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8x8 Marketing Masterclass for Channel Partners

As part of its channel partner programme 8x8 company hosted its first ever marketing masterclass last month, at its new offices The Relay Building in central London. The successful event was created to equip 8x8 partners with the tools and insight necessary to support them in their marketing efforts.

“This year, the world is facing a tipping point – cloud-based telephony and messaging product spend will outstrip on premise services” explains Charles Aylwin, Director of Channel and Public Sector 8x8. “There are already more than 400 million monthly business telephony users around the world and this market is going to grow even larger. Marketing to this expanding market could be hugely rewarding, if done correctly.

“We wanted to give our partners the tools to take the lead in the industry, so we assembled a panel of experts from all areas of marketing to deliver practical and quality advice.”

Topics ranged from SEO and website optimisation to securing more leads through social media and PR opportunities. Throughout the day, the recurrent theme was that successful marketing relies on identifying who your customer is and then tailoring your strategy to reach them. On average there are 5.4 people involved in the typical B2B buying process so making sure you know who these people are, what interests them and what their business motivations are, is vital.

Many businesses struggling to identify who their target buyer is will be surprised to find that almost half (46%) of B2B buyers are millennials. While millennials aren’t wildly different to other groups, they do tend to have slightly different attitudes, behaviours and thought processes that need to be catered to. For instance mobile optimised websites are not a “nice to have”, but a necessity.