With transport needs and policies changing so quickly, it’s clear that technology is coming into its own with its ability to deliver solutions quickly, cost-effectively and efficiently. But how do you get that message across to decision makers? Watch it here.

This week’s discussion from ITS (UK) features three experts in marketing, from a billion dollar multinational, an SME and a news agency.

They share their views on how companies large and small should engage with customers and clients to ensure people know how their solutions can make a real difference.

“We work quite a lot with PR agencies, to really get them to understand the technology that’s happening not just with Cubic, but with our partners in the industry as a whole,” explains Krishna Desai, Global Marketing Manager at Cubic Transportation Systems. “Let them be the change makers and the noise makers… Sometimes it’s easy for us to talk about our own solutions in the jargon, heavy words that we use and expect everybody to know about it, or sometimes not even seeing the unique selling points of what it is that we’re actually trying to say. [We need to turn it around and say] actually, why would people find that really interesting?”

Not having the budget for a PR agency makes Georgia Tomkins, part of the marketing team at AppyWay look for innovative ways to promote the business. “We’re leaning quite heavily on our contacts within the industry,” she explains. “Whether it’s co authoring articles within trade magazines, or whether it’s just making sure that we’re keeping our news front and centre and keeping those relationships strong with those public publications. And the other thing that we’re doing has government guidance. So as a team and as a company, we’ve just made sure that we’ve been on top of all of that, and making sure that we know what the government guidance is and creating booklets and creating white papers and thought leadership pieces so that our local authority partners and people we haven’t partnered with yet know that we’re on top of this, we know what this means, and that we have the solutions to help them with that.”

ITS (UK)’s media partner DMA Media provides content to journalists around the world. Auto Futures editor Alex Kreetzer gave some hints on what journalists are looking for – the user perspective, “It’s almost the easy part is making the the software making the solution,” he says. “We say, what is the solution on a personal or humanising level? So how does this solution solve the problem? Obviously, this differs for different areas in the market and different solutions. But if people can understand the human aspect of it, what does it do for society.”

The discussion details many more hints and tips for companies keen to show off their solutions to an audience which is clearly in need to know about them.