While the property industry may have been one of the last industries to embark on a digital transformation journey, Lendlease has built new commercial capabilities for its clients with the creation of Lendlease Digital.
Michelle Zamora, Head of Marketing for Lendlease Digital, says that the organisation’s role is to use digital technologies to deliver better outcomes for customers as well as for the communities they serve.
“It is very much telling the digitisation and the transformation story for the property industry for Lendlease, and then also building awareness of the portfolio of products and solutions that we’ve created to address those very needs of the property market,” says Zamora.
Zamora highlights automation as a critical component of Lendlease’s digital transformation agenda, as the company looks to automate the design phase, building operations, engagement across supply chains and improve data integration.
As part of this year’s iTnews Digital Nation series, we profiled the work Zamora and her team do in collaboration with Lendlease’s IT teams to better understand the impact of technology – especially marketing technology (MarTech) – on the business (watch the video at the start of this article).
Zamora sees MarTech as a key enabler of the work Lendlease Digital performs. She breaks the concept down into what she describes as the “three C’s of marketing”, merging contact and customer and then segmenting connect, content and collaboration.
“From a customer and contact point of view, we're looking at how do we automate the relationship with the customer and the interaction with the customer? From a connection point of view, how are we automating everything from email to social through to the virtual experiences that they might have? And then increasingly, in that category is the mixed reality and gamification of content,” says Zamora.
“From a content perspective, it's how do we automate the creation of the content? How do we manage the content? How do we distribute the content? And then from a collaboration point of view, again, very much looking at the way that we co-create with our customers and co-create with our partners and having the tools in which to do that, but also how do we collaborate from an experiential point of view.”
Marketers have often misunderstood the level of deep integration required for their MarTech stacks to deliver real transformation, although Zamora, with a long career in technology marketing prior to her shift to the property sector, is better placed than most to understand the work required.
MarTech depends on successful integration and collaboration between the IT and marketing teams, she says.
During the launch of Lendlease Podium in 2020, she relied on the IT organisation to understand the ins and outs of the platform to better share the story of what autonomous buildings would mean to the property industry.
“Both IT and marketing were completely in sync with what we were trying to do, and how to deliver an experience that was something that Lendlease as a brand could be proud of.”
As Lendlease works to cement itself as a leader for digital in the sector, Zamora explains that enabling marketers to engage with technology has empowered them to be creative and drive business value.
“[MarTech] allows us to demonstrate the return that we're driving and the reason for continuing investment,” says Zamora.
“It's allowing us to be more agile, more strategic, again, more creative. And I think it's, quite frankly, making the role of a marketer a lot more fun.”
