CMO Chats with Li Li Chua, Senior Director of Marketing APAC at Workiva

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world. Today, we are thrilled to have Li Li with us. Can you just give a short introduction about yourself, your job title, and your company?

Thank you, Neil. I’m privileged to be in this session. I bring with me over 20 years of marketing experience, but I did not start as a marketer. Actually, I was a computer graduate, and I pivoted from being a systems engineer to a product manager in my earlier years. Throughout the years, I was privileged to be given the opportunity to dabble in the multiple facets of marketing as I climbed the marketing ladder. I acquired actual real-life experiences, not just in marketing but also in people management, leadership, shaping corporate cultures and values, managing through all the technological changes, dealing with crises and change management. Now, as the Senior Director of Marketing of APAC at Workiva, I lead the team through various phases of growth, from building our digital ecosystem to creating demand generation strategies and delighting customers through engaging experiences and building a community of customer advocates. This role covers Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. This is where I am now.

For those who are not familiar with Workiva, could you just give a quick snapshot into what the company does?

Sure. Workiva is the Cloud Platform. We have a cloud platform for reporting, and we cover reporting in all angles, from sustainability reporting to financial reporting and governance and risk, all in one united platform.

In your role as the Senior Director of Marketing, could you give us an insight into what currently is your main focus?

I would say it’s getting ahead of the pipeline to create a very sustainable marketing growth engine. With the current geopolitical landscape, it brings about uncertainty to businesses. Hence, it is even more imperative for marketers to focus on driving measurable impact and positive business outcomes while sustaining this growth journey.

We can just dig a little bit deeper into some of your campaigns that you’ve been running. I’d love for you to share any particular campaigns that have been very successfully executed recently, and just share some of the outlines on how that was achieved.

Well, there have been many successful events. In my current capacity, I would consider our annual Accelerate event a success in this region. Workiva Accelerate is a roadshow we run in Sydney, Singapore, and Melbourne. This is our opportunity to really bring together a mix of industry leaders, partners, and customer speakers from across industries like finance, sustainability, risk, and compliance professionals, all together to gain insight and learn from the best, and simply network amongst all of them. It is successful because of the quality of the discussion that we see, the actions that the audience can take after the event, and, of course, the pipeline that it brings to our business.

How many years have you been running Accelerate, and is that something you fine-tuned over the years?

Yes, globally we have global conferences called Amplify. We have been in APAC for the last five years, and over the last three years, we started with Accelerate. This is going to scale from a local roadshow and amplify to a much bigger scale. So this is how we tweak and change along the way to make it more impactful and more meaningful for our customers and our partners.

What are your challenges as a marketer at the moment?

In today’s digital age, consumers have an accelerating appetite for innovative products, but on the contrary, their attention span to capture that understanding of the innovation is decelerating. The challenge for marketers today, I would say, is being able to be a peacock for that moment. When a peacock spreads its feathers and people stop to look. So be that peacock in that short span of time to draw the consumers’ attention and pique their interest so that they swipe you to the right and not the left.

The life cycle of a product is also getting shorter today compared to before. The speed to market is of the essence, and as consumers, they tend to switch between business and social channels, LinkedIn and Facebook, online and offline. So, the need to really navigate the different messaging across these channels and keep an ‘always on’ mode is a challenge.

I like the phrase ‘be that peacock.’ How do you stay ahead of your competitors in terms of your marketing strategy?

In terms of marketing strategy, I would say that it really depends on your objectives. It could be acquiring market share, or it could be increasing your share of wallet in a particular segment. Is this a volume game or a value game, or capturing mindshare from competitors? So you deploy different strategies, and it also largely depends on how much of your budget you have In general, I would say keeping an omnichannel approach works best for us. Through digital channels, it has the ability to reach far and wide, including capturing a global audience. Again, if you can create that peacock type of content, you will get that high engagement and leads, and then nurturing the leads down the funnel, combining it with in-person engagement will bring your scores higher and ultimately help promote conversion.

Obviously, the decreasing budget is something that everyone has to deal with, and it’s something that I think marketers have definitely felt over the last year or two. It seems like budgets are getting smaller, and the goals are staying the same for the business. In terms of that ‘peacock’ moment as a marketer, do you think that’s harder to do, or do you think it’s creating opportunities to define creative ways to set yourself apart from the competition?

