This week in Barcelona, the Mobile World Congress was in full session. The event has become the CES of the mobile industry and several companies, including AT&T, were showcasing innovations in devices connected over wireless networks. At AT&T’s Innovation City, visitors could experience a personalized, virtual reality showcase of innovation for the connected car, home, wearables and industrial sector Internet of Things. They could also take a virtual spin in the connected car where the connected world came to life with integrated wearables and connected home devices.

In advance of the conference I talked with Steve McGaw, Chief Marketing Officer for AT&T Business Solutions, to learn more about how the company is evolving its marketing programs to incorporate the technologies it is selling to others.

Ellett: You’re getting ready for Mobile World Congress to demonstrate the impact of mobility solutions on businesses. What are the key trends that you’re trying to stay on top of as you help companies embrace mobility for their businesses?

McGaw: Over the past 12 to 24 months the world has really changed. it ranges from companies wanting to use the Internet of Things to connect everything from tractor trailers to health monitoring systems to microwaves. It includes an explosion of collaboration solutions so that workforces can collaborate across geographic boundaries from any location using mobility and wired-line infrastructure and be device and network agnostic. And the trend toward the “bring your own device” model for companies where they want their employees to be connected [with their personal devices]. They may not want to buy all the devices themselves as a corporate payment plan, but they do want their employees to bring a device and then they want to be able to put capabilities on that device for the employee to be reachable, to be able to collaborate and to be able to access applications.Then across the board there’s this concern with security and: “Are my connections secure? Am I protected against threats?” This is especially pronounced in the world as applications are virtualized into the cloud.

Ellett: How have these trends affected the tactics marketers use when trying to sell to businesses?

McGaw: That’s a good question because I’m probably one of those impacted because I’m the [business] marketing guy here at AT&T. Marketing leaders or marketing change agents are constantly trying to morph how they communicate with their customers. One of the things that I’m constantly looking for are ways that I can leverage technology to improve engagement levels with our customers. The collaboration technology that we’re using, whether video conferencing capabilities or sharing of documents, is becoming much more common for me.

The second thing I would say is around our distribution. We’re leveraging the technology in the hands of our sales force to be able to quote solutions to customers’ problems much more readily. Within my team we create use cases for our technology and we do that on a vertical basis – a use case for certain technology for finance or a use case for healthcare. Then we push that out to the tablets of our salespeople. Then when they have the conversation with their customer they can use that tablet-based communication right in front of their customer. If the customer is interested then they can convert that from an educational [conversation] to an order.

A third is when we launch new lines of business. Like any company, we’re constantly launching new services for our customers. We’re cloud enabling everything that we do. Few marketing people will start with “let’s go build a data center.” Instead they would rather launch a new service using cloud-based technology from someone else and then if it doesn’t work it can be shut down much faster. So even within the world of AT&T, I’m using cloud technology to create new services, launch them and test-drive them in the real world. I’d say those are three ways that I’m using the technology and the way that I see other CMOs around the country using the technology.

I guess a fourth area would be around analytics and improving the science of marketing. We can identify, for instance, where to build our company-owned retail stores. We can look at traffic patterns. We can look at demographics. We can figure out where the best corner is to put a store. That is a capability that we’re bringing to market for our own customers – to figure out where they should put their drycleaner or where they should put their restaurant.

Ellett: There is another trend that we’re seeing with the clients that we work – the self-help decision process that customers are going through. They’re getting as much as 60% – 70% of the information they need to make a decision before they ever talk to a salesperson. A lot of that is content in different forms – videos, papers, infographics – increasingly explored on mobile devices. Are you seeing that happening for you? And how has that shifted the way you think about the development of content?

McGaw: Yes it’s absolutely happening! And it’s not just happening for us, it’s happening for our customers as well. A great example of that is something that we launched recently, which we call the Business Circle, an online social network primarily for small businesses. You’re dead on that small businesses are doing their research online. As much as they want to hear from big vendors and carriers, they also want to hear from their peers. So the concept around the Business Circle is sharing expertise and knowledge. We started that with video vignettes about how small businesses have incorporated technology to improve the efficiency of their business and to improve their reach to their customers. We sponsored some of the initial videos and then we ran a little program and customers started submitting their own. We then started bringing experts to bear. And by the way, we don’t put AT&T branding all over this thing. We do sponsor it. We do support it, but the intent is to facilitate the learning for small businesses because they are doing so much online.

(Credit: Web)