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On Wednesday, I spent the morning at ad:tech London, the show that bills itself as being “all about interactive marketing”. For those who didn’t make it and are interested in what they might have missed, here’s a quick run through of this first-timer’s observations.
Unsurprisingly, the exhibition floor at Olympia was packed from the moment I got there until the moment I left. Forrester Research recently predicted a further 15% growth for search marketing between 2009 and 2014, so it’s no surprise that so many people want a slice of the action. Don’t underestimate the increasing importance of social media though (also discussed in detail at ad:tech), for which Forrester is predicting a 34% expansion.
I took a sneaky peek at other visitors’ badges and found a healthy mix of marketers and small business owners. Exhibitors and speakers alike therefore needed to adjust their pitches if they were to address the many different levels of understanding possessed by this mix of visitors.
I attended a range of seminars throughout the day – alternating between the analytics/affiliates and search/ad networks theatres. The first seminar was pitched at a relatively basic level, but the speaker made some good points. This is my summary of the most interesting ones.
This links back to my very first point – get your PR agency talking to your online marketing agency and make sure that your various campaigns support and strengthen one another. According to Microsoft, 54% of people are more likely to search on a brand term (company name, tagline, key phrase from adverts, etc.) once they’ve seen a display ad. And, of course, this can all be tracked online.
Why should you go to ad:tech 2010?
Overall, it was a good day and I’d recommend the seminar programme to anyone who is interested in increasing their basic understanding online marketing. The main seminars were completely free (you can pay to attend the Google University if you so wish), so they’re a good option if you want to learn whilst avoiding the persistent sales pitches from the exhibitors with stands.
If you’re a seasoned online marketing professional, I couldn’t say with confidence that you’re likely to get a lot out of a visit to this exhibition – unless it’s a bit of competitor analysis that you’re after, of course.
If you didn’t make it to ad:tech this year and would like to talk to someone about online marketing – or if you did go, but were disappointed by the companies you spoke to – give Coast Digital a call. We’ll be happy to help you with any aspect of digital marketing that interests you.
(4) comments
Comments
Thanks for contributing.
It's heartening to hear that all members of your team are actively using social media and especially that they have been encouraged to do so as part of their professional development.
Id be interested to hear any success stories that you can directly attribute to the introduction of social media training and online reputation monitoring at your agency.
Rebecca
At Staniforth we've introduced social media training and encouraged people to get involved in writing blog posts (we have a weekly editorial meeting to plan posts for the week, as well as reacting to breaking stories) and becoming familiar with Twitter. Based on particular client demands, people are getting involved in social media auditing in order to understand how word of mouth is affecting brands online. The term "social media expert" is a difficult one to prove, as the medium is changing too fast for anyone to be consistently expert. But we see the need for all our PR consultants to have sufficient knowledge to help the client understand the evolving online world.
Thanks for adding your thoughts to my write-up of the event.
In my experience, clients who have invested in their brand prior to, or concurrent with, the launch of an online marketing campaign have enjoyed considerably more success than those who have launched without the support of other marketing investment. Of course, early success often depends on the type of business selling a new chocolate bar will always be very different to selling complex management services, for example but if your brand is entirely unknown, building trust and converting visitors into sales is bound to be difficult. It is also worth considering the following at the time of launch to ensure that you are not wasting valuable online traffic: do you have a strong website that is attractive, usable and visible; is your product competitively priced; is your product honestly of superior or equal-quality to those of direct competitors? As always, the more competitive you can be and the better your product is received at the outset, the easier it will be to build repeat business and gain recommendations.
I agree with you completely about PR agencies needing to invest increasing amounts of time to fully understand the impact that digital PR and social media are having on the marketplace. Id like to think that the majority of people would see through an agency bringing in an expert at the pitch stage who will never be seen again and certainly wont be involved in the day-to-day running of an account - but Im sure it still happens. Prior to joining Coast Digital I worked as an agency-side PR professional so I have seen first-hand the benefits of an agencys employees dedicating time to learning about online marketing for themselves and how these activities can significantly benefit their clients and improve the results that they are generating.
Thanks again for reading the blog!
Rebecca
On the point about the PR agency and digital agency talking to each other you make another excellent point but more often than not I think the PR agency should be dipping their own toes into digital PR and social media. There is a shift happening with budgets moving from offline to online and it looks as though its an irresistible and unstoppable movement. Gone are the days when the offline agency could wheel out the digital expert to wave his hands in front of the client, only to be put back in his box whilst the grown-ups get on with the serious business of making a TV commercial. Now clients are a bit more clued up and want to hear what the digital guys say. They are not interested in just building a website though they are interested in the overall end to end solution.
Anyway feel free to write back, but excellent write up.
Aaron