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47: Bath Digital Festival 2019 roundup

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After spending three days, attending 12 talks and walking over 20,000 steps, I’m back from Bath Digital Festival. I was lucky enough to interview some of the speakers and attendees to bring you a flavour of the state of technology and marketing in 2019.

It’s a fully packed episode and I hope you enjoy it.

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Day One notes

Jack Cook, Beyond The Brand

  • Beyond The Brand
  • 95% of people remember the content of a video
  • 85% videos watched in silence – add subtitles
  • Adding video to emails can increase click rate by 300%
  • People always have a top two. Make sure you are in it
  • Don’t worry about people seeing the defects that you see, they won’t. In fact it may make you a better personality. Confirmation bias
  • Imposter syndrome. Your audience wouldn’t watch you if they didn’t like you.
  • Get people engaged in 2.4 seconds. Try adding something from the conclusion and add at the beginning
  • Add a call to action!
  • Social media video VS video. On SM share but don’t sell.
  • LinkedIn is good for organic reach
  • Execution: make people stop in their tracks, tell them how long video is, tag in related audiences,
  • Inshot app. Good for chopping up videos

Amy Morse, Does anyone actually read anymore?

  • Learn To Love Your Words
  • VARK ways that people learn. Visual (watching), Aural (listening), Read (or writing), Kinaesthetic (physical, doing something)
  • Words create imagery in the brain
  • Digital books sales up 5%
  • Non-fiction / reference up 1%
  • Reasons to write: Google eats words, helps give people a reason (describe content), reading can be faster
  • But don’t just write. Used mixed media within text. Variety is the spice of live. Think 360d
  • Use voice recorder to transcribe?
  • Amy has dumped Instagram. Concentrated in using LinkedIn

Joeelle Engolia, Good influence

  • Wild & Wolf
  • At its core it’s word of mouth
  • 92% of people trust recommendation from people over brand content
  • Macro over 60k subscribers, Micro 10k to 50k, Nano up to 10k
  • More authentic and less expensive over ads
  • Influencer marketing is good of product is considered
  • Paid ads better for impulse as more controllable
  • Bath film festival logo stencilled on floor when it’s coming up
  • User influencers around events
  • Content must be authentic to get “cut through”
  • Target a specific network relevant audience
  • Tips for small brands: steer clear of macro influences as expensive, find a niche, using Gifted,
  • Work out personal, then vertical (lifestyle, gaming etc)
  • Set goals and let influencer know
  • Follow ASA guidelines!

Chris Kemp & Duncan Burgess, Video creation: telling stories and engaging your audience

  • Suited & Booted Studios
  • 82% of internet will be animation and video by 2021
  • 72% prefer video not text
  • YouTube transitioning to social platform
  • Tips for improving views on out video podcast for YouTube
  • Avg video uploaded to YouTube gets 200 views
  • 64% people watched videos then converted
  • More likely to retain information in video
  • 60% of digital requests original from a mobile. People likely to interpret content through this as more trusted. It’s more personal!!
  • Netflix 10% of uk internet traffic
  • The old landscape (3 mins): intro, how/why, make, result, brand, CTA
  • The landscape now: Now brand, end, make, cta, view more
  • Book: Emotionomics. “The more you make people think the less they feel and the less they feel the less motivated the are to give”
  • Good RedBull video examples
  • The brief, who is it for, why should they care, where will they watch it (formats and length), what do you want them to do
  • Considerations from story – KPIs
  • Platforms mark down unoriginal content so may need to repurpose content for different platforms.

Day Two notes

Edward White, Personal brand

  • At Live
  • 4000 ads a day
  • Go on the journey, just start
  • Over create. Video, record everything and repurpose as content
  • LinkedIn articles stay at the top of your listing
  • Create your own personal brand pages
  • Grow your network around events by following people who are mentioned on the hashtag
  • Separate company (finished, polished) and personal (my story) brand pages
  • Great idea to ask people to connect on LinkedIn
  • Doing what the girls do and having legs in their Instagram post

Tom Vaughton, Is google a monopoly

  • Varn
  • Search engines started 1994
  • Google trawled over 30 trillion pages last year (check)
  • Monopoly (in majority control of users), Monopsony (only one buyer)
  • Companies like Google are so big because we are lazy. We don’t use other services
  • Watch HyperNormalisation, on the BBC
  • If you don’t want to be tracked try Duck Duck Go or Swisscows search engines or ProtonMIL or Outlook
  • BrightonSEO conference

