Erse Kablo Focuses On The Future With Marketing Communications Management

Erse Kablo Focuses On The Future With Marketing Communications Management

Erse Kablo, aiming to make a difference in the sector in brand communication management and marketing activities, shared its marketing targets for 2021 and her valuable comments on the transformation in the marketing world, Marketing Manager Begüm Sevinç shared with us.

You have a business experience ranging from customer relations to corporate communication and marketing studies. Could you tell us about your business adventure at Erse Kablo?

First of all, I would like to state that we are happy to meet with the sector to evaluate Erse Kablo's marketing communication perspective. In this long-running marathon that started in the last quarter of 2015, we can talk about a process that progresses from corporate communication management to Marketing Management. By combining Erse Kablo's production, sales experiences and corporate infrastructure in the sector, the experiences I have gained in the electrical and electronics sector and my trainings, aiming to ensure continuity with our Management, our future-oriented perspective has enabled us to strengthen our marketing management.

As Erse Kablo Marketing Manager, one of our main marketing communication-targeted project managements is keeping the internal motivation constantly dynamic. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place. Because this market is dynamic, it is a sector that constantly develops, develops and is open to transformation. That's why you always have to be one of the visionary leaders who support transformation in order to improve yourself and keep your company pace with this development.

What do you think are the important topics to be considered in marketing communication management? How do you manage these at Erse Kablo?

First of all, brand communication should be determined correctly, all fiction and strategy should be planned over this communication for the correct communication management of marketing. In order, it should be ensured that every message you give through marketing communication channels is passed on to your target audience with the correct perception management for this plan to be implemented.

Your marketing communication management strategies should be interconnected, from your message to the customer to your price policy.

It is necessary to know and perceive the dynamics of the sector well, and the data that will form your company strategies should be reliable and meaningful. The close branding of the market, products, customers, competitors and target customers ensures that the management strategy model of the brand is formed in the most efficient way. Communication with your customers should be established clearly and solidly.

As Erse Kablo, we determine our marketing communication targets according to our sales strategies in order to make the correct positioning in the markets we target for our domestic and export channels. The dynamics that change every year require that we, as the Marketing Department, follow the agenda closely, our competitors, and most importantly, analyze our customers' expectations based on statistical data. At the end of the year, the results of our customer satisfaction surveys and reports from our regional sales managers create a roadmap for us. Thus, we determine which actions we should take in which period and draw our path according to these strategies. Our product quality, customer relations management, pricing policy evaluations, delivery speed, service and packaging quality, and brand recognition are among the most important issues we take into consideration. When we examine the rates of our marketing communication activities in the customer satisfaction survey evaluations of the last 3 years, we can say that it has gained an increasing momentum every year.

“Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place.”

During the pandemic period, we observed that B2B marketing has a more specific content compared to other marketing strategies. As Erse Kablo, can you tell us about your opinions about B2B marketing and the actions you have taken?

The pandemic period caused companies with B2B business models to rapidly digitize. Sales managers are increasingly promoting products with video links, technical departments come to the fore with their technical seminars, companies' app applications appear. After the pandemic, we can clearly say that the most important stop in the purchasing journey of B2B customers was the websites of the companies. In the marketing perspective, every update made by B2B companies on their websites has reached a very important level. In order to adapt to this transformation, all B2B companies need to position their websites as the center of their marketing activities and structure all marketing and sales processes accordingly.

We, as Erse Kablo Marketing Department, have invested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail and video marketing this year and put these tools at our center to use these tools that we can easily reach our customers with content marketing management. You can see SEO and email marketing as two marketing tools with high return rate and long-term returns. In B2B marketing, the rate of reading and returning consumer e-mails is high. At this point, the important thing is to be able to send the right mail to the right recipient through the right channels by making the correct segmentation. Likewise, video marketing is 80% more effective than other types of marketing in research. Making use of these tools for your potential customer personas is indispensable for B2B marketing communication activities.

Our Dealer/Customer Portal, which we activated last year, also enabled us to create a bridge based on innovation with our dealers for the weak current cable sector, and to create a B2B interaction suitable for the era of e-transformation. Our Dealer/Customer Portal, where we aim to provide a significant added value to workforce gain, has the feature of being a platform where the desired stock and products are followed by providing 7/24 order and payment convenience. We aim to create an e-business-based interaction with our customers in the future by evaluating the expectations of our customers for our portal and ensuring the development of our portal.

In our marketing perspective, our goal in this area is to manage persona marketing. To enable us to develop strategies suitable for the ideal customer that we are trying to attract in our sales activities and product development works. For example, instead of sending the same marketing e-mail to everyone in your database, the recipient can segment by personas and you can customize your messages according to these different types of customers. This will increase your sales conversion and increase your profitability.

Could you tell us about your product promotion activities for marketing communication management at Erse Kablo?

In order to increase brand and product awareness, it is necessary to focus on different channels in marketing. As Erse Kablo, our traditional PR studies, current press releases and our communication with the leading publishers of the sector are important and very valuable to us. Every year, based on domestic sales and export sales targets, it determines the product promotion materials and accordingly, we manage our marketing communication practices periodically.

The popularity of our specially designed cable stands, which we started to distribute for our dealers and customers in 2017, at domestic and abroad enabled us to consolidate our brand image in product promotion.

The delivery of our price lists to our dealers and customers, which we distribute periodically every year, is one of the important factors that support the sales of the Marketing Department.

We determine our promotions, which are distributed throughout the year, by changing each year by focusing on quality. We take care to make our promotional choices by considering the needs and expectations of our business partners. We apply our advertising designs by separating them according to the product categories our customers sell to. This enables us to support the realization of the right marketing management with the right advertisement for our sales channels.

