From May 27th to 28th I attended the digital marketing conference\u00a0DIGIMARCON West<\/a>\u00a0at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica L.A. The post comes a little late but I won\u2019t withhold my impressions on this event organized by\u00a0Aaron Polmeer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On wednesday the attendees arrived for a cocktail come together on the pool deck. We got rewarded with a beautiful view on the Santa Monica pier, snacks and great talks. One thing I won\u2019t forget was\u00a0Jacob Curtis\u2019<\/a>\u00a0question, if we are already prepared for the heavy session set. One look at the agenda shaked me up, there were 17 sessions coming up. But instead of bothering you now with 17 summaries I picked a few interesting topics worth reading.<\/p>\n

Content marketing – you should be the signal instead of the noise<\/h2>\n

One of these exceptions was\u00a0Rand Fishkin<\/a>\u00a0from the inbound marketing software provider MOZ.<\/p>\n

! In a world where content creation gets every day easier it gets also every day harder to stand out! Rand Fishkin<\/p>\n

One way is to try reaching people before they come into a funnel. But how? Don\u2019t focus on the next e.g. following user, find out who influences people and how. Find new platforms and try to build tactics or do things even if they don\u2019t scale at the first moment. They will have a long term effect. Another tip is to use visual content. It can be consumed much faster and people trust images or videos more than written one. So it wonders no one that in the last years the fastest growing platforms are visually driven. Rand also gave us the tip to get in touch with new companies or other influencers before they become famous and their fans choke in the noise of other brands.<\/p>\n

Be aware that people will trust your brand no matter what you do. When a brand has reached such a position as a trustworthy company you can find out for yourself by searching something in the web. You get several results, but which of them will you click? The one with the exact title or the one from the brand you trust the most.Notice: The less directly a process leads to scale, the less competition it has. It is hard work to bring a brand to life and it needs even more investment to keep this brand on top, ut it is worth it.<\/p>\n

Big Data changes the world of marketing and sales<\/h2>\n

Another one or better two sessions dealt with Big Data analytics and the effect on marketing and sales in the future. Therefore I have to mention that I visited the Big Data Marketing Day in Vienna three months ago. For those interested, I already wrote\u00a0a blog post<\/a>, sorry it\u2019s only in German. Big Data is around us and involves a lot answers to unsolved questions. Let me quote\u00a0Sameer Khan<\/a>, Senior Manager in Analytics and Marketing from IBM:<\/p>\n

! 51 % of companies say they have a holistic view on their customers but only 37 % of customers say, that companies understand them. Sameer Khan<\/p>\n

You see, there is a huge gap in the perceptions of both sides. Due to Big Data analytics Netflix already knew before the first day of shooting the series House of Cards that it will be a success. Big Data can provide users with the right products in a webshop, offers the right information at the right time and many more. Therefore companies need to collect data.<\/p>\n

! Marketing should not be just a process, it has to create assets.\u00a0Forest Cassidy<\/a><\/p>\n

Inbound marketing helps to tie these assets to social profiles. Enriched with the other data (open data and others) you will get a stack that determines your marketing and business strategies and helps you make decisions even if there is no visible signal to humans. Companies that already collect data will not be ahead from now on!<\/p>\n

Rethinking webdesign<\/h2>\n

When relaunching websites, requirements changes during the development process. And here I don\u2019t mean a micro site, but rather corporate sites, integrated CRM solution, e-commerce systems and so on. So it is very hard and highly cost intensive to determine every single task at the beginning. And then you have a perfect plan with thousand of working hours invested but no working system. And in the end, let\u2019s say a year or more, the system is old before it gets launched and can\u2019t support the business processes anymore and needs expensive reeingineering. As business or marketing processes changes nearly every month, requirements for websites do too. Decision makers have to forget planned costs upfront, as these times are over. Agile workflows dominate the software industry and a start with a minimum viable product is the only approach for success.<\/p>\n

A good strategy involving all departments and based on data is essential. Make sketches, plan tasks for first sprints and provide just the necessary design, if possible in form of living style guides to make fast and cost effective changes if necessary. For the initial launch the site needs to have just the core functionality to get your business going. In the software business the\u00a0\u201c80\/20\u201d rule or Pareto principle<\/a>\u00a0exists, so in the beginning don\u2019t care for all wishes from a developer, a marketer or a sales guy, especially not from the owner. Just go live, make tests (e.g. A\/B), collect data, improve, test more, evaluate the results and enhance the site in future sprints with additional functionality. And as I mention in the Big Data paragraph: a website should not be static. Offer CTAs, different landing pages, user paths and provide relevant content to each user. Cheaper but less successful will be a separation by user group or country and so on. If any feature or assumption of your prior website strategy doesn\u2019t work – kill it. In the end this tactic will lead in a high performing website creating not only traffic but also leads and conversions. That approach is far more cost efficient than a 500 site system specification and a bunch of wonderful Design-PSDs requiring enormous budget at the end. This also the reason why\u00a0Luke Summerfield<\/a>, Program Manager at HubSpot recommends growth driven design. It minimizes the risk, provides the chance of continuously learning and improving the system and delivering necessary feedback for the marketing and sales department for future decisions.<\/p>\n

Wearables and the future of media consumption<\/h2>\n

Finally I want to mention two other great sessions relating to wearables and the associated changes in our and especially in a marketers everyday life. One was from\u00a0Loni Stark<\/a>, Senior Director of Strategy & Product Marketing at Adobe and my absolute favorite of this conference came from\u00a0Mark Schaefer<\/a>, Executive Director at Schaefer Marketing Solutions.<\/p>\n

Adobe forecasts 35 billion connected devices by 2020. That will be more than 4 devices per person – worldwide. As new applications and sensors are to be developed, adding more value to the devices, it becomes more and more interesting. At this point I have to mention the new Google Lab project Soli. We can just imagine, what devices we will have in 2020. Awesome, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

One thing Loni mentioned made me rethinking a special topic. Where is the success of Uber coming from? It\u2019s not to hire a taxi. It\u2019s about having a remote control for a car. This statement has so much truth value. We will not just consume content anymore, we will control the physical world and enable other systems to provide us the information we want and need at a specific moment.<\/p>\n

Truly the best was saved for last. So Mark Schaefer entered the stage. By the way, he is a great speaker and entertainer but he may frustrated a lot of people in the room with his comments. Some marketers just have found a working strategy and soon they will stand at the same position years ago. We already entered the change, at it feels like the phase when Facebook & co. entered the market. Now the same happens with wearables and the way we consume media. On average we consume\u00a014,6 hours<\/a>\u00a0of content a day. That\u2019s a lot and there is not much space upwards. And the cut of delivering content already happens like on Facebook. They claim that a single user only can scan max. 1500 posts a day. So how will it work to be within the x percent people get delivered? Sales messages aren\u2019t worth spreading, but creativity and useful information do so. People don\u2019t share because they want to help you selling your goods. They do it because of intrinsic emotional reasons. We have to break new grounds, should have a look at new technologies, provide different content types and the real essential things, find a unsaturated niche and build trust with the creative content we deliver. In the future no one will visit special networks, I guess all networks will work together with the devices and provide us information on our health, the posts of our friends or essential information for every-day live without an opener like in the past. So that\u2019s also the reason why QR or barcode scanning didn\u2019t work for providing additional information in marketing. And please guys out there, stop using QR codes on our websites, newsletters or other media. Why?<\/p>\n