If you are in control, you’re not moving fast enough

A Reflection on Festival of Marketing 2015

Festival of Marketing 2015 was an incredible couple of days. Hosted at Tobacco Docks in London, the exhibition had many highlights for Tealium. Not only did we have a stand, a souvenir Maker’s Lab, a 7 foot Digital Marketing Beast mascot, but we also managed to execute a real-time marketing campaign, AND our Beast went head to head with the Thunderhead in a table tennis match.

There were a huge number of topics being discussed and debated across the two days; mobile, email, digital, offline, technology, data, b2m, b2b, b2c, wearable tech….the list was endless. What was clear though was there seemed to be an obvious challenge faced by marketers on how to integrate all of their platforms, data and activity to deliver targeted, personalised messaging whilst also proving ROI.

In his presentation, keynote speaker Anthony Thomson stated ‘marketing for me is really simple; you use data to feed opportunity’, which many would agree with, but HOW to do this in the most effective and efficient way was the biggest question.

Proud to be a Marketing T*sser

Day 1 brought Lord Alan Sugar as the opening interviewee. With an excitable room of marketeers, Lord Sugar, as controversial as ever, opened the Festival by calling marketers ‘t*ssers’. This gave Tealium the opportunity (with our t-shirt printing Makers Lab) to run a ’Proud to be a Marketing T*sser’ themed campaign.

Despite this interesting opening, Lord Sugar did offer advice during his interview. He gave praise to Apple for the concise way they tell you the benefits of their product and how it will make your life better, where and how to buy it. He suggested that making the steps your customers need to take in order to buy your products as clear as possible, is the best use of marketing activity.

The purpose of business was a common thread with divided opinion between Lord Sugar and the opening presenter of day 2, Anthony Thomson, Founder and Chairman of Atom Bank. Lord Sugar insisted the purpose was about making money, whereas Thomson claimed the point of starting a business is to make something better. 

Mobile

Thomson is revolutionising the financial industry by introducing the world’s first online only bank. In his presentation he stated that ‘the No.1 reason why people love shopping online is because it’s easier’, which might be an obvious statement, but is often overlooked and it is important to consider this when planning a marketing strategy that you don’t want to make it difficult for your customers to buy your products or services.

Thomson also advised marketers to put mobile first when planning campaigns to engage consumers. Mobile now cuts through all elements of marketing activity and should be considered not as a platform but as a stage for the customer. When considering email design you have to address mobile first; the majority of emails are now read on a mobile device first and you have to simplify the message to make it  easy  and quick to digest. You can’t make your customers guess what you want them to buy. As all experts would suggest, responsive design should be part of your strategy already but when thinking of your website or email marketing you need to think about getting rid of complicated templates that won’t render nicely on a mobile device, but think first what will work best on mobile and then desktop will then follow.  

Mobile is in no way new, and shouldn’t be considered as such, but the way it is being used is affecting different industries in extraordinary ways. As the banking industry develops over the next 24 months we will see more change than in  the past 50 years with a continued closure of banks across the world of 10 per cent every year. All of this change is linked to the rise in mobile.

Social media for B2B

With many B2B businesses attending the Festival there was an ongoing debate as to whether B2B marketers should use social media as a means to generate leads. Listening to the extensive advice from many marketers across the two days, they suggested that you should use social as a feedback tool for your business, if you then use the information from your community to improve your products or services, will then in turn generate leads. Really it’s about blending data sets together, being accessible and transparent and demonstrating you understand what your customers want.

The HOW

The Festival exists to educate marketers in the best software, the best technologies, best practices, best strategies and the best people in the industry.

The overarching theme of the Festival was how to implement a marketing plan that fully ties together data, platforms and tools to give us, as marketers, the data and information needed to continue high performance and show ROI. The HOW is something that Tealium have helped many businesses to execute through the implementation of Tealium iQ and AudienceStream. Our data management platform unifies your marketing applications and data, allowing you to respond in real-time with maximum effect when opportunity knocks. It may seem difficult at the outset but the need to get things moving in the right direction, is the need to get started.

I will finish on something that Anthony Thomson said; ‘if you are in control, you’re not moving fast enough’. I think this is a great reflection on how technology is moving and how we, as marketers, should aim to keep up.