Along with these activities, it is very important for us to use the communication power of social media. In this process, we have secured our place in social media by providing continuity. The social media platforms you take part in allow you to directly reach the relevant audience in your industry. The important thing here is that you follow the statistics and follow your interaction rates, reach wider target audiences or your regional target audiences by following your regional metrics. You can also promote your brand to large audiences thanks to the presence of many different user groups in these channels and the advertising options of these platforms. As Erse, interactively communicating with our followers by conducting content studies on social media enables us to increase our brand and product awareness.

We will bring a new breath to our industry by publishing our blog, which shows the usage areas of your products, explains their technical features, and gives tips that can increase the user experience.

What are your views on how the basic concepts of marketing strategies in the industry will change? What are Erse Kablo's marketing objectives, targets and strategies for this year?

Practices in B2B marketing practices are changing. The way the product is presented to the customer began to differ. Customers are looking for quality in service as well as quality products. Your quality service takes you one step further than your competitors. While competitors are different and less in the 20th century, your competitors are also differentiating and increasing in the 21st century. As Erse's Marketing Manager, it is among our most important missions to make a difference for Erse in our sector and to support Erse's creation of a noticeable brand perception.

There is an adventure that occurs within the framework of intersecting points between the brand and the customer. As Erse Kablo, we believe that if we manage this adventure with the right message, the right offers and the right communication, we will achieve success together with our business partners. We need to understand the motivations of the customers well and have a good command of the consumption adventure that we have shaped on those motivations. How much better we are trying to manage this adventure in marketing. If we can pack this with content, story, experience and message and enter the sales channels of our customers correctly, we are doing the right marketing for the Erse brand.

Our business development and marketing activities will continue to increase the use of our brand in the Middle East, Gulf, North Africa and Far East markets for our LPCB and VDE approved fire resistant cables (Ervital, Ervital Fire Safe Cable, Ervital Fire Safe Gold Cable)  for this year.

All of Europe, especially England and Germany; We export to more than 50 countries in Asia, the Middle East and Gulf Regions. At this point, we support our quality with international documents in accordance with customer expectations and needs. We are implementing the Integrated Management System and we have certified our ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 10002 management systems created within this framework. Manufacturing the products based on national and international standards, Erse has the product certificates in the norms of “TSE, VDE, MPA, LPCB, REACH, RoHS, CE (LVD, CPR) and SASO”.

We have a customer network based on long-term cooperation and strategic partnerships. As a result of our recent activities, we are taking strong steps towards becoming a reliable and preferred brand in foreign markets. I think that this situation is generally important for the sector that prefers to make contract manufacturing. Last year, we ranked 40th in the TET (Electricity and Electronics Exporters Association) ranking and we maintained our leadership in our segment.

Especially in the last five years, while our export turnover has doubled, its share in our company has exceeded 60%. Since we have the vision of increasing the momentum in this direction; Our management has put the aim of "being a global brand" in the first place in their targets this year.

We continue to support our communication with our new dealers to be configured in Anatolia, our retail group customers and potential companies in the regions, our promotional activities with our visits and promotional and billboard posts. We plan to organize online and offline technical seminars for our project companies and engineers on CPR.

Our activity on our social media platforms is increasing day by day, in order to support this increase, we will develop up-to-date strategies for interactive marketing communication, produce and implement projects.

Erse Kablo received the title of R&D Center in 2018. How do you reflect your technical activities in your marketing management?

In B2B business model marketing, customers don't just focus on pricing policy, technical team support and keeping technical documents up-to-date are of great importance. For this reason, you can show your customers that you are a solution partner by establishing a technical team together with marketing and sales. As Erse Kablo, we take care to provide technical communication management in our customers' visits and online customer meetings together with our R&D Manager and Quality Control Manager in the communication management we establish with our customers. Our R&D Manager gives cable training at seminars held at technical universities and electrical engineers' chambers; thus, as Erse Kablo, we underline that we are an innovative solution partner that contributes to the development of our customers.

As a weak current cable manufacturer in the sector, we successfully continue our R&D activities with a 1% share of our turnover in 2019. We aim to increase exports by supporting domestic production in our modern facilities, holding the title of R&D Center approved by the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, and producing innovative projects. Our priority is to increase the capacity by developing our new products and production technologies, to increase the product quality through efficient use of resources, and to accelerate the entry of foreign direct investments into our country. Based on these goals, as Erse Marketing Department, we are aware that companies that help their customers to develop technically in our sector are one step ahead. We make according to our product groups with the presentations, we emphasize the importance of cable among building materials for life and property safety by highlighting our products. We have supported this with our technical training on CPR (Construction Products Regulation) inside and outside the institution, with our technical brochures, posters and announcements published for the industry.

As Erse Kablo, we have added value to our business partnerships with our R&D, quality control activities, internal and external trainings, market researches and our own CPR laboratory since the first period of the CPR process.

In many projects where the CPR demands for the products in the prestigious projects received in 2019 will increase even more in 2021, there will be product demands according to the CPR classes. Our investment in the CPR testing laboratory enables us to monitor the consistency of the performance of our products. We inform both the sector and our stakeholders with the knowledge provided by our domestic and international seminar participation. Therefore, we fulfill the necessity of being among the leading companies in CPR about products and classes. We will continue to emphasize this in our marketing communication activities.

Could you share your marketing evaluations about Erse Kablo's mission in the sector and the dealership system?

As Erse Kablo, we are the preferred brand of prestigious and important projects with our weak current cable products. We have a wide and robust dealer network domestically, producing products demanded on the shelves of our dealers and customers.

