What We Learnt
Especially as 2023 has been such a momentous year for technology, from the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools, to the looming demise of third-party cookies. This is an opportunity for us to see what other marketers are doing with technology, and we always come away inspired.
This year Beatrice Aragone, our Digital Marketing Manager, and Aaditteya Bindra , our Marketing Executive, tackled the two-day conference. Read below to find out their favourite learnings from Technology for Marketing.
Did I go too far? Am I being too casual?
Those are two of the biggest questions I struggle with when writing copy.
Here at Webstars, we believe that it is important to showcase your brand's personality to stand out. Corporate speak can get lost in a sea of other companies and their marketing materials.
One of the most interesting talks I attended at the Technology for Marketing event this year was about taking tips from Ernest Hemingway when writing copy and using his writing techniques to tell your brand story - which certainly helped assuage some doubts I feel personally.
Gaston Tourn (CMO of Curio) had my attention throughout his talk and two of my main takeaways from his talk are as below.
The first sentence should capture the attention of your audience. Relate to your audience’s emotions and thoughts and don’t be shy about bringing up negative emotions (sometimes they are more easy to relate to!). In fact, weaving in drama or conflict can help reinforce the point you are trying to make in the minds of your audiences.
And secondly, be human. And while you might read this and go “Of course, that is obvious!”, sometimes we really do forget to be human and get lost in the world of corporate terminology, especially in the B2B sphere. Humans are not perfect, and by extension, neither is a brand. All brands have shortcomings and make mistakes, it is better to take ownership than to gloss over and hope no one notices.
“A chicken restaurant, out of chicken.” A statement most of us remember from KFC’s apology in 2018. One line that hints at conflict and humanises the brand - a short story, well told.
Source: Evening Standard
Telling the truth “warts and all” allows a brand to be more relatable in the eyes of the audience, building not just empathy but also trust and can even help build memorability - it is certainly well illustrated in the case above!
Storytelling is not just writing fiction, it is about telling the story of your brand and journaling the ups and downs over the passage of time. Give it a try, you might be surprised with the results.
A topic we have been recently discussing at Webstars is the effectiveness of a homepage and how people actually browse a website. It was a nice surprise to see a talk labelled “Is the homepage dead?” at the event so I had to listen in!
And the results are surprising! The popularity of homepages has been declining since 2020, with bounce rates also increasing, to 1 in every 5 sessions. In fact, the most popular pages tend to be those that list all of a brand's offerings to the audience followed by the offering page itself.
With scroll rates and the average time spent on a website steadily decreasing ever since the pandemic (falling by 7.5%), it is becoming increasingly important to build a homepage that is optimised to lead visitors to your offerings or insights to keep them engaged.
So while the homepage isn’t necessarily dead, building content and information-rich offering pages that lead visitors to other relevant content can lead to them coming back and, given enough time, converting. To this extent, testimonials from your clients can help convert more visitors and take the desired action on your website.
As marketers, we are looking ahead to third-party cookies being phased out in 2024 (unless delayed further) and have been trying to move our focus towards collecting first-party data that is valuable to our business.
It became clear to me during the event that first-party data collection and management requires a lot of care and thought if we want to utilise it to its full potential. A business needs to have various procedures and processes in place to make sure that not only are duplicates being removed and the data being cleaned, but also being collated from different levels of the organisation.
Especially if there are different teams working on different tasks and collecting their own first-party data, bringing it all together to collate it, and then feeding it back to relevant departments allows you to have a more holistic view of your data.
It should also be noted that collecting first-party data for B2B firms is just harder, with smaller volumes and more attributes for individuals. That’s why B2B businesses should record information about roles and responsibilities and learn who the decision-makers in an organisation are. Narrow down your data collected and then seek to supplement it with commercial third-party and open-source data sets.
Doing so will allow you to implement a personalised approach to marketing as you have a much richer data set to pull from and can communicate with them in ways they prefer on platforms they prefer. However, do remember that when starting off on your personalisation journey, always measure against a control group as this will allow you to test that the effort you are putting in is actually valuable and the results are not the same or worse! And as always, be wary of over-communicating or oversharing, the last thing you want is to come across as creepy!
