Tell us about yourself

I’m Lorna Nightingale, Head of Marketing at Esri UK, a global software company with around 3,000 UK customers across all sectors.

I’ve worked in marketing for over 30 years, predominantly in the software industry, marketing business intelligence solutions that enable organisations to gain deeper insights into their data and solve some of the world's most complex challenges.

My core purpose is to lead a talented team of marketing professionals, helping them develop their knowledge, skills and expertise in brand, customer, programme and digital marketing to achieve both their individual objectives and our collective goals to support the company’s business plan. 

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How do you see your role as a B2B marketer in driving broader industry/sector change? 

When I started in marketing 30 years ago, email marketing, database management, the internet and social media influencers didn’t exist. So, throughout my career, it’s been really important to keep pace with technology and understand how it can be leveraged by marketeers to good effect. 

I like to consider myself as a marketing trailblazer. Since my first global marketing role at Cognos, I’ve been an early adopter of new technology and at the forefront of change. In 2005, I led the first global rollout of SalesForce.com and Eloqua, one of the first marketing automation systems available on the market. Over three years, I travelled the world and oversaw the training of nearly 400 marketing professionals. For the first time, marketers could send targeted communications, track campaign responses and most importantly understand lead conversion and return on investment.

I literally transformed the way marketing operated forever, Not just for Cognos prior to its acquisition by IBM in 2008, but as a blueprint for the wider industry to follow in our footsteps.

What's the most provocative idea or strategy you've implemented in your B2B marketing, and what was the response and the outcome? 

My everyday role primarily centres on campaigns to raise brand awareness, generate demand and support the company’s new customer acquisition targets, so it can be very focused on the short term with the need to constantly build pipeline and grow revenue. So, when the opportunity came along to focus on a longer-term vision – giving every child in the UK access to our award-winning technology –I jumped at the chance to make a difference.

To bring the Free4Schools programme to life, we became one of the key partners to support the Department for Education's Nature Park project, created to teach children about climate change and improve biodiversity across the country. The project uses ArcGIS software to map, manage and enhance the grounds in every school, college or nursery in the country, creating one, vast nature park roughly twice the size of Birmingham!

Since the launch in 2023, over 3,000 schools have now signed up for the project and started to map their school grounds. One of the highlights of my career was seeing four students from the Harris Academy present to an audience of 2,000 delegates at our annual conference in London. They shared how they had mapped the habitats in their school grounds to create a plan to increase biodiversity in a densely populated area of London.

The project is now making waves across the world as other governments are looking at how their education estates could benefit from doing something similar.

Can you share an example of how you've used storytelling to provoke change or shift perceptions in your industry?

One of our biggest challenges is connecting with a wide range of audiences to communicate the benefits that geographic information software delivers. Since joining, I’ve championed our customer advocacy programme and storytelling sits at the heart of it. 

Every year, we are privileged to work with over 100 customers, helping them to share their story, either in our annual customer success awards, in the media, speaking at one of our events or in a case study. One thing that really works is partnering with senior executives at a wide range of customer organisations and then working with them to create and share their story. However, it’s not just about the story in itself, but also who’s telling it and their ability to communicate how they are using GIS technology to deliver transformation 

We now have a huge collection of stories that showcase how GIS technology is used to solve real-world challenges, such as how to tackle Britain’s housing crisis or identifying locations to invest in green energy.

In your view, what's the biggest change needed in B2B marketing right now, and how are you contributing to that shift? 

There is no question, we are now in the era of AI. Just like all the other tools marketing has conquered over the past two decades, from marketing automation systems to website optimisation, social media platforms and eCommerce; B2B marketing leaders now need to learn what AI tools are available and how they can be harnessed to good effect across the marketing mix.

One area of interest to me is how AI tools can be used to help make sense of huge volumes of data across multiple channels to easily identify buyer intent. Implementing these new tools will be a game changer for marketing moving it from a function that generates leads for sales to follow up to a more valued AI-generated pipeline approach.

We’re definitely on a learning curve and at the start of our AI journey but I’m excited about the opportunities this will bring for marketing leaders for increased value add of the marketing department to the business. 

How do you encourage your team or organisation to think more boldly and embrace change in their marketing approaches? 

As a child growing up, one of my mum’s favourite sayings was ‘It’s better to try and not succeed than to never try at all’ – this has been my mantra throughout my life. Today, I’m lucky to be working in an organisation where one of our core values is to ask, ‘Is there a better way?’

I’m very supportive of requests from my team to try out something new and I run workshops where the team work in groups to try out new ideas or technologies. At the moment, we’re trying out how to create content such as campaign messaging, social posts and email using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. It’s early days but we are already discovering that when combined with marketing expertise, these tools increase our efficiency and reduce the time to market for campaigns.

At the end of the day, to be successful in marketing you have to execute a campaign. Sometimes it’s not going to work but at least you will learn something in the process. The biggest failure in marketing is to keep perfecting a strategy and never get around to launching the campaign!

What makes B2B marketing changemaking – in one word?

Listen.

Listen to feedback from your customers.

Listen to the marketplace and your competitors.

Listen to your employees and their experiences.

Listen to your gut instincts.

What is your one piece of advice to future Changemakers on how to be more effective in B2B marketing?

Keep up to date with new marketing technologies, understand how they can be harnessed to improve marketing practices and be bold, because ultimately; it’s better to try out something new and not succeed than to never try at all. 

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Want to learn from Brian Macreadie on how not to be a boring marketer? Click here for more #Changemakers.