We have a story that we create together with our customers. In marketing communication, we define this as story telling. Using your customers' perspective to create this story, listening to them gives a very strong starting point to your story. As Erse Kablo, we tell our business partners how we can create value for them; we write this story together by telling them the value we offer them, how this value has a place in our customers 'lives, how we make our customers' lives easier, what resources we use and what activities we carry out.

The difference in the dealership structure emerges at a point where the risks increase and the business decreases in the market. We share risk and profit with our dealers. Periodic dealer actions both increase production efficiency and provide competitive price advantage to our dealers.

We have a loyalty bond that we have built together, and it is our priority to maintain and support this bond with our marketing activities and customer relations management. By combining our decisive position in the weak current cable sector with our marketing and sales strategies, we continue our investments by taking our goal of becoming a global company both at home and abroad.

Knowing our responsibilities towards our dealers and customers and supporting them for innovation, our story is concrete. Their trust in us further increases our effectiveness in the market.

What would you recommend to companies that want to advance in marketing as well as sales in your industry?

As long as you can increase the marketing communication activities, we can progress and spread your brand. I can say that configurations based solely on sales-oriented activities will not bring any future benefit in the new transformation process. We have to create new engagement scenarios for your customers and followers we interact with every day. Because there are always options for the new consumer, these options are increasing according to different marketing business models; consumer's motivations do not change, but the consumer's journey of consumption is changing.

Human-oriented branding and marketing activities are at the forefront. Identify your target customers and approach each segment with a different strategy, without knowing your target audience, you have no chance to be statistically successful. The segmentations created with the sales team, the actions you will take towards the targets and the fastness will make it easier for you to reach your target audience. Speed is important here. The fast actions and decisive steps you will take will strengthen the bond between you and your customers or enable you to establish a new contact.

Finally, brands started to manage my communication from digital platforms. How do you interpret the difference between digital and traditional communication management?

The reach of digital marketing to the masses is almost limitless. This is a great advantage when used correctly, but it is also a disadvantage that the customer is exposed to very high interaction in the same environment. In this case, it becomes more important to produce visuals and content that can attract attention at the same time by making the targeting in the most professional way.

The image, power and influence of a brand can only be constructed and reinforced with traditional marketing methods. While the rapid interaction of digital marketing can lead you to sales, you do not have a chance to turn to sales at this speed through traditional marketing; but your brand awareness and strength drive the customer's purchasing decision.

Marketing and sales are a mechanism that acts as a whole. Today has entered a digital era. This situation makes both digital marketing and digital sales important. Every action that marketing takes will definitely return to support the sales in the future. With this awareness, our actions will continue in digital marketing and digital sales.

As Erse Kablo, we have to protect and develop the structuring of our customers at the center of our domestic and international marketing and sales targets, as well as supporting and maintaining this system with prestigious projects in Turkey and in the world.

With traditional marketing communication, you reach the customer with stronger, striking and therefore effective visuals and content that strongly emphasizes your message. Digital marketing communication management requires a practical, fast and flexible understanding. Comprehensive preparation processes including long-term plans, foresight and meticulousness are important in traditional marketing communications.

Retaining the existing customer group that has experienced the brand as well as gaining new followers and potential customers, ensuring the continuity of brand loyalty is an important factor that will ensure continuity. Aiming to be a brand that is always up-to-date, open to innovation, creating alternatives, creating opportunities instead of seizing opportunities with both product diversity and communication, and progressing accordingly, is an investment in the continuity of your brand. As Erse Kablo, new marketing communication projects planned and implemented by investing in technology, data and data analysis of B2B companies, where human-oriented brand communication is at the forefront all over the world, will carry us into the future.

Erse Kablo Focuses On The Future With Marketing Communications Management

Erse Kablo, aiming to make a difference in the sector in brand communication management and marketing activities, shared its marketing targets for 2021 and her valuable comments on the transformation in the marketing world, Marketing Manager Begüm Sevinç shared with us.

You have a business experience ranging from customer relations to corporate communication and marketing studies. Could you tell us about your business adventure at Erse Kablo?

First of all, I would like to state that we are happy to meet with the sector to evaluate Erse Kablo's marketing communication perspective. In this long-running marathon that started in the last quarter of 2015, we can talk about a process that progresses from corporate communication management to Marketing Management. By combining Erse Kablo's production, sales experiences and corporate infrastructure in the sector, the experiences I have gained in the electrical and electronics sector and my trainings, aiming to ensure continuity with our Management, our future-oriented perspective has enabled us to strengthen our marketing management.

As Erse Kablo Marketing Manager, one of our main marketing communication-targeted project managements is keeping the internal motivation constantly dynamic. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place. Because this market is dynamic, it is a sector that constantly develops, develops and is open to transformation. That's why you always have to be one of the visionary leaders who support transformation in order to improve yourself and keep your company pace with this development.

What do you think are the important topics to be considered in marketing communication management? How do you manage these at Erse Kablo?

First of all, brand communication should be determined correctly, all fiction and strategy should be planned over this communication for the correct communication management of marketing. In order, it should be ensured that every message you give through marketing communication channels is passed on to your target audience with the correct perception management for this plan to be implemented.

Your marketing communication management strategies should be interconnected, from your message to the customer to your price policy.

It is necessary to know and perceive the dynamics of the sector well, and the data that will form your company strategies should be reliable and meaningful. The close branding of the market, products, customers, competitors and target customers ensures that the management strategy model of the brand is formed in the most efficient way. Communication with your customers should be established clearly and solidly.

