doubled CP x social media reach and engagement. And so I want to ask you about the strategy that you use to generate leads or attract more followers to your pages,

Unknown Speaker 12:03
a couple of things.

Robert Dekker 12:05
I think first and foremost, we applied more different trading strategies across the various channels. I’m always a very strong believer that if you’re going to use a social media channels, any social media channel, you have to know what it is that you’re going to use it for. which ultimately means you have to understand what your audience is expecting you to use it for. And I don’t like it when a company I had a blast the same message over all the same social media channels. And I also certainly don’t like it if it’s too much sales driven or just just pushing information out. Some channels are really great to engage with your customers in a way which allows them to interact with you and to ask questions. other channels are much more more suited to provide information so that if people want to read something they can do. other channels are really good in increasing your reach because you put out information, which is very easy to understand very easy to share and very easy for people to interact a sexual way that it pushes your reach numbers up. So I think that’s one thing we certainly did. The second thing I did, we invested in more and better content, and actually that allowed us to follow through in that strategy. The third thing we did, and that’s something which actually had already started, just before I joined, is because we are delivering projects, which are around real estate investments in Pakistan. And we’re not only selling to Pakistan, living overseas, but also to people who are generally interested in that say, real estate investments in emerging markets. We thought it was very important to Typically, my boss, the CEO of the company, Shan Shah, for it was very important to try to portray a more accurate and up to date picture of Pakistan as it is today. I joined the company a year and a half ago with a certain view of what Pakistan was like. It’s like, and I had to adjust by my my point of view. And we’ve invested in quite a lot of thinking about three influencer trips to Pakistan to visit various areas of the country, and to take that content here on the road. So we’ve had several road shows and showings of some short films we did and even one of the showings was in the house of parliament to help people understand, look, the view the perception half of this country, and therefore also of its economy or of the real estate sector in general is not Longer accurate. And even people from Pakistani origin who will be living in this country for quite a long time had to come to us and say, I didn’t know that my home country had changed so much and quite often for the better. And it’s it’s that kind of content, which is very engaging and spark discussions, but also really has helped us to increase our reach numbers. But it’s a bit of a gamble and quite a bit of an investment to do that.

Carlota Pico 15:29
I relate a lot to that response, because in my former life, that’s exactly what I used to do. I worked with governments from emerging markets and help them to promote their investment opportunities overseas to your European audience and also North American audience. And a lot of times it was about re educating the audience about the actual opportunities that lie on the ground versus their hesitation sometimes because oftentimes in Western markets, the way that emerging markets are viewed are only for poor social economic reasons rather than the wealth of opportunities that lie in those markets more more than anything, because they just don’t know about it. Oftentimes news portrays the sad part of life rather than the happy part of life and how well the country is doing and in a certain region. So yeah, it’s all about re educating and also informing. So I definitely resonate with that.

Robert Dekker 16:26
Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s very easy to look at a country’s past and even in the case of Pakistan, its relative recent past in terms of democracy or to what extent are is an economic growth or whether that economic growth is is properly distributed amongst these people. How much red tape there is, you name it, all of those things? And yes, you could live in a country and say, okay, it’s not as Let’s call it advanced, quote unquote, as some Western countries. On the other hand, if you look at the the pace of change and the development and the opportunities, which therefore arise in such a country, you get a sense of how it might look like in 510 20 years from now. And that’s, that’s an essence what you’re asking people to buy into, which is don’t look at yesterday. But don’t fixate on what what still could be improved today, look at the trajectory this country is on and what’s happening and where ultimately, this will lead to.

