MarTech360 Interview With Radmila Blazheska, Chief Marketing Officer, SecurityHQ

“The most important thing is if you are doing targeted and agile campaigns, you are getting consent from your audience, that is a bulletproof strategy for a successful marketing campaign.”

Who is Radmila Blazheska, and what is your role within SecurityHQ?

As CMO, I am responsible for SecurityHQ’s global marketing and communications strategy. This includes new commercial strategies, product launches, events, webinars, and marketing campaigns, along with developing digital and print content streams, and leading internal re-branding projects.

I am a Keynote Speaker and Branding Strategist with focus on Demand Generation. With over 18 years’ experience leading marketing and sales teams, delivering multimillion-pound growth and profitability along the way.

Radmila, what is the most Challenging and most Rewarding part of your job?

A lot of people don’t realise how the marketing team interacts with everything in the company. A lot of the time people who work in marketing are just perceived as people who design flyers, or set up the website, they are perceived as a nice to have element, but not as an essential. But once businesses start working with the marketing team then they realise how we are a necessity and are part of the core structure. A lot of the time marketing priorities are pushed down the scale and I think that is the most challenging part for marketing teams across the board. Making sure that our priorities are met, and that everyone else in the company understands that our priorities are their business priorities, this can be a great challenge.

And a lot of marketing teams have that same frustration. One of the reasons why I like working at SecurityHQ, is because the management team understands our importance. Obviously, sometimes our priorities are pushed down because of essential priorities, but in previous companies that I have worked in, not being heard was the most frustrating part of the job.

The business values at SecurityHQ mean that we are being listened to as a group and, because of that, we can see how the company is growing because of our efforts. Once you have achieved certain goals you can see how those goals have impacted the business and you can be proud of that.

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What trends are you noticing with regards to data security? How is data security evolving?

There was a lot of buzz about GDPR a few years back, and a lot of marketers panicked in terms of making sure that they were compliant to GDPR rules. However, by doing that, a lot of companies were just ticking it off the to-do list, but they were not really looking into WHY they must be compliant. For every campaign and every activity, you are reaching out to your audience, and you need to make sure that the audience is the right type of audience, that you are targeting the right campaigns, the right kind of people that you need to promote or sell to.

Now, GDPR is a good data security law, but you need to think about it terms of applying it to every campaign that you do, so a lot of people are still using a lot of marketing tools, this means that they don’t know their audience in real time, they don’t know their audience as a personality, they don’t see the person on their website or has clicked on their campaigns. You need to make sure that you are investigating different areas. In terms of data security, if you have a data leak you are prone to not only significant fines, but also the loss of trust from your customers.

The biggest trend that we have noticed recently is that a lot of companies are relying a lot on social media and with it different apps and functionalities. This means that they are relying on 3^rd party vendors a lot, and they need to make sure that all these vendors and apps are securing their data. If not, they are potentially leaking a lot of your information out there, into cyberspace.

How aware are marketers of their responsibilities when it comes to cyber security?

Unfortunately, not very much. We know for a fact that a lot of marketers don’t think that it is their responsibility to think about cyber security, and that is wrong because when it comes to brand value, when it comes to success of the marketing campaigns, is whether the audience trusts their brand. And if there is a data leak, if there is potential breakdown in their cyber security, it still comes down to the marketing PR to come up with how to gain their trust again, and it’s much worse to gain trust when it is lost, than build that trust from the beginning.

A lot of marketers use MarTech and marketing automation tools, 3^rd party vendors, they buy a lot of data. But if you don’t probe a little deeper into how they obtain this data, you are also not just buying the wrong data/audience, but you are opening your company up to cyber risks. So, the first thing that marketers should do when they are applying allot of this automation and tools, are to make sure that those vendors are securing their data, because when you plug something in, you are basically linking all your data, and you are trusting everyone else and the security controls that they have in place.