As Erse Kablo, we determine our marketing communication targets according to our sales strategies in order to make the correct positioning in the markets we target for our domestic and export channels. The dynamics that change every year require that we, as the Marketing Department, follow the agenda closely, our competitors, and most importantly, analyze our customers' expectations based on statistical data. At the end of the year, the results of our customer satisfaction surveys and reports from our regional sales managers create a roadmap for us. Thus, we determine which actions we should take in which period and draw our path according to these strategies. Our product quality, customer relations management, pricing policy evaluations, delivery speed, service and packaging quality, and brand recognition are among the most important issues we take into consideration. When we examine the rates of our marketing communication activities in the customer satisfaction survey evaluations of the last 3 years, we can say that it has gained an increasing momentum every year.

“Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place.”

During the pandemic period, we observed that B2B marketing has a more specific content compared to other marketing strategies. As Erse Kablo, can you tell us about your opinions about B2B marketing and the actions you have taken?

The pandemic period caused companies with B2B business models to rapidly digitize. Sales managers are increasingly promoting products with video links, technical departments come to the fore with their technical seminars, companies' app applications appear. After the pandemic, we can clearly say that the most important stop in the purchasing journey of B2B customers was the websites of the companies. In the marketing perspective, every update made by B2B companies on their websites has reached a very important level. In order to adapt to this transformation, all B2B companies need to position their websites as the center of their marketing activities and structure all marketing and sales processes accordingly.

We, as Erse Kablo Marketing Department, have invested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail and video marketing this year and put these tools at our center to use these tools that we can easily reach our customers with content marketing management. You can see SEO and email marketing as two marketing tools with high return rate and long-term returns. In B2B marketing, the rate of reading and returning consumer e-mails is high. At this point, the important thing is to be able to send the right mail to the right recipient through the right channels by making the correct segmentation. Likewise, video marketing is 80% more effective than other types of marketing in research. Making use of these tools for your potential customer personas is indispensable for B2B marketing communication activities.

Our Dealer/Customer Portal, which we activated last year, also enabled us to create a bridge based on innovation with our dealers for the weak current cable sector, and to create a B2B interaction suitable for the era of e-transformation. Our Dealer/Customer Portal, where we aim to provide a significant added value to workforce gain, has the feature of being a platform where the desired stock and products are followed by providing 7/24 order and payment convenience. We aim to create an e-business-based interaction with our customers in the future by evaluating the expectations of our customers for our portal and ensuring the development of our portal.

In our marketing perspective, our goal in this area is to manage persona marketing. To enable us to develop strategies suitable for the ideal customer that we are trying to attract in our sales activities and product development works. For example, instead of sending the same marketing e-mail to everyone in your database, the recipient can segment by personas and you can customize your messages according to these different types of customers. This will increase your sales conversion and increase your profitability.

Could you tell us about your product promotion activities for marketing communication management at Erse Kablo?

In order to increase brand and product awareness, it is necessary to focus on different channels in marketing. As Erse Kablo, our traditional PR studies, current press releases and our communication with the leading publishers of the sector are important and very valuable to us. Every year, based on domestic sales and export sales targets, it determines the product promotion materials and accordingly, we manage our marketing communication practices periodically.

The popularity of our specially designed cable stands, which we started to distribute for our dealers and customers in 2017, at domestic and abroad enabled us to consolidate our brand image in product promotion.

The delivery of our price lists to our dealers and customers, which we distribute periodically every year, is one of the important factors that support the sales of the Marketing Department.

We determine our promotions, which are distributed throughout the year, by changing each year by focusing on quality. We take care to make our promotional choices by considering the needs and expectations of our business partners. We apply our advertising designs by separating them according to the product categories our customers sell to. This enables us to support the realization of the right marketing management with the right advertisement for our sales channels.

Along with these activities, it is very important for us to use the communication power of social media. In this process, we have secured our place in social media by providing continuity. The social media platforms you take part in allow you to directly reach the relevant audience in your industry. The important thing here is that you follow the statistics and follow your interaction rates, reach wider target audiences or your regional target audiences by following your regional metrics. You can also promote your brand to large audiences thanks to the presence of many different user groups in these channels and the advertising options of these platforms. As Erse, interactively communicating with our followers by conducting content studies on social media enables us to increase our brand and product awareness.

We will bring a new breath to our industry by publishing our blog, which shows the usage areas of your products, explains their technical features, and gives tips that can increase the user experience.

What are your views on how the basic concepts of marketing strategies in the industry will change? What are Erse Kablo's marketing objectives, targets and strategies for this year?

Practices in B2B marketing practices are changing. The way the product is presented to the customer began to differ. Customers are looking for quality in service as well as quality products. Your quality service takes you one step further than your competitors. While competitors are different and less in the 20th century, your competitors are also differentiating and increasing in the 21st century. As Erse's Marketing Manager, it is among our most important missions to make a difference for Erse in our sector and to support Erse's creation of a noticeable brand perception.

There is an adventure that occurs within the framework of intersecting points between the brand and the customer. As Erse Kablo, we believe that if we manage this adventure with the right message, the right offers and the right communication, we will achieve success together with our business partners. We need to understand the motivations of the customers well and have a good command of the consumption adventure that we have shaped on those motivations. How much better we are trying to manage this adventure in marketing. If we can pack this with content, story, experience and message and enter the sales channels of our customers correctly, we are doing the right marketing for the Erse brand.

Our business development and marketing activities will continue to increase the use of our brand in the Middle East, Gulf, North Africa and Far East markets for our LPCB and VDE approved fire resistant cables (Ervital, Ervital Fire Safe Cable, Ervital Fire Safe Gold Cable)  for this year.