Yes, I think everybody is going after that same pie, and the budget is lean. So you really need to be creative about how you can maximise that given budget. For marketing to succeed, it is not just about the conversion or the ROI piece, which is necessary and important, but what is needed is also to string together all cross-functions. I see the most effective campaigns and the best performance not just from marketing activities that are kicked off well with all the detailed planning and excellent execution, but it comes when you have all the teams coming together, from pre-sales to inside sales, between sales and marketing, and all across, from the pre to actual and the post at the end of it, seeing through the handover, making sure that the entire lead conversion to opportunity process and the win comes after. So, a very tightly knitted and collaborative team with synergy and a shared common goal is critical for success. Given the lean budget, this is even more important.

Yeah, definitely. Marketing, especially, has a lot of different functions that filter into it and are crucial to the success of a lot of campaigns. And I agree, you might have your vision, but it needs to be a group vision to really get the most out of these, especially with a leaner budget. As a marketing leader, what do you believe is the biggest opportunity today that might not have been available in the past?

I would say that data is the biggest opportunity for CMOs. But data can also pose as a threat. In the past, I think there was a lack of data and the right systems to capture the data. That was an issue. But today, it presents huge opportunities for us so that we can gain that greater insight into that targeted segment, that targeted audience, and enable us to be more targeted and personalised. However, it is also a threat, as we now have an abundance of data, a lot of digital and non-digital footprints and traces. So how do we effectively capture those offline and online signals, leveraging technology and having the right ecosystem in place to capture and draw insights, and then model that for further growth? So I would say that’s a huge opportunity, but we have to manage that carefully.

When we look into the future of marketing, obviously, you’re speaking about data there. That’s obviously a massive change that’s come into play and will continue to shape the industry. But other than that, what does the future of marketing look like?

Well, I think the future of marketing can’t run away from AI. I believe that’s one that is infused with AI and personalisation, one that is highly targeted, highly augmented and experiential; it becomes second nature in every aspect of marketing with sustainability considerations embedded, and innovation will be crowdsourced. So the fastest AI production of a crowdsourced innovation that is hyper-personalised wins the game.

I agree that hyper-personalisation is going to be key. And I also agree that there are so many facets of AI that are going to come into our lives, and that speed of adoption is going to be important. What is the role of a senior director of marketing in one word, and why?

I would choose agility. Well, because in today’s environment, as a CMO, you may not be able to work with past trends as they are highly unpredictable these days. So you need to be able to pivot, and pivot quickly. You need to scale quickly. You need to double down once the wind blows in your way, or you need to withdraw and reinvent when you’re at its tail. Being agile is a trait that you need to have in the marketing community.

In terms of leadership advice, what space of traditional leadership advice that you don’t believe applies to modern marketing leaders?

We cannot take loyalty for granted in today’s context, both with our customers and with our employees. The lifespan of everything has shortened, and that’s the same with loyalty. So, whether it is customers’ purchase decisions or an employer-employee relationship, we can no longer assume that stickiness is there. With employees, modern CMOs cannot adopt a top-down approach like before. So there’s a need to instill a very collaborative culture, an environment that is highly conducive for radical candor to inspire continuous innovation and creativity. This will help fuel the experience to delight customers and continue to attract and retain them to follow the brand.

I was speaking to some HR leaders, and they were speaking about how important it is now to experience off-boarding someone because, like you said, the relationship, be it with an employee or a customer, is way shorter than it used to be. But actually, that  off-boarding of a customer or employee is more important now because there is a lot more opportunity to bring that person back around into being a customer. Actually, their experience at the exit is just as important as at the entry. Now, in terms of career advice, what advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders on their way up?

I think there are a lot of opportunities. The one piece of advice is, firstly, for young marketers to be agile, to be constantly hungry for knowledge, to gain that experience, and to be able to adapt to situations very quickly. And, of course, equip yourself with a set of both the soft skills and the AI-driven skill set, as there are many aspects of marketing work where you can deploy AI to gain efficiency. However, soft skill is also needed because there are things that AI cannot replace, that is, the human-centric portion, the psychological aspects of it, the empathy, the reading of non-verbal cues, and binding through that relationship building, which is highly key for a successful campaign. That’s my advice for young marketers.

Fantastic. I think that’s great advice. With that, thank you very much for joining our series.