Helen Tonetti, Inside out branding

  • Make Digital Work
  • Most businesses market to people who are cold and unaware
  • Remarketing or targeting is the most underused marketing method
  • Remarketing Ads must be relevant, must be valuable and have clear call to action
  • If you get people to click back bring them back to the relevant product or page
  • Remarketing to people Looking for you: search, social. Remarket to them with offer or objection to a sale (e.g. if a webinar then tell them they can watch it later)
  • Other remarketing ideas: template libraries, finish checkout, idea testimonial, webinars
  • Ask people what their Objections are? In person if possible
  • Also make sure objections are handled on the page such as testimonials
  • Remarketing to Customers: new content h(segementation matters), renewals and upgrades, sell new services and up sell
  • Can now upload customer list to to LinkedIn and Google for remarketing
  • Remarketing to lookalike (matched on LinkedIn) audiences: similar to existing customers, event attendees, email list (active users), video views (important) – look for people who are engaged.
  • Custom Intent Audience (CIA): People that have intention to do something. On Google and Facebook.
  • Keyword / Competitor analysis tools: SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Answerthepublic
  • Keyword strategy: research on a Google for basic keywords (Ads, organic and shopping). Research competitors found on Google, collect URLs from competitors and use to make a CIA
  • Using LinkedIn insight tag can see job titles of Google searchers
  • Remarketing to Locations: Venues (schools, stadiums etc), Evans, towns, competitor locations, or even own venues for customer promotions – just on Mobile
  • Bryan Plumb. Example about using a trade show video to get people to become customers. Got 40 enquiries and 10 customers.
  • SEO audience: create content based on questions people ask online and answer them
  • Cold audience: educate them about the problem. Inspire education or entertain.
  • People love statistics

Bill Stalk, Six Numbers to run your business

  • Be Astute
  • Don’t always think about financial KPIs
  • Camel racing: numbers to create revenue
  • Pick KPI that you can influence and that are easy to collect. Make sure to look forwards
  • Make sure the numbers work for your business
  • KPIs we chose: Ad/marketing/sales activity, Avg Cost/order, Average Order Value, Number of orders

Day Three notes

Sandeep Roy, Hypercharge growth

  • Innovate2Grow
  • The “flat white economy” is the uks biggest sector
  • Digital sector grew at 3x the overall UK economy
  • Digital is a way of thinking, need to fundamentally rethink they way business is done
  • 300 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute
  • “What got you here, will not get you there”
  • Digital competition shrinks value e.g. Uber shrinking taxi service by 40%
  • Competition is now global
  • 8% of businesses will survive the digitalisation of business
  • How long to reach 50m users: telephone 75years, to Pokemon go 19days
  • Old business model + digital. Doesn’t work. Thomas Cook
  • How do retailers counter show rooming? Change the buying experience eg Carvana, uses large car vending machine for people to pickup and buy. They are also overcoming barriers such as flight voucher to pickup! 7 day refund.
  • Amazon go store
  • Business model: Who is customer, what is the value and ho do you deliver that value to the customer (at appropriate cost)
  • Post office being disrupted with delivery services which offer kore availability
  • Hyper personalisation: like segmentation but super targeted. Asked on behaviour and other customer data. Stitch fix, Clothes company that sends 10 clothes free pay only for what you buy, send everything else back. Gives them lots of data.

Dave McRobbie, The need for humane tech

  • Dave McRobbie
  • Watch The panda is dancing
  • humanetech.com
  • “Move fast and break things” (and markets/barriers/trust) zukerberg
  • Attention is the new oil. Finite resources that’s running out
  • Attention drives data, Data drives business, Business craves attention.
  • In 2004 people gave 3 mins of undivided attention, in 2016 now 40 seconds of undivided attention, includes internal distractions (Gloria Mark)
  • Google User Profile Information (information surplus)
  • YouTube UPI comes from 20% of users
  • Facebook pivoted to develop Behavioural futures trading based on the UPI. With 300 likes they know you better than yourself
  • “Humans being downgraded as technology being upgraded”
  • Almost half of children between 11-16 have gambled r3cently
  • The hawthorn effect.
  • “Tech moves quickly – People slowly”
  • Centre for Humane Tech
  • Design with the end in mind. Not only help people to join but also to leave
  • Lifefaker app – life isn’t perfect, your profile should be

Craig Rackstraw, Can technology save the planet

  • IcoTeq
  • Habitat loss is the main threat to 85% of species
  • “Nature is not a nice to have – it’s our life-support system.” Mike Barrett