All of Europe, especially England and Germany; We export to more than 50 countries in Asia, the Middle East and Gulf Regions. At this point, we support our quality with international documents in accordance with customer expectations and needs. We are implementing the Integrated Management System and we have certified our ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 10002 management systems created within this framework. Manufacturing the products based on national and international standards, Erse has the product certificates in the norms of “TSE, VDE, MPA, LPCB, REACH, RoHS, CE (LVD, CPR) and SASO”.

We have a customer network based on long-term cooperation and strategic partnerships. As a result of our recent activities, we are taking strong steps towards becoming a reliable and preferred brand in foreign markets. I think that this situation is generally important for the sector that prefers to make contract manufacturing. Last year, we ranked 40th in the TET (Electricity and Electronics Exporters Association) ranking and we maintained our leadership in our segment.

Especially in the last five years, while our export turnover has doubled, its share in our company has exceeded 60%. Since we have the vision of increasing the momentum in this direction; Our management has put the aim of "being a global brand" in the first place in their targets this year.

We continue to support our communication with our new dealers to be configured in Anatolia, our retail group customers and potential companies in the regions, our promotional activities with our visits and promotional and billboard posts. We plan to organize online and offline technical seminars for our project companies and engineers on CPR.

Our activity on our social media platforms is increasing day by day, in order to support this increase, we will develop up-to-date strategies for interactive marketing communication, produce and implement projects.

Erse Kablo received the title of R&D Center in 2018. How do you reflect your technical activities in your marketing management?

In B2B business model marketing, customers don't just focus on pricing policy, technical team support and keeping technical documents up-to-date are of great importance. For this reason, you can show your customers that you are a solution partner by establishing a technical team together with marketing and sales. As Erse Kablo, we take care to provide technical communication management in our customers' visits and online customer meetings together with our R&D Manager and Quality Control Manager in the communication management we establish with our customers. Our R&D Manager gives cable training at seminars held at technical universities and electrical engineers' chambers; thus, as Erse Kablo, we underline that we are an innovative solution partner that contributes to the development of our customers.

As a weak current cable manufacturer in the sector, we successfully continue our R&D activities with a 1% share of our turnover in 2019. We aim to increase exports by supporting domestic production in our modern facilities, holding the title of R&D Center approved by the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, and producing innovative projects. Our priority is to increase the capacity by developing our new products and production technologies, to increase the product quality through efficient use of resources, and to accelerate the entry of foreign direct investments into our country. Based on these goals, as Erse Marketing Department, we are aware that companies that help their customers to develop technically in our sector are one step ahead. We make according to our product groups with the presentations, we emphasize the importance of cable among building materials for life and property safety by highlighting our products. We have supported this with our technical training on CPR (Construction Products Regulation) inside and outside the institution, with our technical brochures, posters and announcements published for the industry.

As Erse Kablo, we have added value to our business partnerships with our R&D, quality control activities, internal and external trainings, market researches and our own CPR laboratory since the first period of the CPR process.

In many projects where the CPR demands for the products in the prestigious projects received in 2019 will increase even more in 2021, there will be product demands according to the CPR classes. Our investment in the CPR testing laboratory enables us to monitor the consistency of the performance of our products. We inform both the sector and our stakeholders with the knowledge provided by our domestic and international seminar participation. Therefore, we fulfill the necessity of being among the leading companies in CPR about products and classes. We will continue to emphasize this in our marketing communication activities.

Could you share your marketing evaluations about Erse Kablo's mission in the sector and the dealership system?

As Erse Kablo, we are the preferred brand of prestigious and important projects with our weak current cable products. We have a wide and robust dealer network domestically, producing products demanded on the shelves of our dealers and customers.

We have a story that we create together with our customers. In marketing communication, we define this as story telling. Using your customers' perspective to create this story, listening to them gives a very strong starting point to your story. As Erse Kablo, we tell our business partners how we can create value for them; we write this story together by telling them the value we offer them, how this value has a place in our customers 'lives, how we make our customers' lives easier, what resources we use and what activities we carry out.

The difference in the dealership structure emerges at a point where the risks increase and the business decreases in the market. We share risk and profit with our dealers. Periodic dealer actions both increase production efficiency and provide competitive price advantage to our dealers.

We have a loyalty bond that we have built together, and it is our priority to maintain and support this bond with our marketing activities and customer relations management. By combining our decisive position in the weak current cable sector with our marketing and sales strategies, we continue our investments by taking our goal of becoming a global company both at home and abroad.

Knowing our responsibilities towards our dealers and customers and supporting them for innovation, our story is concrete. Their trust in us further increases our effectiveness in the market.

What would you recommend to companies that want to advance in marketing as well as sales in your industry?

As long as you can increase the marketing communication activities, we can progress and spread your brand. I can say that configurations based solely on sales-oriented activities will not bring any future benefit in the new transformation process. We have to create new engagement scenarios for your customers and followers we interact with every day. Because there are always options for the new consumer, these options are increasing according to different marketing business models; consumer's motivations do not change, but the consumer's journey of consumption is changing.

Human-oriented branding and marketing activities are at the forefront. Identify your target customers and approach each segment with a different strategy, without knowing your target audience, you have no chance to be statistically successful. The segmentations created with the sales team, the actions you will take towards the targets and the fastness will make it easier for you to reach your target audience. Speed is important here. The fast actions and decisive steps you will take will strengthen the bond between you and your customers or enable you to establish a new contact.

Finally, brands started to manage my communication from digital platforms. How do you interpret the difference between digital and traditional communication management?

