The Demand Strategist is market focused role serves as the face of marketing to clients and sellers in Middle East and Africa (MEA). You are externally focused to bring the voice of the client and market insights into IBM. You’re responsible for knowing and understanding IBM clients, sellers, offerings, and the overall MEA and specially UAE and Saudi Arabia market trends – what’s important to whom, why and how IBM can uniquely bring value to every client.
This is a growth marketer role and the architect of the end-to-end customer journey with the goal of delivering healthy opportunity pipeline and revenue for IBM.
Demand Strategists design, orchestrate and optimize a modern mix of tactics that efficiently and effectively delivers desired brand reputation, relationship and revenue outcomes in direct alignment and support of strategic business plans. IBM puts customers at the heart of everything we do; IBM Demand Strategists exercise extreme empathy for all customers, prospects and users, making sure content is compelling and valuable and served up at the right time, in the right channel, in the right context.
Key Responsibilities:
1) Strategy Planning & Customer Journey Design for MEA top clients with a focus on Saudi Arabia and United Arab of Emirates.
· Understand the market landscape, business objectives, target personas, key use cases and product offers for the assigned demand program.
· Translate business objectives into actionable demand outcomes across the funnel.
· Receive inputs from product marketing, messaging & content strategists on business priorities, key messages and content strategy & plan
· Design the omnichannel demand journey for key audiences, anchored in a core demand experience & working backwards from the outcomes
· Build nurture and sales follow up/enablement strategy to land the right conversation with the right customer about the right solution/offering
2) Execution Orchestration of local marketing plans to support go-to-market strategies in the Middle East and Africa region, considering cultural nuances, local trends and the unique needs of clients in alignment with the business priorities and needs.
· Design and deliver demand strategy for priority audiences, such as top account lists, industries and job roles
· Partner with and brief in discipline (digital, social, media, email) focals to ensure demand strategy is executed consistently across channels
· Responsible for ensuring the discipline focals have the demand inputs they need in order to deliver a plan that aligns to demand strategy and can execute accordingly
· Required proficiency in channel strategy where you can speak to what is currently in market for your demand program
· Communicate demand strategy to relevant stakeholders, including but not limited to: geo hub teams, field marketing, BU stakeholders etc.
· Assess and communicate demand plan readiness to geo counterparts to ensure demand strategy can be picked up and executed
· Partner with content, social, digital, email, and media experts to create & execute an omnichannel experimentation plan.
· Partner with geo hub and field marketing teams to ensure sales is enabled to properly work leads
3) Performance Optimization of MEA market activities
· Understand brand to demand performance trends for the assigned campaign & work with discipline focal to diagnose and optimize performance issues
· Deep analysis of marketing performance across aspects such as tactic type, content asset, channel, audience segment or business line
· Evaluation of relevant KPIs (such as impressions, web traffic, organic search performance, leads, pipeline or wins) with a keen eye on benchmarks and yield rates
· Readiness to explain emerging performance opportunities or challenges
· Strategies to deliver “next best actions” and support targeted pipeline coverage and revenue for the business
· Turn insight into action – cycling of performance insights directly back into planning and orchestration
- Experience in relevant markets creating and implementing successful marketing plans, leveraging a range of tactics and technologies within budget, and on time.
- Ability to work with cross functional and multicultural teams.
- Understanding of technology products, sales cycles, and solution positioning.
- Highly empathetic, able to imagine walking in our customers’ shoes
- Understand current and emerging marketing technologies and fundamentals of data science and applied analytics
- Mix of “right brain, left brain" analytical and creative thinking.
- Collaborative leadership style and use of agile methodology and tools
- Strong project management, time management, prioritization and organizational skills
- Able to make rapid decisions and assert proposals based on data-driven insights
- Strong executive presentation and stakeholder management skills
- High effectiveness working cross functionally to drive plans through to execution
- Fluent in English.
- Arabic speaker and writer.