Infosys Consulting CMO: ‘PR is effective in building brands’

Infosys Consulting interview: We speak to Chris Fiorillo, CMO of the consulting branch of tech giants Infosys, in the latest of Press Gazette’s Marketing Maestro interviews. This series is produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman Media Group’s content marketing arm.

What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role? 

For any good leader to be successful, they must have a great team, and as typical as it sounds, building and curating a great team has been my greatest achievement. 

Seeing your people grow and develop into world-class professionals that help drive the company has been very rewarding. Knowing that I can rely on them to achieve results makes my role a lot easier and gives me a range of people and projects to be proud of, rather than one specific achievement. 

What media channels do you see as most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity? 

PR and thought leadership without a doubt is one of our best value-driving channels. To position a high end consulting brand to the CXO community, and to enrich the sales process for our leaders, having a strong and credible way to tell stories and amplify that in the market is key. PR has been very effective in building our brand and the profiles of some of our top executives.

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What is your advice for mastering social media? 

Take a good hard look at your target audiences and what their online behaviours are like, and learn their habits and interests, likes and dislikes, before you start reaching out to them. The key is to focus your efforts on a more targeted approach. You also need to match this closely to what goals you want to drive through social – have a clear set of KPIs before you begin, so your purpose for this investment is understood by the entire team implementing it. 

If brand awareness, lead generation, or client engagement is the focus, the channels and tactics used to achieve results could be drastically different. To optimise success and reach your ‘prime people’, be sure to set clear and defined goals for each program to ensure you are best optimising budgets and resources effectively.  

In your opinion, what is the main difference between B2C and B2B marketing? 

The dividing factors that separate the two are reach and engagement. B2C marketing is often associated with mass marketing efforts, or reaching larger audiences, especially with a brand awareness goal in mind. This is in comparison to B2B, which is often linked to target marketing, driving deep personalisation, engagement, and lead generation. While the two are by no means mutually exclusive, a marketer’s end goal – and then channel tactics – will of course have a very different approach.  

What is the key to producing engaging marketing content and what types of content works best for you? 

As touched on before, knowing your audience is the foundation to any marketing strategy. By understanding their buying behaviours, you can create engaging content that can stimulate an activity. Content can play a very important role during the journey, but knowing where you can have the biggest impact and what content can be most effective at each stage is critical.

As an overall approach, client storytelling, using case studies and their voices, has worked best for us in the B2B space, as content with this type of authenticity and third-party endorsement is extremely valuable in reaching the CXO audience.  

How important is technology in modern marketing? 

Technology is the beating heart of today’s modern marketing landscape, it’s what pumps blood to every stage in the marketing process. 

At the start, providing us with insights and data to identify our target audience, it then allows us to track their engagement through analytics, therefore allowing us to spot buyer trends. It used to be said that ‘50% of your marketing spend will always be wasted, you just don’t know which half’, but this no longer has to be true with data-led decision making.  

And finally, if you could ask your peers for one piece of advice or help, what would it be? 

What is the big next trend that, if we could capitalise on today, we can mobilise around to be ahead of the market?