A wrap up of Interactive Minds Digital Summit 2015.

Last month, I attended Interactive Minds’ Digital Summit in Melbourne. It was a jam-packed day of presentations and delicious food at the Docklands.

There were some key highlights in a couple of presentations that I want to focus on in this article. I could’ve given you a tweet-by-tweet wrap up of the whole day. But instead I’ll focus on highlighting the areas of digital marketing I think are important right now, the ones we should all be considering if we work in this space.

That said, there were some great moments throughout the day I’ve included here because I couldn’t bear to leave them out.

If you attended Interactive Minds this year, let me know what you thought of the event in the comments below. Who was your favourite presenter on the day?

The expectation gap (+ how to overcome it).

Victoria Foster, Head of tw:in at TrendWatching, spoke about a number of key consumer trends they are observing in digital. But first, what is a consumer trend?

According to TrendWatching, it is “an emerging pattern of consumer behaviour, attitude or expectation”.

In order to identify these trends, TrendWatching look for “clusters of innovations that have unlocked or newly serviced an existing consumer need, desire, want or value.”

A great example of this is Uber and the expectation gap.

Between 2013 and 2014, TrendWatching asked people how long they were prepared to wait for an Uber car to arrive. In 2013, this was around 8-10 minutes. But in 2014, patience had shifted to half that time! People were prepared to wait 4-5 minutes for an Uber car to arrive, but no longer.

Victoria played a video of an interview with Louis C.K. on Conan O’Brien (apologies, the quality isn’t great). It probably had my favourite quote of the day when it comes to technology and patience. You may have already heard it around the traps…

“Give it a minute, it’s going to space!”

Watch the video and you’ll understand why.

With technology continually providing us with a sense of ‘instant on’ and ‘I can get it right now’, brands are encouraged to keep up. Make people wait too long and they’ll simply go somewhere else. Even if the waiting time is only four minutes.

TrendWatching gather their information from more than 3000 spotters in 90-plus countries. They provide monthly briefings and publish a range of quarterly bulletins that enable you to stay up to date with global and market trends.

Be human.

This isn’t a new concept. We talk about it a lot with our clients, and it’s a strong feature in how we market the August brand. Nancy Csutoros also covered its relation to content here.

So, why am I including it? Because new examples provide fresh perspective and that means there’s an opportunity to learn something.

Sarah Prescott, Head of Marketing and Communications at Thankyou, talked about how being human in their marketing helps drive brand awareness, engagement and improve their business.

Thankyou is a social enterprise selling bottled water, food and bodycare products, with all its profits going to developing nations. In doing so, they’ve built ongoing relationships and projects with those nations.

Sarah talked about building a social media presence on zero marketing budget. Zilch, zip, nada. Social media for Thankyou is the equivalent of grassroots marketing, and through constant perseverance, regular content and campaigns, they now receive two million impressions per month through their social and online channels. That’s impressive.

The focus of the presentation was the Coles and Woolworths social campaign that Thankyou launched in order to get their products into these two supermarkets. The campaign was simple, yet effective. They asked their followers on social media to post requests to the Coles and Woolworths Facebook pages for Thankyou products to be stocked in their supermarkets.

The response was nothing short of huge. Fifteen million media impressions and a ‘yes’ from Coles and Woolworths that they would stock the Thankyou products in their stores.

Here are some of key takeaways from Sarah’s presentation. To help drive engagement and awareness:

• Give your fans a voice: Create an opportunity for them to talk about your organisation.
• Quality content is king: Thankyou regularly ask their fans about their products on social media. These are the posts that get the highest engagement.
• Have a plan: Failing to plan is planning to fail.
• Be bold and seize the opportunities before you: Something might come up that’s not in your marketing schedule but could increase your brand’s awareness or engagement. Don’t let it pass you by. Be flexible and go get it!

And most importantly – be human. The Thankyou brand succeeds at applying this to all their content and brand communications because they want people to engage with them naturally and not in a forced way.

How marketing is like fishing.

Stay with me here.

Laura Huddle, Head of Marketing Australia for Eventbrite, presented late in the day. The coffee was wearing off and it was post-afternoon tea scones with jam and cream. What better way to get the brain fired up than with an analogy!

Laura presented on how and why Eventbrite sweats the details when it comes to their conversion data. She explained the importance of optimising the customer experience through email marketing and click-throughs.

So how is marketing like fishing? Think of it in four steps.

1. You need to know where to find your fish. Who is your target market? Where can you find them? Without knowing this information, you can’t determine what kind of marketing you’ll need to reel in your audience…
2. Once you’ve found your fish, you need to find the right channels for your audience and your business. Talk to your audience where they most frequently communicate. Whether that’s Facebook, LinkedIn, email or Twitter. Working this out early saves you time in the long run. It will make you a better fisherman.
3. You need to know where to find the bait. What is your hook that draws in your audience? Creating an engaging hook in marketing is nothing new. But without the first two steps, your hook is useless. Make sure you’re speaking your audience’s language, giving them what they want from your business. Don’t waste their time with bait that is of no interest to them.
4. Once you have your fish on the hook, keep them there. Don’t ignore your audience once you’ve started speaking to them. Keep them engaged through regular conversation, updates, news and information they may find interesting. Tell a story with your brand and ask your audience questions.

While you’ve probably heard something along these lines before, perhaps the analogy is something new and may resonate with you. I found it helpful because it made me think about marketing in another way.

Useful bites of knowledge I couldn’t resist sharing.

From the other presentations of the day, I wanted to share some useful takeaways that have stayed with me.

Michelle Weil, Director of Marketing at Funny or Die

Great content solves problems

As a way to increase sales for the new release Durango, Dodge partnered with Will Ferrell to create an ad featuring Ron Burgundy and Anchorman 2, as well as the new Durango. Within the month of its release, Durango sales increased 59%.

Mobile beats desktop

According to the analysis and research that Funny or Die’s regularly conduct, mobile has surpassed desktop when it comes to how people find the content they want to watch or read.

Alex Holmes, Digital Marketing Manager at Envato

When it comes to brand awareness, make sure you have something great to share before investing in sharing. Quality content always trumps quantity.

Rob Hudson, Chief Digital Officer at GPY&R

If you are working on a campaign and find that you need to overcome some form of tension in the market in order for the campaign to succeed, why not create tension in the campaign? Rob spoke about the project they worked on for Nutri-Grain. Rather than find a way for skateboarders and surfers to engage with each other during the campaign, they used the tension between the two sports as the campaign and created battle challenges.

One last point…

August was fortunate enough to present the Schools Water Efficiency Program at this year’s Interactive Minds. August co-founder Daniel Banik revisited the challenge that Marcus Barber, one of Australia’s great strategic Futurists, set us in 2014 at AIMIA’s V21 Digital Summit.

What have you (as digital marketers) done to change the world?

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And so, reflecting on the highlights of the day, how can you use them to change the world?