Jonathan Andrews talks to Angela Lockwood, Itron’s Director of Product Marketing, about how marketers have had to adjust to cities’ changing needs
Marketing to city governments is notoriously difficult. They vary in composition and decision-making structures from state to state, country to country, and region to region with varying degrees of staff retention. And while cities face common challenges like ageing infrastructure, growing populations and public safety, their priorities are different.
Yet Angela Lockwood points to this as the reason she loves her job. As Director of Product Marketing and Sales Enablement for Itron’s Network Solutions line of business, she oversees a suite of energy and water solutions marketed to 8,000 customers–mainly cities and utilities–in 100 countries.
“As a marketer I want to make sure that we are really clear about the value and the benefits created for each community,” she says. “It’s making sure that you can demonstrate those benefits to the city. They’re not buying technology for technology’s sake. It’s understanding what are the challenges that are unique to them and how you map the value back to them specifically.”
With over 20 years’ experience in marketing, Lockwood took a “non-traditional” path into the field. A communications major in college, she began her career as an intern at a global banking automation solutions company that serves financial institutions.
“I quickly found that I loved connecting the dots between the products we sell and what customers need. My skills and strengths really translated well into marketing,” she explains.
Lockwood began her own consultancy focused on start-ups helping them build marketing strategies and adopt best practices, from which stemmed some freelance writing work for Itron. She then joined Itron full time and over the last 15 years has worked up the ranks.
“I love that I’m in a tech company and working for an organisation that’s really making a positive impact on the world’s most critical resources– energy and water.”
Lockwood’s appreciation for water conservation comes from her childhood in rural New Hampshire growing up in a household without city water services.
“We had our own dug well and we experienced summertime droughts when the well would run dry so I know what it feels like to be very water conscious and to conserve every drop,” she says.
As city budgets become ever more drastically reduced due to COVID-19, Lockwood understands that city leaders are looking for even greater value from their resources and are wanting investments that have an immediate impact on their communities.
“It’s looking at marketing to the city chief information officers, city leaders, and city managers, and showing how their investments are going to create social, economic and financial benefits for their communities,” she explains. “What we’re hearing from city leaders and utilities is that they want a three-dimensional return on investment. If you have those things in mind, the societal, economic and financial benefits at the beginning, it’s a recipe for success.”
Just getting to meet city leaders face-to-face to even have those initial discussions has been curtailed by the pandemic. Lockwood’s team would typically meet those leaders in person, attend conferences and demonstrate the technology and use cases. Yet, like other companies, she has had to lean heavily on the company’s digital marketing arm and virtual events.
“It’s about bringing these concepts to life, especially knowledge-sharing sessions,” she adds. “The cornerstone of our marketing has always been on great content, use-case driven, value-based content, that’s aimed at helping to make the buying process go a little bit easier.”
After creating a foundation of high-quality content, Lockwood measures success based on the level of engagement, the audience reached, and how that converts ultimately to a purchase.
She is a huge fan of research-based marketing that enables her to “check the pulse” on a particular topic and has been the foundation for her team’s most successful campaigns.
“Whether it’s with utility executives or city leaders, it’s about getting input from them, and then creating a valuable tool that can be used for cities to hear from their peers,” she says. “Once you’ve collected that data from the peers of the people you’re targeting, you can slice and dice that data in a number of different ways and make it really relevant.”
Like many companies, her own department’s budget has “felt the pinch”. Lockwood is using this to the best of her ability by leveraging internal resources to target customers. One silver lining that she discovered during the pandemic was that she was able to reach more decision makers in cities and utilities. Previously, many would not have been able to attend an in-person event due to travel budget constraints.
“In some aspects it has been great because we got to get our message out to even more people in a non-traditional way,” she explains. “But we have to be super mindful of and conscious of virtual event fatigue.”
Lockwood regularly tries to attend at least one big event a year. One she is particularly looking forward to return to is the Smart City Expo World Conference in Barcelona. It was here in 2018 the company launched its Smart City Challenge where developers were invited to use Itron’s platform to spark innovation and solve challenges specific to Glasgow and the City of London.
The value of this conference, she says, is the blend of technology companies and cities that have booths and sharing what they are doing in their communities.
“You can see all the latest and greatest in technology but also you have city leaders walking the floor asking questions,” she explains. “But I also see tremendous value in smaller more intimate events where you’re focused on a particular topic, with mostly cities sitting around the table talking about their experiences.”
As the world begins to slowly “unlock” from the pandemic, Lockwood is casting her eye over the pressing concern of resiliency and references Texas which suffered a power grid failure in February due to large winter storms.
She wants to make sure that utilities and communities are equipped with a grid that is active and responding to changing conditions in real time. This has become possible with distributed intelligence at the network edge, and is changing how utilities can not only reactively respond to unexpected weather events, but proactively plan for it.
“Utilities do such a great job of providing a reliable, safe service that you don’t realise how fragile it could be due to ageing infrastructure,” she says. “When utilities and cities are investing in these technology platforms, they are investing long term. Sometimes these investments are hard to justify from the business case but like the event in Texas we should remind people that we need to invest in plants, in our grid, and in our infrastructure.”