The reach of digital marketing to the masses is almost limitless. This is a great advantage when used correctly, but it is also a disadvantage that the customer is exposed to very high interaction in the same environment. In this case, it becomes more important to produce visuals and content that can attract attention at the same time by making the targeting in the most professional way.

The image, power and influence of a brand can only be constructed and reinforced with traditional marketing methods. While the rapid interaction of digital marketing can lead you to sales, you do not have a chance to turn to sales at this speed through traditional marketing; but your brand awareness and strength drive the customer's purchasing decision.

Marketing and sales are a mechanism that acts as a whole. Today has entered a digital era. This situation makes both digital marketing and digital sales important. Every action that marketing takes will definitely return to support the sales in the future. With this awareness, our actions will continue in digital marketing and digital sales.

As Erse Kablo, we have to protect and develop the structuring of our customers at the center of our domestic and international marketing and sales targets, as well as supporting and maintaining this system with prestigious projects in Turkey and in the world.

With traditional marketing communication, you reach the customer with stronger, striking and therefore effective visuals and content that strongly emphasizes your message. Digital marketing communication management requires a practical, fast and flexible understanding. Comprehensive preparation processes including long-term plans, foresight and meticulousness are important in traditional marketing communications.

Retaining the existing customer group that has experienced the brand as well as gaining new followers and potential customers, ensuring the continuity of brand loyalty is an important factor that will ensure continuity. Aiming to be a brand that is always up-to-date, open to innovation, creating alternatives, creating opportunities instead of seizing opportunities with both product diversity and communication, and progressing accordingly, is an investment in the continuity of your brand. As Erse Kablo, new marketing communication projects planned and implemented by investing in technology, data and data analysis of B2B companies, where human-oriented brand communication is at the forefront all over the world, will carry us into the future.

Erse Kablo Focuses On The Future With Marketing Communications Management

Erse Kablo, aiming to make a difference in the sector in brand communication management and marketing activities, shared its marketing targets for 2021 and her valuable comments on the transformation in the marketing world, Marketing Manager Begüm Sevinç shared with us.

You have a business experience ranging from customer relations to corporate communication and marketing studies. Could you tell us about your business adventure at Erse Kablo?

First of all, I would like to state that we are happy to meet with the sector to evaluate Erse Kablo's marketing communication perspective. In this long-running marathon that started in the last quarter of 2015, we can talk about a process that progresses from corporate communication management to Marketing Management. By combining Erse Kablo's production, sales experiences and corporate infrastructure in the sector, the experiences I have gained in the electrical and electronics sector and my trainings, aiming to ensure continuity with our Management, our future-oriented perspective has enabled us to strengthen our marketing management.

As Erse Kablo Marketing Manager, one of our main marketing communication-targeted project managements is keeping the internal motivation constantly dynamic. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place. Because this market is dynamic, it is a sector that constantly develops, develops and is open to transformation. That's why you always have to be one of the visionary leaders who support transformation in order to improve yourself and keep your company pace with this development.

What do you think are the important topics to be considered in marketing communication management? How do you manage these at Erse Kablo?

First of all, brand communication should be determined correctly, all fiction and strategy should be planned over this communication for the correct communication management of marketing. In order, it should be ensured that every message you give through marketing communication channels is passed on to your target audience with the correct perception management for this plan to be implemented.

Your marketing communication management strategies should be interconnected, from your message to the customer to your price policy.

It is necessary to know and perceive the dynamics of the sector well, and the data that will form your company strategies should be reliable and meaningful. The close branding of the market, products, customers, competitors and target customers ensures that the management strategy model of the brand is formed in the most efficient way. Communication with your customers should be established clearly and solidly.

As Erse Kablo, we determine our marketing communication targets according to our sales strategies in order to make the correct positioning in the markets we target for our domestic and export channels. The dynamics that change every year require that we, as the Marketing Department, follow the agenda closely, our competitors, and most importantly, analyze our customers' expectations based on statistical data. At the end of the year, the results of our customer satisfaction surveys and reports from our regional sales managers create a roadmap for us. Thus, we determine which actions we should take in which period and draw our path according to these strategies. Our product quality, customer relations management, pricing policy evaluations, delivery speed, service and packaging quality, and brand recognition are among the most important issues we take into consideration. When we examine the rates of our marketing communication activities in the customer satisfaction survey evaluations of the last 3 years, we can say that it has gained an increasing momentum every year.

“Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. Teamwork takes place in our center in our marketing projects and communication activities. In Erse Kablo's marketing communication goals, being an effective player in the domestic and global markets for our future-oriented and vision in the sector is in the first place.”

During the pandemic period, we observed that B2B marketing has a more specific content compared to other marketing strategies. As Erse Kablo, can you tell us about your opinions about B2B marketing and the actions you have taken?

The pandemic period caused companies with B2B business models to rapidly digitize. Sales managers are increasingly promoting products with video links, technical departments come to the fore with their technical seminars, companies' app applications appear. After the pandemic, we can clearly say that the most important stop in the purchasing journey of B2B customers was the websites of the companies. In the marketing perspective, every update made by B2B companies on their websites has reached a very important level. In order to adapt to this transformation, all B2B companies need to position their websites as the center of their marketing activities and structure all marketing and sales processes accordingly.

We, as Erse Kablo Marketing Department, have invested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail and video marketing this year and put these tools at our center to use these tools that we can easily reach our customers with content marketing management. You can see SEO and email marketing as two marketing tools with high return rate and long-term returns. In B2B marketing, the rate of reading and returning consumer e-mails is high. At this point, the important thing is to be able to send the right mail to the right recipient through the right channels by making the correct segmentation. Likewise, video marketing is 80% more effective than other types of marketing in research. Making use of these tools for your potential customer personas is indispensable for B2B marketing communication activities.