It feels like we’ve been talking about the death of (third-party) cookies for years now, but the deadline for Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies - set for Q3 2024 - is fast approaching, and marketers need to be prepared. My first session of the second day of Technology for Marketing was aptly titled ‘Crumbs! The Cookieless Debate’, hosted by CDP Institute’s Susan Raab, Flying Tiger’s Paul Brett, and Unilever’s Biju Mukund.
Since Google’s announcement that they would be completely disabling third-party cookies in response to data privacy concerns, I’ve seen a lot of doom and gloom from marketers - understandable, as so many of our digital marketing efforts and personalisation rely on data from this type of cookie. However, ‘Crumbs!’ offered a more balanced view of what a post-3PC marketing landscape could look like. Zero party data (ZPD), first-party data, and second-party data will all play much bigger roles for marketers in the coming years, although the ‘data mix’ – and the effectiveness of these data sources - will heavily depend on the quality of organisations’ data collection and hygiene practices.
On one hand, I do think the changes that the death of cookies will bring to marketing practices around data are long overdue. Biju Mukund described the current marketing approach towards collecting data as a ‘hit and run’, when it really needs to be ‘value exchange’; not only will this give us better quality data (in smaller, more manageable quantities), but it actively helps us build trust with our would-be clients.
However, it’s not lost on me that phasing out third-party data heavily benefits the Big Tech companies that collect and store this data (which, yes, includes Google). People in both the marketing and tech space have been talking about walled gardens like Google, Amazon, and Meta, and the challenges they create for marketers. As the ‘Crumbs!’ panel pointed out, small businesses - who don’t have the resources to collect the large amounts of data they need to continue personalising their marketing - will feel the effects of this change more than larger companies, making it extra important to be prepared.
I would have been surprised if a conference called ‘Technology for Marketing’ wasn’t heavily AI-focussed, especially with the recent advancements in machine learning technology in the marketing space. From copywriting to creative design to campaign planning, I’ve seen all kinds of applications for AI crop up in the last year, and Technology for Marketing was a great opportunity to see how other organisations are using AI in their campaigns.
Of course, I saw some incredibly clever uses for AI wandering around the exhibitor stalls. For example, using machine learning to enhance CRM systems through automated audience segmentation, and AI-suggested next steps for prospects based on historical behavioural data could be revolutionary for time-poor marketers who simply don’t have time to manually trawl through thousands of contacts in their CRMs. Case studies like these make me very excited to see what AI can bring to the marketing landscape.
However, I also saw some more questionable uses for AI. One panellist talked about using AI to respond to customers’ comments on their organisation’s social media posts, which definitely gave me pause - after all, shouldn’t we be moving towards a more empathetic and human approach to brand-consumer relationships? According to the Braze Brand Humanity Index, consumers are more likely to purchase from and recommend a brand that feels more ‘human’; replacing genuine human interactions with AI-generated replies seems like a missed opportunity, and a huge step backwards for marketers. After all, this is why brands like Duolingo and Ryanair do so well on social media - reading their replies to customers, you can absolutely tell that there is a real person behind the screen.
Where does social media fit into your customer journey?
This is a slightly more challenging question for B2B marketers, where social media usually isn’t prioritised as much as other marketing channels such as email. But one session I attended, ‘The role of social media in the customer journey’ hosted by Alvin Gunputh from Thredd, correctly pointed out that in the year 2023 your audience is definitely on social media; in fact, they’re probably on multiple social platforms, which for me reinforced the importance of expanding beyond LinkedIn with our social content! From the awareness stage through to post-purchase, social media is truly all-encompassing in the customer journey.
And clearly, social media platforms are responding to their increasing role in the customer journey. For example, LinkedIn has been adding targeting options to their organic posts, while on the other end of the spectrum, TikTok has been working on a partnership with Google to integrate Google search results into their app - which could mean a whole new way of doing SEO in the near future.
We love attending events like Technology for Marketing because they provide a great opportunity for us to see what’s happening in the marketing world, and all the cool new ideas, technologies, and challenges that marketers are facing. With exciting new developments in websites, data, AI, and much more, it’s a nice reminder of why it’s important to step out of our Webstars bubble!
Do you think there is more you can be doing in your business around this topic? If so, feel free to get in touch with us.
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