The first thing you need to ensure is a zero-tolerance protocol with regards to cyber security, so that you basically make sure that whenever you are signing a contract with a MarTech vendor, before you investigate the benefits to your MarTech stack, you need to make sure that the cyber risk is very low, and therefore your cyber risk is lower as well.

What key strategies do you believe marketers should have in place?

I have covered awareness, but cyber security training is a great part of that. A lot of marketing teams are also responsible for internal communication, and they should work with internal IT or security teams in their company on training, on internal communications. Internal threats are one of the biggest threats in companies nowadays. So, they should be part of cyber awareness/training, and attend data security training – marketing teams are on the front end, email marketing, PR, communication, social media, website, the marketing team is the most responsible for all of this and if there is a cyber threat, they are the ones on the line.

Will teams be more limited or liberated in their campaigns?

There is a big debate in the marketing world. Obviously, we want to know everything about what a customer is doing in the digital world, and there is a lot of data out there that is profiling us. You can buy a profile on a given person, their interests etc. Every day we are tracked by different apps, via our phones, social media activity, laptops, everything digital can be profiled, and there are companies out there who sell that type of data.

On the other hand, there is also the debate about privacy, and about making sure that all of this information is not tracked, so that you should not be able to identify an individual based on their profile.

Fortunately, the data privacy argument is winning, and it is winning because due to a lot of data leakage, you get to know a lot of things about a person that you don’t need to know.

With the new regulations, we are not allowed to place a lot of cookies on websites. This means it is harder for marketers to profile their audience. So, in response, you need to come up with many strategies, to obtain consent from your prospects and customers. And that is where the primary strategies should be leading to. It should not be about buying data that is often useless for what you need. In that instance, you make yourself open to vulnerabilities in exchange for a short-term win.

The most important thing is if you are doing targeted and agile campaigns, you are getting consent from your audience, that is a bulletproof strategy for a successful marketing campaign.

What sets SecurityHQ apart from the competition?

SecurityHQ is a Global MSSP, that detects, and responds to threats, instantly. As your security partner, we alert and act on threats for you. Gain access to an army of analysts that work with you, as an extension of your team, 24/7, 365 days a year. Receive tailored advice and full visibility to ensure peace of mind, with our Global Security Operation Centres. Utilize our award-winning security solutions, knowledge, people, and process capabilities, to accelerate business and reduce risk and overall security costs.

But what really sets us apart is the perfect combination of processes, technology, and people. We all believe in what we do, and we do it the way that we would secure our own company. We build trust with our customers, which means we have a very high retention rate, and referrals because customers trust us in what we do. Because we are global, we act on different threats instantly, and we have local experts in every major market, to be able to talk to customers in real time.

How, according to you, are MarTech and marketing automation helping in transforming the entire marketing landscape?

It’s transforming the marketing landscape because everything can be automated, there are a lot of tools out there to help ease the work for the marketer. However, on that level, it adds complexity, because now marketers need additional training, and they need to have tech and IT knowledge that classically trained marketers would not have. That also changes the landscape for hiring.

But aside from using a lot of new tools, you should not forget that behind all these automation tools, you are talking to a person which means you still need to be very personalised to make sure that you use a language and a tone that is genuine when you reach out to these people so that you don’t sound like a robot.

Do you think CRM and marketing automation can maximize marketing benefits due to their combined strengths when used together?

Absolutely. You cannot have marketing communication without a good CRM tool, and the other way around, you must have good clean data to start with. You also need to have the processes in place to disperse the information further, because obviously when you create a marketing campaign, what are the results coming back?

The job of a marketer does not stop when the lead enters the CRM, that is when the work only starts. The process is followed in the dissemination of those leads to the sales teams, customer support teams etc. Collect feedback from your sales teams and customers so you can measure the success of your campaigns, and not just rely on data analytics.

What would be your piece of advice to the budding marketers out there?

 Take calculated risks, learn, and evolve and don’t be afraid to stake your opinion.

Thanks, Radmila!