Carlota Pico 17:37
Yeah, I mean, one of my first campaigns was in Ghana back in 2009, West Africa, and that campaign was published later on in the London Times and we did zoom into the real estate industry because 2009 Ghana real estate was actually quite affordable, and it was an amazing investment. And it proved to be an incredible investment now in 2020. So those clients that bought property 10 years ago have seen a very good return on their investment. And in our case, when it came to investment reports, what we were always trying to say is that a smart investment or an investment is going to provide a very high ROI usually takes a lot of risk. But at the same time, the compensation is going to be that much higher. Because if you’re only investing in very, very secure traditional markets, that means that probably really needs to be really high as well. And there’s not going to be a very big margin on the return. So,

Robert Dekker 18:34
yes, for us, it’s to some extent, saying look, remember what Dubai was like 30 years ago. Remember what Singapore was like 15 years ago. Remember what Shenzhen was like 20 years ago. Now look at the parallels with growth arm, which which is the city which is at the center of the pack, and one of the real sort of pivotal points in the whole VRI project. There’s no there’s no reason why this city this region, this country couldn’t be the next one in in in that sort of list of those countries.

Carlota Pico 19:09
Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned Dubai, because actually one of my most recent campaigns before joining very content was about Sharjah, which is one of the Emirates in the UAE and exactly about the power that Sharjah has right now for those investors who will risk venturing into an Emirate that’s less known but that the return could be a lot higher than if they were to buy property right now in Dubai. Because obviously Dubai is a lot more expensive. This does lead me to my next question, which is going to be about the power of content and the power of marketing. When it comes to content HubSpot CEO said the following. What separates good content from great content is a willingness to take risks and to push the envelope, taking it to a marketing level. What do you think separates good marketing from great marketing

Robert Dekker 20:02
For me, it’s about making not be afraid to make choices and sometimes decide that less is more and to be willing to look at the stories and the customer journey and how you tell those stories across your various customer journeys and try them to put yourself in a position of your customers or potential customers and then ask yourself is there anything in here which is which is not necessary and basically just just cut out all the bullshit or cut out all the stuff which is makes you feel good but doesn’t really mean anything for potential customers and and be quite ruthless about trimming it down and giving something with really soft value And reason nuggets of good information and trust people to appreciate that and then if they want more, you’ll find out. But I think these days it’s much easier to overload customers with so much duplication and useless or unnecessary information. That becomes a lot harder for people to find what it is or exactly looking for. So keep it simple, keep it transparent. That was separated for me.

Carlota Pico 21:33
Okay, and spinning off of that question. Companies are expected to spend 100 and $20 billion in digital marketing by 2021. chunk of that will obviously be towards social networks. But what do you think the future of marketing will look like keeping in mind that figure

Robert Dekker 21:58
Well, I mean, I know one I’m relatively old school, but for me things like marketing versus content or even digital marketing versus called analog marketing or offline marketing. It doesn’t exist. For me, it’s about what he said you’re trying to promote, sell, communicate, that to whom is it relevant? And do you then understand how your potential customers or your target audience, how they prefer to consume this kind of information and how they want to be spoken to how can you best interact with them and besties in a way, which they appreciate but there’s also cost effective for you as a company. And that will determine your mix. Full stop now, whether that’s online, offline, very heavy in content, or not so much, but it’s For me, starting with the question, should I invest in digital versus digital marketing or invest more content versus

Unknown Speaker 23:10
other marketing channels is irrelevant.

Robert Dekker 23:13
You start you start with, you start with the customer, not with your product, not with your servers, not with what you think is right. No, you start with your customer. And then you sort of build it from around there. So to answer your question, does it surprise me that investments in let’s call it content and digital marketing will continue to increase? No, because that’s how, how we as customers, consumers, take information to us. That’s how we are more used to inform ourselves and purchase or pre purchase goods or services. I think the the challenge for companies more and more these days is how to make clear choices about what it is you’re going to do or what it is you’re going to do first. Rather than trying to jump on the bandwagon and try to do everything, you know, go into all social media channels and do all all forms of acquisition marketing, where you might be better off choosing only a few channels and doing them right.

