Knowledge, storytelling and branding in a digital world.

This week our Marketing Director (A/G), Britt Nichols attended DigiMarCon in Sydney to learn more about the digital marketing landscape.

DigiMarCon brought in experts from around Australia to share their stories and lessons from the dynamic ever-changing industry of Digital Marketing. Social media, SEO, automation, optimisation, content creation and storytelling, there was a lot of ground covered over the two days.

Don’t you know me?

Customer service in the digital world is a fascinating topic. We know that the companies we shop with have information on us as customers, so receiving curated material is convenient and sometimes inspiring. Netflix and Spotify are great examples of this being done right. But there is almost an uncanny valley in this marketing when we start to question the data they have. It can quickly go from “Don’t you know me?” when shopping and your wishlist isn’t loading to “wait…do you know me?” when you get advertised something you were just thinking about.

The Great Hack was referenced a lot in this conference, a must-see if you are interested in how your behaviour is tracked online and used.

The Knowledge Doubling Curve

In 1982, Buckminster Fuller, an American architect and futurist came up with the Knowledge Doubling Curve, showing that knowledge in the world had been increasing exponentially. He proposed that human knowledge was doubling every 100 years in 1900 and doubling every 25 years by the 1950’s. IBM added to this model predicting that with a combination of things, such as the internet of things, big data, innovations and collaborations we are due to see knowledge double as fast as every 12 hours.

Generation Voice

Marketing conferences love to reference ; I even wrote about this last year when I went to Data61+ Live.

Peter Hammer from the Marketing Scientist Group said that at this stage, most of the voice commands are being used to make calls, write messages and play music.

New Zealand company Spark had an excellent advertisement last year, demonstrating how the newer generations will take advantage of voice search:

The Power of Storytelling

Get to know your customer. How well you know them, and the mood of your community is your strength over your competitors. What are the fundamental things that feel about your brand and how can you tap into that through storytelling?

Daniel Kahneman stated that economic decision making is 70% emotional and 30% rational. Mark Jones from Filtered media thinks we need to  find the crossover of the heart and mind in storytelling and give it a heartbeat. “Wrap stories in a container of emotion” he says.

A an effective  example of this is from Western Sydney University.

Platforms, software & services

Every speaker and expert seemed to have a tool or service that they swore by (and swore they weren’t sponsored by). Here are a few gems:

Optimisation and Automation: SEMRush, HotJar, Zapier, Google Data Studio, Ahrefs
Content: Qwilr, Mural, Social Media Examiner

Biggest Takeaway

Digital marketing technology can help and hinder. Whilst at this conference I only had three business cards, a lack of foresight for a wonderful networking opportunity, however that night it didn’t matter. When I got home, scrolling through my Facebook feed all the businesses that I wanted to follow up on were my sponsored posts. They had tagged the location of the event for their marketing, capturing all that attended the conference. That’s pretty darn clever, if you ask me.