Nur Aidil Nordin, Marketing Manager for APAC at Crayon

What does your company do?

Crayon is a global IT services provider, distributor, and reseller, supporting businesses throughout their entire IT journey, from software procurement and cost optimisation to cloud services, data, and AI solutions.

We operate across two key lines of business: one focused on direct engagement with end customers, and another centered around supporting our channel partners. For direct customers, our core strength lies in IT cost optimisation. We help enterprises manage and reduce their IT spend while ensuring their infrastructure is secure, efficient, and primed for innovation. This is where Crayon brings real value, by making technology work for the business, not the other way around.

We act as a strategic partner, offering consulting-like services including frameworks, insights, and tailored advice. We help customers understand the current state of their IT estate, whether they’re overspending in the cloud or underutilising certain services—and provide actionable recommendations to optimise costs, maximise value, and unlock new business outcomes.

On the channel side, we empower our partners through enablement programs, co-marketing campaigns, and incentive structures designed to help them grow their business. We support their efforts across licensing, services, and solution sales, building a thriving partner ecosystem. Our approach is collaborative and community-driven, enabling our partners to deliver greater value to their customers.

We also work closely with major vendors, with Microsoft as our leading partner, alongside other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google. Whether it’s cloud, on-prem, modern workplace, optimisation, data, or AI, Crayon is your trusted IT partner, here to help navigate the complexities of today’s technology landscape and drive measurable outcomes. 

 

Thanks for that overview. Nur, that’s very helpful. Second question: As the senior marketing manager at Crayon, what is your current main focus?

As the Marketing Manager, I lead direct-to-customer marketing across APAC, with a focus on field marketing and regional strategy. While we have a separate team managing channel marketing, my primary audience is end customers across markets, including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, Sri Lanka, emerging markets, and Japan.

My role involves orchestrating regional campaigns that align with our APAC business objectives and serve as a foundation for local marketers to execute effectively. I develop campaign kits and end-to-end strategies and also localise global campaigns from our headquarters in Oslo, Norway, ensuring they’re relevant and actionable for each market in the region.

In addition, I manage regional vendor funding and initiatives, such as Microsoft MDF or AWS marketing funds—ensuring they are utilised efficiently across markets. I track campaign performance, lead generation, and pipeline impact, and I provide reporting and insights to our senior management team. 

 

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful field marketing campaign that your team has recently executed?

We run a combination of flagship events and targeted digital campaigns, both of which are tightly integrated to create a cohesive customer experience. Our most successful initiatives effectively bring these two elements together—amplifying reach, relevance, and results.

One of our standout programs was Crayon Connect, our flagship event series, which we executed across key markets. Its success was driven by a highly targeted approach, focusing on new customers and greenfield accounts, and ensuring that the messaging and solutions presented were relevant to market needs. For example, our AI-focused campaigns across APAC gained strong traction thanks to well-timed, locally resonant content and the launch of our own AI accelerators, designed to solve real business problems.

From a program development perspective, we tailor our solutions to address specific challenges faced by our customers. These solutions are supported by strong vendor partnerships, particularly with Microsoft, which has been instrumental in boosting the impact and credibility of our campaigns.

We also place strong emphasis on thought leadership and the customer journey. Across regions, we build campaigns with clearly defined buyer touchpoints, leveraging a digital mix of EDMs, blogs, case studies, whitepapers, and e-books. These assets help us deliver content tailored by industry, be it healthcare, public sector, or education, ensuring the message lands with the right audience at the right time. All of these tie together to make campaigns successful, and this is what we’ve been seeing good results with. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to delivering a clear value proposition. At the end of the day, what value are you bringing to our customers? What’s been very good from our side is that we go for our tagline as well as our mission, which is “optimise to innovate.” As mentioned, we are here to help them save money, fine-tune, and ensure their business can move forward and innovate with whatever they are using. As strategic advisors, we are here to help them with their frameworks and their methodologies, and we were also named a leader for the Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Managed Services. This is also something we use as a key value proposition for customers to trust us and ensure we are given an opportunity to innovate with all of this asset management. 

 

You’ve mentioned your flagship event, the Crayon Connect. That’s fine as an example for the next few questions, and you’re more than welcome to share as many as you would like or as many as you’re comfortable sharing. Moving forward, what are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

Number one is getting the right audience. Although we do have a database, it’s still hard to pinpoint and segment them in the right group or buying group. It’s also hard to understand their intentions. It’s really important for us to do our research and work with companies and organisations that are experts in this space to get the right audience and the right database. 

We’ve worked with a lot of companies and agencies who provide us with leads, but again, they’re not always “good leads.” So, it’s hard for us to work with this and not get the investment we wanted. 