Our Dealer/Customer Portal, which we activated last year, also enabled us to create a bridge based on innovation with our dealers for the weak current cable sector, and to create a B2B interaction suitable for the era of e-transformation. Our Dealer/Customer Portal, where we aim to provide a significant added value to workforce gain, has the feature of being a platform where the desired stock and products are followed by providing 7/24 order and payment convenience. We aim to create an e-business-based interaction with our customers in the future by evaluating the expectations of our customers for our portal and ensuring the development of our portal.

In our marketing perspective, our goal in this area is to manage persona marketing. To enable us to develop strategies suitable for the ideal customer that we are trying to attract in our sales activities and product development works. For example, instead of sending the same marketing e-mail to everyone in your database, the recipient can segment by personas and you can customize your messages according to these different types of customers. This will increase your sales conversion and increase your profitability.

Could you tell us about your product promotion activities for marketing communication management at Erse Kablo?

In order to increase brand and product awareness, it is necessary to focus on different channels in marketing. As Erse Kablo, our traditional PR studies, current press releases and our communication with the leading publishers of the sector are important and very valuable to us. Every year, based on domestic sales and export sales targets, it determines the product promotion materials and accordingly, we manage our marketing communication practices periodically.

The popularity of our specially designed cable stands, which we started to distribute for our dealers and customers in 2017, at domestic and abroad enabled us to consolidate our brand image in product promotion.

The delivery of our price lists to our dealers and customers, which we distribute periodically every year, is one of the important factors that support the sales of the Marketing Department.

We determine our promotions, which are distributed throughout the year, by changing each year by focusing on quality. We take care to make our promotional choices by considering the needs and expectations of our business partners. We apply our advertising designs by separating them according to the product categories our customers sell to. This enables us to support the realization of the right marketing management with the right advertisement for our sales channels.

Along with these activities, it is very important for us to use the communication power of social media. In this process, we have secured our place in social media by providing continuity. The social media platforms you take part in allow you to directly reach the relevant audience in your industry. The important thing here is that you follow the statistics and follow your interaction rates, reach wider target audiences or your regional target audiences by following your regional metrics. You can also promote your brand to large audiences thanks to the presence of many different user groups in these channels and the advertising options of these platforms. As Erse, interactively communicating with our followers by conducting content studies on social media enables us to increase our brand and product awareness.

We will bring a new breath to our industry by publishing our blog, which shows the usage areas of your products, explains their technical features, and gives tips that can increase the user experience.

What are your views on how the basic concepts of marketing strategies in the industry will change? What are Erse Kablo's marketing objectives, targets and strategies for this year?

Practices in B2B marketing practices are changing. The way the product is presented to the customer began to differ. Customers are looking for quality in service as well as quality products. Your quality service takes you one step further than your competitors. While competitors are different and less in the 20th century, your competitors are also differentiating and increasing in the 21st century. As Erse's Marketing Manager, it is among our most important missions to make a difference for Erse in our sector and to support Erse's creation of a noticeable brand perception.

There is an adventure that occurs within the framework of intersecting points between the brand and the customer. As Erse Kablo, we believe that if we manage this adventure with the right message, the right offers and the right communication, we will achieve success together with our business partners. We need to understand the motivations of the customers well and have a good command of the consumption adventure that we have shaped on those motivations. How much better we are trying to manage this adventure in marketing. If we can pack this with content, story, experience and message and enter the sales channels of our customers correctly, we are doing the right marketing for the Erse brand.

Our business development and marketing activities will continue to increase the use of our brand in the Middle East, Gulf, North Africa and Far East markets for our LPCB and VDE approved fire resistant cables (Ervital, Ervital Fire Safe Cable, Ervital Fire Safe Gold Cable)  for this year.

All of Europe, especially England and Germany; We export to more than 50 countries in Asia, the Middle East and Gulf Regions. At this point, we support our quality with international documents in accordance with customer expectations and needs. We are implementing the Integrated Management System and we have certified our ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 10002 management systems created within this framework. Manufacturing the products based on national and international standards, Erse has the product certificates in the norms of “TSE, VDE, MPA, LPCB, REACH, RoHS, CE (LVD, CPR) and SASO”.

We have a customer network based on long-term cooperation and strategic partnerships. As a result of our recent activities, we are taking strong steps towards becoming a reliable and preferred brand in foreign markets. I think that this situation is generally important for the sector that prefers to make contract manufacturing. Last year, we ranked 40th in the TET (Electricity and Electronics Exporters Association) ranking and we maintained our leadership in our segment.

Especially in the last five years, while our export turnover has doubled, its share in our company has exceeded 60%. Since we have the vision of increasing the momentum in this direction; Our management has put the aim of "being a global brand" in the first place in their targets this year.

We continue to support our communication with our new dealers to be configured in Anatolia, our retail group customers and potential companies in the regions, our promotional activities with our visits and promotional and billboard posts. We plan to organize online and offline technical seminars for our project companies and engineers on CPR.

Our activity on our social media platforms is increasing day by day, in order to support this increase, we will develop up-to-date strategies for interactive marketing communication, produce and implement projects.

Erse Kablo received the title of R&D Center in 2018. How do you reflect your technical activities in your marketing management?

