Zendesk Q&A with Emma Acton: Inside the shift to brand-led, AI-driven marketing

Sophie Milburn: How do you see marketing priorities in enterprise technology evolving right now, particularly when it comes to balancing demand generation with long-term brand building?

Emma Acton: It’s incredibly important that you start from the brand itself and that you drive demand through a brand-led motion first, so that people understand who you are as an organisation and what you stand for. Then you can follow with the campaigns, because your performance marketing tactics are going to bomb unless you've got that up-front brand recognition and knowledge. 

Sophie Milburn: Account-based marketing has become a key strategy for many organisations. How are you approaching ABM today across different segments and levels of account engagement?

Emma Acton: I've done ABM for well over a decade now, but I think it's evolved. Initially, it was a buzzword and everyone was like, well, we're ‘doing account-based marketing’, and they're inviting a set of target accounts to an activity. It isn't about that. You've got to look at your customers and prospects. You've got to break down the types of accounts and then the approach that you give them. 

You might do some one-to-one, which is a bit more of a white-gloved approach for your larger strategic accounts, and the activities align to that much more personalised approach. You might have clusters of accounts that are from the same industry or the same use case, so that’s your one-to-few campaigns, and you’ve got messaging that is appropriate to those.

Sophie Milburn: I can imagine it’s getting more complex as we start to introduce AI into this. With those increasingly complex martech stacks, what are the biggest challenges you’re seeing people face at the moment?

Emma Acton: I remember looking at the martech stack diagrams back in the day; they were quite simple. Now they are just off the charts. It wouldn't fit onto a PDF or onto a screen. There are so many different pieces of technology that we as marketers are able to tap into. I think it’s about really understanding and getting insight into your data and making data-driven decisions. You can have all the tools in the world in your martech stack, but if they’re not talking to each other and your data is not unified, you’re not able to tell the story or understand the picture from the data. You’ve got to have the tech integrated.

Sophie Milburn: How does that start to look when you're trying to build a brand globally, but also then looking specifically more into EMEA? How do you find that balance there?

Emma Acton: You’ve hit an important point there; EMEA is unique. We've got an awful lot of countries, cultures, nuances, languages. And so, we have to think about how we balance the global brand and approach with campaigns, with our messaging. But then how we localise appropriate to each individual market country and the maturity.

Some countries are more mature than others. We’ve got to work that into our tactics and our activities. It is taking that bigger picture and then amplifying it, but appropriate to each of the regions that we’re operating in.

Sophie Milburn: Marketing is increasingly connected to broader ecosystems of partners and alliances. How important is this in driving pipeline and awareness, and how do you measure its impact effectively?

Emma Acton: They are absolutely critical and key to our success. We can't build our pipeline and we can't amplify our messaging in our markets without them. We're very heavily reliant, so we've got to make sure that they're part of our ecosystem. They're acting as Zendesk out there in the market and on our behalf, so we've got to make sure they're enabled. We've got to make sure they have all the tools and different elements that we would use ourselves to go and tell our story and to attract demand. It's an incredibly important ecosystem for us. 

Sophie Milburn: What do you see coming up in the next couple of years with AI and automation when it comes to marketing? 

Emma Acton: I think you've got to look and say, what are we looking to achieve? What are the things that AI can take off our plate that we can automate using AI so that we, as the human marketers, can go put our time onto more valuable activities? And so, what are the tools that we need? If you look at all the activities we might do every day, from demand through to conversion through to our tracking to the web. What are those pieces that we can automate that we can use AI? Where would we get the most value from? 

Going and having conversations with customers and prospects face to face, our physical events are so well attended. We have to operate wait lists because people want to come and have a conversation, particularly in the customer experience space. Making sure we can automate some of the more menial pieces of marketing, and then put those humans into driving that kind of face-to-face, that human-to-human interaction through events activities, those things that we know our customers and prospects really like to come and speak to us at.

Sophie Milburn: Events, digital campaigns, and social selling are all playing a role in modern B2B marketing. How do you decide where to focus investment, and how do you even begin that prioritisation process?

Emma Acton: It goes back to that data. The analysis of the data from an attribution perspective, it isn't a first touch or a last touch attribution model that works. You've got to look at a whole account-based model, because you could have ten, fifteen, or even twenty different buyers within or personas that you are selling to within an account. You've got to be able to understand from an attribution perspective, all your tactics, what's resonating where and so it isn't a one and done. 

Having visibility into that is incredibly important in the data so that we can see a typical journey: well, they came in and they did a trial, then they came to an event, and they had a really in-depth demo and conversation with our team there. Then they met with a couple of our executives. Then we did this, and then four more people from the event went to an AI workshop. And so having that account map, to see all the touch points and how that moved our conversation and relationship with that customer forwards is incredibly important.

Sophie Milburn: What are you most looking forward to at Zendesk and what you've got coming up? 

Emma Acton: We’re heading into a really busy season. We’ve got a big roadshow event in EMEA. It’s always a highlight for me, running those, and the team do a phenomenal job.

We’ve just deployed a tool, and it’s making our lives so much easier because it’s tracking everything that we do activity-wise. It connects to a lot of other systems. It’s giving us great visibility and insight. We can iterate and change it literally in ten minutes. For non-technical people, the user experience is phenomenal for adding new functionality quickly. I am excited to use more tools like that that are giving me those insights and are allowing me to free up resources for that human-to-human piece, and where I can automate the more menial tasks that take time that the AI can do for me.