One of the challenges we continue to face is tracking the return on our marketing investments. Given the breadth of our services and multiple lines of business, from solutions to services to licensing, the measurement of ROI can vary significantly across different offerings. Our sales cycles also tend to be long, sometimes stretching from three months to over a year, which makes it even more difficult to attribute marketing activities directly to closed deals. At the moment, we don’t always have the full capability to accurately measure ROI across the board. It’s something we’re actively working on improving, and we’re confident that with better alignment and tools, we’ll continue to enhance visibility and reporting moving forward.

Another key challenge we face is building stronger brand awareness. While we’ve implemented several strategies to increase visibility, we’re continuously evaluating whether we’re doing enough to position Crayon as a leading IT partner. Many still perceive Crayon primarily as a Microsoft licensing and resale partner without realising the breadth of our capabilities, from IT cost optimisation and managed services to data and AI solutions and software procurement. It’s a challenge to shift that perception and educate the market on the full scope of value we offer. We are actively working to change that. Through flagship events, industry sponsorships, expos, and trade association engagements, we aim to place Crayon front and center as a strategic partner in the IT space. We also engage our sales teams and partner ecosystem to amplify our message and consistently highlight our broader solutions portfolio.

That said, we still hear feedback from sellers that some customers aren’t fully aware of who we are or what we offer. This reinforces the need to continuously push our brand forward, ensuring we’re not just visible but clearly understood as a trusted, innovative IT partner. 

 

How does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing? 

Number one is to be innovative. From our point of view, we always want to focus on how we can bring value to customers. With this in mind, being a top leader in this space, I feel like we are ahead of our customers because we support customers and partners with the value that we bring rather than just saying this is what we do. We want to focus on what we can do for you and what it means for your business. 

At Crayon, we focus on aligning with our customers’ business objectives and long-term goals. Our go-to-market strategy is centred around being a true partner—walking alongside them throughout their IT journey. This customer-first mindset is what sets us apart from the competition. From software procurement and security to cloud innovation and hybrid strategies, we offer end-to-end support that evolves with our customers’ needs. We don’t just offer solutions—we act as an extension of their team, providing ongoing guidance and expertise from both our technical and sales teams. Whether it’s fine-tuning existing systems, navigating cloud adoption, or unlocking new opportunities for innovation, we’re here 24/7 to ensure our customers are supported, enabled, and empowered every step of the way. That’s the Crayon difference.

From a marketing perspective, I think we also stay ahead by being very laser-targeted with our marketing approach. We focus on specific industries and specific motions. Do we accelerate? Do we acquire? Do we retain? This is one of the things we are pushing this year: making sure we are doing things not just for the sake of meeting our vendor request, but more about what the objective is, and whether it ties into our plan, our strategy, and making sure that we also cover the specific needs of the customers. Apart from that, being industry-focused, making sure that we target the right segment, giving them the right assets before, and nurturing them are how we stay ahead.

From a branding perspective, we’ve done a lot of good work in terms of making sure that we reach the brand position and awareness that we want in the market. This is how we also stay ahead of the game: we make sure that our brand is always out there, our website traffic is always high, our social media growth is high, and our PR and comms, the media outlets and media buys that we have, are still out there. We make sure that we also tie in with all the ads and work with all of these media outlets.

Winning prestigious awards like Reseller of the Year, Microsoft Partner of the Year, and License Distributor of the Year further solidifies our position as thought leaders in the industry. These accolades not only validate our approach but also help us stay ahead of the competition.

All of these elements, our strategy, focus on customer pain points, and commitment to addressing their unique needs, are integral to our success. By nurturing our customers and continuously understanding their challenges, we ensure that our solutions remain at the forefront of the market, reinforcing our leadership role across the industry. 

 

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for field marketers today that might not have been available in the past? 

Mainly, I believe it’s the development of artificial intelligence or AI. We do have a lot of tools now that we are able to use to make things more efficient and make use of our time much better. As marketers, we have so much on our plates and so many hats to fill. We have so many things to do. I feel like whatever can support us from a content perspective, AI can support us. We use tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot that can help us create and proofread our content. I think that’s super helpful, making sure that we are also relevant and working on the tone, our branding guidelines, typing into whatever post that we have, and so on and so forth. All of this, from an AI perspective, supports us in a way that I feel wasn’t available to us.

Apart from that, we also have a lot of new communities, especially marketing communities, that are also big opportunities. Companies and thought leaders around lead generation also have a lot of opportunities for marketers to utilise them. All of these communities also create support through knowledge sharing and leading. Sharing those insights across the community or community-building helps in a way that I feel like wasn’t really there before. I think now there are more and more communities and companies doing more of these, like B2B or B2C type of marketing communities that can support as well. 