In B2B business model marketing, customers don't just focus on pricing policy, technical team support and keeping technical documents up-to-date are of great importance. For this reason, you can show your customers that you are a solution partner by establishing a technical team together with marketing and sales. As Erse Kablo, we take care to provide technical communication management in our customers' visits and online customer meetings together with our R&D Manager and Quality Control Manager in the communication management we establish with our customers. Our R&D Manager gives cable training at seminars held at technical universities and electrical engineers' chambers; thus, as Erse Kablo, we underline that we are an innovative solution partner that contributes to the development of our customers.

As a weak current cable manufacturer in the sector, we successfully continue our R&D activities with a 1% share of our turnover in 2019. We aim to increase exports by supporting domestic production in our modern facilities, holding the title of R&D Center approved by the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, and producing innovative projects. Our priority is to increase the capacity by developing our new products and production technologies, to increase the product quality through efficient use of resources, and to accelerate the entry of foreign direct investments into our country. Based on these goals, as Erse Marketing Department, we are aware that companies that help their customers to develop technically in our sector are one step ahead. We make according to our product groups with the presentations, we emphasize the importance of cable among building materials for life and property safety by highlighting our products. We have supported this with our technical training on CPR (Construction Products Regulation) inside and outside the institution, with our technical brochures, posters and announcements published for the industry.

As Erse Kablo, we have added value to our business partnerships with our R&D, quality control activities, internal and external trainings, market researches and our own CPR laboratory since the first period of the CPR process.

In many projects where the CPR demands for the products in the prestigious projects received in 2019 will increase even more in 2021, there will be product demands according to the CPR classes. Our investment in the CPR testing laboratory enables us to monitor the consistency of the performance of our products. We inform both the sector and our stakeholders with the knowledge provided by our domestic and international seminar participation. Therefore, we fulfill the necessity of being among the leading companies in CPR about products and classes. We will continue to emphasize this in our marketing communication activities.

Could you share your marketing evaluations about Erse Kablo's mission in the sector and the dealership system?

As Erse Kablo, we are the preferred brand of prestigious and important projects with our weak current cable products. We have a wide and robust dealer network domestically, producing products demanded on the shelves of our dealers and customers.

We have a story that we create together with our customers. In marketing communication, we define this as story telling. Using your customers' perspective to create this story, listening to them gives a very strong starting point to your story. As Erse Kablo, we tell our business partners how we can create value for them; we write this story together by telling them the value we offer them, how this value has a place in our customers 'lives, how we make our customers' lives easier, what resources we use and what activities we carry out.

The difference in the dealership structure emerges at a point where the risks increase and the business decreases in the market. We share risk and profit with our dealers. Periodic dealer actions both increase production efficiency and provide competitive price advantage to our dealers.

We have a loyalty bond that we have built together, and it is our priority to maintain and support this bond with our marketing activities and customer relations management. By combining our decisive position in the weak current cable sector with our marketing and sales strategies, we continue our investments by taking our goal of becoming a global company both at home and abroad.

Knowing our responsibilities towards our dealers and customers and supporting them for innovation, our story is concrete. Their trust in us further increases our effectiveness in the market.

What would you recommend to companies that want to advance in marketing as well as sales in your industry?

As long as you can increase the marketing communication activities, we can progress and spread your brand. I can say that configurations based solely on sales-oriented activities will not bring any future benefit in the new transformation process. We have to create new engagement scenarios for your customers and followers we interact with every day. Because there are always options for the new consumer, these options are increasing according to different marketing business models; consumer's motivations do not change, but the consumer's journey of consumption is changing.

Human-oriented branding and marketing activities are at the forefront. Identify your target customers and approach each segment with a different strategy, without knowing your target audience, you have no chance to be statistically successful. The segmentations created with the sales team, the actions you will take towards the targets and the fastness will make it easier for you to reach your target audience. Speed is important here. The fast actions and decisive steps you will take will strengthen the bond between you and your customers or enable you to establish a new contact.

Finally, brands started to manage my communication from digital platforms. How do you interpret the difference between digital and traditional communication management?

The reach of digital marketing to the masses is almost limitless. This is a great advantage when used correctly, but it is also a disadvantage that the customer is exposed to very high interaction in the same environment. In this case, it becomes more important to produce visuals and content that can attract attention at the same time by making the targeting in the most professional way.

The image, power and influence of a brand can only be constructed and reinforced with traditional marketing methods. While the rapid interaction of digital marketing can lead you to sales, you do not have a chance to turn to sales at this speed through traditional marketing; but your brand awareness and strength drive the customer's purchasing decision.

Marketing and sales are a mechanism that acts as a whole. Today has entered a digital era. This situation makes both digital marketing and digital sales important. Every action that marketing takes will definitely return to support the sales in the future. With this awareness, our actions will continue in digital marketing and digital sales.

As Erse Kablo, we have to protect and develop the structuring of our customers at the center of our domestic and international marketing and sales targets, as well as supporting and maintaining this system with prestigious projects in Turkey and in the world.

With traditional marketing communication, you reach the customer with stronger, striking and therefore effective visuals and content that strongly emphasizes your message. Digital marketing communication management requires a practical, fast and flexible understanding. Comprehensive preparation processes including long-term plans, foresight and meticulousness are important in traditional marketing communications.

Retaining the existing customer group that has experienced the brand as well as gaining new followers and potential customers, ensuring the continuity of brand loyalty is an important factor that will ensure continuity. Aiming to be a brand that is always up-to-date, open to innovation, creating alternatives, creating opportunities instead of seizing opportunities with both product diversity and communication, and progressing accordingly, is an investment in the continuity of your brand. As Erse Kablo, new marketing communication projects planned and implemented by investing in technology, data and data analysis of B2B companies, where human-oriented brand communication is at the forefront all over the world, will carry us into the future.