There aren’t too many digital marketing events in Newcastle, so when I saw that the team at Vicinity Marketing was running an event under the Interactive Minds banner it caught my interest. Even better was that the event, The Future of Digital Marketing, had speakers from Google, Hubspot and VRXP.

 

These three experts — Ash Rane, Yoan Demarty and Andrew Gallagher — gave their take on what lies in store for digital marketing: data-driven marketing, inbound marketing and chatbots, and virtual reality projects.

 

Here are the highlights, as per my hastily scribbled notes. If you think I’ve misunderstood anything, call me out in the comments and I’ll add corrections.

 

Ash Rane, solutions architect at Google

 

First up was Ash who, because of his position at Google, was the big drawcard for me. Ash’s talk focused on three main tips for data-driven marketers in 2018:

 

– measure across all platforms
– remove internal data silos
– leverage machine learning

 

The first point was clear: that customers can engage with a company in many ways when they’re on their buyer’s journey. For something that sounds simple like researching a new car to buy, they may have as many as 900 touch points (such as dealers, friends and websites) and that 90% of people switch screens while researching a product to buy. If you’re not measuring properly, you’re not going to know which parts of your marketing, advertising and sales processes are working best.

 

Removing data silos means, I think, that a company should get as much data as possible and share it freely among employees. As well as data from your site and your AdWords campaigns, you should be looking to integrate information from areas like kiosks, smart TV apps and point-of-sale systems. All company information should be shared between different teams, so everyone has a full picture to work from.

 

To do this, you should find data sources that are easy to integrate (like, ahem, Google products) and if you create measurable KPIs based on business goals then you’re more likely to succeed.

 

Ash’s last point was that if you’re not already using machine learning in some way, you’re about to fall behind the curve. If not this year, then in 2020, or 2025, or… The easiest way to do this is to use automation to cut ‘monkey work’ from your schedule, as otherwise this eats a big chunk of your time on tasks that don’t require your attention.

 

Yoan Demarty, channel account executive at Hubspot

 

Having a speaker from Hubspot was another great coup (and I was delighted when Yoan’s colleague James Gilbert agreed to contribute to our article about content marketing mistakes).

 

Yoan’s talk was also in three sections:
– introducing the benefits of inbound marketing
– marketing automation
– the future of messaging and bots

 

The benefits of inbound marketing is something we’ve written about before and Yoan summed it up nicely: people are tired of interruptive ads, they want content that helps or is useful and that inbound marketing is an infinite loop as you attract, convert, close and delight.

 

 

Yoan then spoke about using marketing automation to save time and some more benefits of a strong content strategy to cover the full buyer’s journey — stating that 60% of the sales cycle is over before a customer talks to a salesperson among some other useful stats, before closing off the section by saying that you can only improve what you can measure.

 

His last section was about Facebook (and its 1.3bn monthly users) and chatbots. These are becoming much more popular and, as time goes on, they’re only going to get smarter and more efficient.

 

Andy Gallagher, founder of VRXP

 

Going into the event, it was Andy’s talk that I was least excited about. However, it was probably the most interesting of the three (maybe because it felt less like work than the others?). I think others agreed, as when we started the Q&A section, all the questions were for him until the MC encouraged people to ask Ash and Yoan about their work.

 

Andy talked about some of the different industries currently using virtual reality in their work (such as architects who can give scale model walkthroughs to clients) and where it might go. Social media was a big talking point, with the idea of virtual rooms and avatars replacing scrolling through memes on a phone (and apparently Facebook already has a system reminiscent of Minority Report). Then he started talking about how people wearing headsets were very trackable (with systems like eye-tracking, heatmaps and ads served to people based on things they looked at) and it all got a bit too much like a Black Mirror episode for my liking.

 

He also talked about some of the projects he’s been involved in, as well as his virtual reality studio on Watt Street (which Newcastle Afoot took members of the Roost to for our Christmas outing), he’s working on archiving historical finds from the light rail work as well as this cracking project he worked on with Enigma.

 

 

The question and answer session followed:

• Andy answered a few questions about scaling VR and the cost compared to normal video production (2-3x more expensive).
• Yoan was asked about content (not something offered by HubSpot — something that has to be done internally or outsourced to a content marketing agency, and something that can’t be done by AI) and about what’s next in inbound before marketers destroy what’s currently working (hold fast with useful content in e-books, whitepapers and the like).
• Ash answered questions about how Google Home and voice search are changing the way the search engine works but that content is still king, especially as we move more into the world of longtail keywords (and Yoan chipped in to say that we should all be writing about topics, not a couple of keywords).

 

In all, it was a great day and a terrific event to have in Newcastle. The only criticism I have (and I overheard at least two groups mention on the way out) was that some of the speakers were a bit salesy at times, pushing their own products and agendas over pure learning, but I guess that’s to be expected. Overall, though, it was definitely worth taking a morning off to find out from some industry experts about what to expect in the coming months and years.