Alongside that are the training courses that are available online. I feel like now, since during COVID as well, there was much content that was produced to be able to equip marketers and be able to utilise how can we be better at doing tools, like Canva or Adobe, all of these design tools that I feel like are very useful, or even just like creating good slides for PowerPoint. I feel like there are many new innovations that can support marketers.

 

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

I feel like in the next few years, five or 10 years, there’s going to be a lot of innovation happening across the board. Marketing-wise, there will be a lot of new AI tools, new platforms, and even AI content. As you can see right now, I can already tell, actually, from a marketer’s perspective, how ChatGPT or Copilot is doing on, let’s say, LinkedIn posts, among others. I can easily identify and mute and see whether people just copy-pasted it or even if they tweaked it a bit. I’m able to see that, and I feel like in the future, there will be even more new AI content. But then again, still making sure that we are still able to stand out and deliver it more to a human approach as well. 

Secondly, the future of marketing also has a lot of automation already, and I can see even more automation coming in. Like, how do you actually get a lot of insights from, let’s say, an email marketing campaign? How many people will be able to understand what a person is actually viewing in this EDM? Or where do their eyes actually go? And what statements are being recognised more? I don’t know. A lot of innovations and automation are going to happen in the future that focus on AI as well. There are always a lot of opportunities for the marketing landscape. 

Of course, from a creative landscape, people will keep innovating and creating more things that can make things even more efficient. Right now, I think we are in a space where AI can support us with specific content. But maybe in the future, I know there is support in terms of images as well. How can you actually, let’s say, resize images with one click or even invitations you can create designs with AI, and so on and so forth. For me, the future of marketing is really just innovation, and it’s taking over as well. From there, it’s our job as marketers to also ensure that we still have a lot of brain capacity and marketing choices from our side, to be creative, and to make sure we can incorporate both the strength of AI and our expertise.

 

What is the role of the field marketer in one word, and why? 

I thought of a lot of words, but I guess the one that covers it all, for me, is impact. Why? Because I feel like, as field marketers, we are influencers to the organisation and to the business. We are influencers in a way where we strategise for them, and we are also doers and strategists. We do everything they need and support them. I don’t want to call it support. I want to be stronger because I don’t want marketers to be seen as just support people. Rather, we really create and strategise for you, and then we ensure that all of your efforts from a sales perspective are also being supported. Also, we are here to make a greater impact on the organisation. Sometimes, field marketers also do a lot of things that are outside their scope. For example, helping HR with internal events. All of this can support and create an impact for more lasting relationships and stronger team building across the team, as well as making sure that, internally and externally, they are all our stakeholders. So, really, it’s the impact that field marketers are bringing to the entire organisation.

 

What piece of traditional leadership advice do you believe doesn’t apply to modern field marketers?

I’ve been thinking more on ways of working, rather than traditional leadership advice. If I think about how marketing was approached in the past, many of those methods simply don’t apply in today’s landscape. Take traditional outreach methods, such as one-off email blasts or direct mailers. These approaches often fall flat now, especially as audiences have become more cautious and discerning. Right now, a more thoughtful, value-driven, and targeted approach is needed. Customers expect relevance, and the old “spray-and-pray” methods just don’t resonate the way they used to. Even telemarketing, which used to be a reliable tactic, has become increasingly challenging. With growing concerns around phishing, scam calls, and caller ID spoofing, people are less likely to engage. While it can still work in some situations, it’s far less consistent and much harder to rely on as a primary channel.

That said, I don’t dismiss traditional advice entirely, it still holds value. Many of those foundational principles continue to shape how we think about modern field marketing strategy. It’s more about adapting those principles to fit the evolving expectations of today’s customers and embracing new ways of working that reflect how people engage and make decisions now. 

 

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

Continue to be flexible, open-minded, and opportunistic. I feel like marketing has so many ways to work with other people and different teams across the board. It’s just finding how we can continue to make an impact across these teams and make sure that they know us and are aware of what we are doing, also being opportunistic around the roles available in the market. Always do what you feel is suitable for yourself. Suppose you’re into creative; stick to creative. If you’re more towards strategy or even client-facing, hone that skill. For me, it’s really getting all of that and being the jack of all trades. Coming from a vendor and fast-paced environment, I see that as a strength; it gives me the ability to say, “I’ve done this before, I’ve worked on this kind of campaign, I’ve handled these challenges.” It’s that “been there, done that” confidence that allows me to move quickly and decisively. I also believe that for marketers in the IT space, having a technical foundation, or at least a solid understanding of how things work behind the scenes, is incredibly valuable. It helps bridge the gap between messaging and actual solution value.

Above all, it’s important to stay curious. The landscape is always evolving, and staying on top of new trends means you’re not just a marketer but a well-rounded contributor who brings both strategic insight and technical context to the table.