Kristi Melani

Kristi Melan talks about how she empowers her teams to push the envelope and challenge the status quo to pursue better, bolder B2B marketing.

Are year-over-year marketing benchmarks dead? Kristin Melani thinks so—for now. In her perspective, B2B marketers need to rethink what successful customer engagement looks like, especially when it comes to virtual events and digital planning.

From digital to content to customer experience, Melani has done it all. She is a senior marketing leader with over 25 years of experience and is presently on the client side. Melani specializes in global marketing, bringing her background in advertising, event management, and public relations to her roles as a senior marketing leader.

In this episode of Change Agents, Melani discusses:

• How to tap into the human side of marketing with empathy and relevant messaging to target audiences.
• Why it’s such an interesting time to be a B2B marketer, primarily because we can no longer rely on the engagement tactics we used pre-COVID-19.
• How she blends the benefits of in-person B2B marketing with digital to create a hybrid engagement model that drives brand recognition and customer awareness.

B2B marketers won’t soon forget the mass pivot toward virtual events in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and virtual conferences dominated the B2B space, while all the while, customers grew weary of the barrage of online connectivity. The screen fatigue was—and in some ways, still is—very real.

In this episode, Melani addresses the challenges brought on by digital fatigue and shares her marketing lessons learned over the past year, along with how her team has packaged them into workable benchmarks.

Melani’s former company, Anaplan, offers tech solutions for global enterprises to contextualize business performance in real time and assist with forecasting future outcomes. The company is growing quickly, and Melani offers her insights to retain marketing synchrony among teams and new employees as the company continues to expand.

Additionally, Melani’s expertise in global marketing offers a cosmopolitan take on event management. She urges B2B marketers with an international consumer base to consider the cultural nuances that impact the ways that digital events unfold.

Her event-planning pro tip: “I don’t think it’s a rinse and repeat,” she says. “You have to keep it exciting.”

Watch the interview to see how Melani approaches customers’ digital fatigue and how she plans and delivers virtual events in a manner that keeps attendees from around the globe coming back for more.