Carlota Pico 24:23
Yeah, definitely, I think it’s also has a lot to do with AV testing. Nobody has a secret recipe or a magic ball that can let the company is going to work best. I think it’s a lot to do with AV testing, seeing what channels users are engaging the most with. And at the same time, learning where your users are going to consume content. If it’s primarily on the internet, then the most resources should be invested into digital marketing because that’s how your consumers are in a digesting content as well. However, I’ve worked across print media as well. And the power of print media, there’s something about it that just when you have a piece of paper in your hand, a newspaper with a very powerful brand on there, there’s a different, it sends a different message at the same time. But it has to be towards the right consumer because I feel like a lot of millennials aren’t going to be appreciating print media as much as they would appreciate digital media, which is quick, easy, fast, and they can move on to the next source of information.

Robert Dekker 25:36
No, but that’s true. But again, that’s not always the same for every product, for instance. So when I was at Ladbrokes, for instance, even though we were speaking to a lot of millennials, we didn’t know we didn’t notice that a lot of the sports pages or free newspapers like Metro etc. aren’t being read by the millennials. I mean, But they won’t pay for a newspaper, that kind of print actually was quite effective. Having said that, I think the role of analog media if you if you wish has changed to the extent that it’s more about creating an awareness and a desire to find out more without giving the full information. So we’re in the past and the media was capable of immediate trigger a call to action. I think these days, it’s it’s much more around creating an interest which might lead to a follow up, which might lead to a call to action. So this seems to be sort of more steps in between.

Carlota Pico 26:39
Okay, fair enough. We are going to be moving into our set of rapid fire questions which are basically your recommendations to our audience. So there will be a resource or an influencer, that inspires you and why?

Robert Dekker 26:54
Well, I recently read a book called eyes wide shots and it was written ready for you years ago, but this is about how particularly in this day and age, where there’s the risk of information overload, or the risks, or so many so called experts, and how you as both of them as just as a person as well as professional, you need to be much more critical and asking questions. Because it’s so hard these days to or to or so easy even to be influenced by all the information which comes towards you. But why should you? So it’s about weaponizing yourself with the right questions and toolkit to again as to cut through the bullshit and ask the right questions and understand what’s right for you.

So I’ve thought

of usually I’m not that keen on, let’s call it guru kind books, but this one really was an eye opener for me so I can I can really recommend that

Carlota Pico 28:00
And it’s above not the movie, right? Not the movie.

Robert Dekker 28:06
Not the movie.

Carlota Pico 28:07
And that’s a very important specification to me.

Unknown Speaker 28:11
It’s a book.

Carlota Pico 28:13
Okay. What about your favorite app at the moment?

Robert Dekker 28:18
Well, because of COVID, and because of being at home quite a lot, I’ve decided to brush up on my language skills a little bit. So I’m playing around a lot with a an app called drops or language drops. So the last week to, you know, sort of improve my friendship and my German, for instance. And the reason I like it so much, because it’s not traditional learning. It’s a gamified learning, so it’s just easy to spend 510 minutes a day and it doesn’t feel like you’re learning, just having fun with it. So yeah,

Carlota Pico 28:55
I love gamification. Big fan of it. Yes. Okay. Whatever. About a hashtag or an event that you’d like to recommend to our audience. And obviously it could be a digital event because of Coronavirus. We all know that face to face events are quite difficult to have, right? Yes.

Robert Dekker 29:15
Really, at the moment to be honest with you, I mean, for me, the fact that we are coming out of looked down a little bit, the ability to meet my friends, again, for me is probably the biggest, most important defense I can have at the moment or to go to my parents again. So yeah. It’s it’s been able to really appreciate you in connection. That probably for me is a realization and anything good has come out of this. It’s appreciation how important human interaction actually is.

Carlota Pico 29:48
That is such a sweet response. I’m sure your parents and your friends will really appreciate the shout out but it’s also quite a market to your response as well because marketing is all about humans and about emotions. So, on that note, we are going to end our interview. Robert, thank you so much for joining us today on the content mix. Those were great tips and advice and I really like learning about your journey.

Unknown Speaker 30:13
Well, thank you so much pleasure was all mine review.

Carlota Pico 30:17
Awesome. And thank you everyone for listening in. 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 week. So keep on tuning in and see you next time. Bye

Unknown Speaker 30:34
bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai