As we head on into the new year of Masterclassing events, we recap just some of the events that took place this year sparking insightful conversations and tackling the biggest trends and challenges of 2023.

This year, Masterclassing delivered over 150 global in-person and online events in 2023, which were attended by over 4,500 Senior Marketers, Cyber Security, HR and Sustainability professionals, with topics such as AI, social media and digital marketing being debated.

Some attendees of some of the Masterclassing sessions included execs from TalkTalk, LG, Uber, Playstation, Universal Music Group, Tinder and QVC.

Other included execs retailer such as Superdry, Puma, Ralph Lauren, MatchesFashion and Gymshark alongside, FMCG brands like Heinz, P&G, Krispy Kreme and McCain Foods.

Alongside in-person events taking place in Berlin, London, Sydney and Singapore, Masterclassing also held a handful of virtual events, which welcomed execs from Wickes, M&S, Simply Be and Selfridges.

Masterclassing Co-founder John Owen said: “Masterclassing was launched 12 years ago to offer an alternative to trade shows. Leaner formats and built on meaningful conversations.

“The format has remained ever since. It’s a platform where you can educate, speak one-to-one with peers and help navigate suppliers.”

He concluded: “Recently added other formats such as breakfast briefings and dinners to the schedule. The demand for smaller ABM-targeted events seems to be stronger than ever and we hope in 2024 we can make more connections happen.”

Read more: Masterclassing reveals 2024 Future of Mobile Festival schedule

The post In Pictures: Year in review 2023 Masterclassing events appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Masterclassing has announced its Future of Mobile Festival schedule for next year, with the first event taking place on 30 January in London.

The schedule also includes nine Mobile and App Masterclasses across the UK, the US, the Netherlands and Spain, with the first taking place on 27 February 2024 in Barcelona.

Click here to find out more

Each event runs for half a day and allows mobile and app marketers to discuss the industry and challenges faced by the current economic landscape.

“We are excited to share news about our 2024 schedule for Masterclass events,” Co-founder John Owen said.

Masterclassing delivered over 150 global in-person and online events in 2023, which were attended by over 4,500 Senior Marketers, Cyber Security, HR and Sustainability Professionals. 

Recent attendees at Future of Mobile Festival events include Asos, Depop, Monzo, Just Eat, Vodafone, Gymshark, Sainsbury’s, Ralph Lauren, Vinted and Zalando.

Alongside, execs from Babbel, Delivery Hero, HSBC, John Lewis, Travelopia, Expedia, Skyscanner, BT Group, Pepsi Co, Microsoft, Uber and American Express.

Owen added: “Masterclassing was launched 12 years ago to offer an alternative to trade shows. Leaner formats and built on meaningful conversations.

“The format has remained ever since. It’s a platform where you can educate, speak one-to-one with peers and help navigate suppliers.”

He concluded: “Recently added other formats such as breakfast briefings and dinners to the schedule. The demand for smaller ABM-targeted events seems to be stronger than ever and we hope in 2024 we can make more connections happen.” 

The post Masterclassing reveals 2024 Future of Mobile Festival schedule appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

At next Wednesdays Mobile & App Marketing Masterclass,  you will hear how to put mobile to work most effectively for your business. Speakers from Mapp Digital, Braze, and Adjust will explain how to embed mobile into cross-channel customer experiences; how to humanise the customer journey across multiple channels; and the benefits of automation.

The online event consists of three 10-minute presentations delivered by our digital experts, each followed by a 15-minute roundtable discussion where you can dig a little deeper into what you heard during the presentation. 

The Mobile & App Marketing Masterclass takes place on Wednesday, 10 February 2021 at 9am GMT. Brand marketers can register to take your virtual seat at the event here.

The post Join us next week for our Mobile & App Marketing Masterclass appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The event, as always, followed the format of short presentations from experts leading to in-depth roundtable discussions, ending with a keynote presentation from Terry Hornsby from Reach PLC (formerly Trinity Mirror).

If you weren’t able to be there, here’s what you missed.

Mike McDougall, strategy director at Stickyeyes kicked things off by handing out a few tips for driving traffic in programmatic.

“The martech landscape is extremely convoluted and confusing,” he said. “I think we’re in a really exciting time – there are new technologies, software, new DSPs, DMPs, everything – the market is really exploding. What that means is that it can be quite a bamboozling and bewildering landscape.”

According to McDougall, brands need to stick to the basics with precise targeting, relevant messaging, and the right timing; they have to make sure their tech stack is fit for purpose; use smart and effective measurement; and think beyond banner and traditional display advertising.

McDougall was followed by Charlie Raper, brand enterprise director at Amobee, who looked at some of the trends occurring in programmatic.

One of the top trends is brands looking to in-house programmatic – Raper stating they are doing this to improve performance and ROI, because it’s cost efficient, to improve control and transparency, to enhance their data and optimisation capabilities, and to improve working media efficiency.

“In-housing is a trend that’s quite popular today,” said Raper. “A lot of the major advertisers all the way down to brands that are purely digital focused are looking at this as a way to improve results and take more control.”

Lani Kakiet, senior solutions consultant at Selligent guided the audience through the uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in programmatic.

She looked at how AI can be used in programmatic to find the best prices that publishers are willing to pay, automatically select publishers willing to bid for impressions, help predict optimal time and likelihood of engagement and conversion, help with context and sentiment, and automatically tag ad inventory.

“AI could be creating videos or producing music for programmatic advertising,” said Kakiet. “There are loads of different opportunities for artificial intelligence in programmatic, but also in the world of marketing itself. The future of artificial intelligence is very exciting.”

Social media – and, in particular, social analysis – was the theme presented by Duncan McCrum, managing director at Fifty.

He showed off the company’s platform, taking those in attendance through a live demo. As part of this demo, he used a Waitrose UK case study, where the firm were able to create segments – or ‘tribes’ – from Waitrose’s social audience in the UK based on what users follow, their common interests, and their mutual connections.

“We analyse audiences based on what they follow, not what they say,” said McCrum. “Social listening accounts for about two to five per cent of social audience, so it’s very hard to look at an audience at scale and get a true representation of who they are. No one lies about what they follow and it allows us to look at 100 per cent of the social audience.”

James Urquhart, enterprise sales director at Adform, gave the final presentation before the roundtables – providing the brands in the room with a programmatic checklist they should follow in order to get their strategy right.

Urquhart highlighted the importance of measurement, having the consumer at the heart of everything a brand does, having creative that is going to fuel campaigns and ambitions, and having the right controls in place.

The day was brought to a close by Terry Hornsby, director of digital solutions at Reach PLC, who presented how Reach, as a publisher, uses programmatic and why brands need to embrace it.

He highlighted how programmatic can be used to provide real-time feedback, brand awareness and marketing of scale, and help in achieving goals and KPIs. Meanwhile, it enables brands to “spend a little and learn a lot” and decide whether to in-house or not. In Reach’s case, it also enables it to build segments over time – but with a higher frequency.

“Use programmatic to your advantage. Due to the fact it’s all automated, you and your agencies and publishers can work to make it right for you. Just try, because a lot of people don’t want to try something different. So, try something different, build creative relationships.”

The post Programmatic for Brands Masterclass – what you missed appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The event, as always, followed the format of short presentations from experts leading to in-depth roundtable discussions, ending with a keynote presentation from Diageo’s Fernanda Gurgel.

If you weren’t able to be there, here’s what you missed.

Proceedings got underway with a presentation from Adam Hawkins, sales director at 4C, who looked at how brands can make their audiences actionable.

He discussed at how many advertisers are now running more integrated media campaigns with video being the driving change in much of the content being delivered.

“We’re seeing when people start to use video, and add that driving change, it means they can invest money in one asset and that asset can be used across multiple channels,” said Hawkins.

Although, he highlighted that operating across multiple channels is a challenge due to different measurement having to be used across each of the channels.

Alice Jones, business development manager at Social Circle took us on a journey through the last nine years of influencer marketing, starting with the emergence of Zoella in 2009 right up to the present day where influencer marketing is used to promote just about anything.

She reminded the brand representatives in attendance that they “buy an audience not an influencer” and to “remember that just because you think an influencer is perfect for your brands, the backend of the audience and the demographics might not reflect that”.

Furthermore, she pointed out that the importance of getting the creative right when it comes to influencer campaigns because audiences “are more than happy to be advertised to via influencers” as long as the message is authentic.

The event rolled on with Gurpreet Dhesi, enterprise business development manager at iAdvize, looking at how brands need to realise that consumers use emotions, conversations, and experience to decide what they pay attention to. As such, authenticity is key.

“The market now is about being more consumer-centric and customer-focused… The key is to make the customer experience authentic,” said Dhesi. “We can introduce a number of technologies, we can introduce a number of automated tools, but the key driver is to make that customer experience authentic.”

Dan Almond, digital consultant at Stackla, highlighted how we’re in an ‘era of visual content’ powered by smartphones and social networks which have changed how we shop, communicate, and experience the world. But this shift has created challenges.

“As the number of devices, platforms, and networks continues to proliferate, so too does the noise that brands need to cut through in order to remain effective and in order to actually reach their target consumers,” said Almond.

In order to cut through the noise, Almond agreed that influencer marketing can be an effective way of solving the challenge. However, he suggested that other challenges, such as the volume of content and the authenticity of content, can only really be solved through consumer-generated content – while it still solves the challenge of cutting through the noise.

“Your customers really are your best marketers. And, when we’re able to efficiently leverage all the content that they produce and then marry it with the broader awareness that influencers can provide, the results are going to be really spectacular,” said Almond.

The presentations prior to the roundtables were rounded off by Dan Best, VP EMEA at IndaHash, who addressed some of the myths surrounding influencer marketing. Myths he looked at included the belief in some quarters that influencer marketing could be effective for all brands, the belief that it’s not truly measurable, and the belief it’s not truly authentic, among others.

He suggested that brands should ask themselves if a task stated within a brief is something they would be willing to do themselves and figure out if that brief is right for their brand, the influencer, and the platform.

Best said: “If you’re giving an influencer a really poor-quality brief and you’re expecting them to do things that are way off track from what they’re used to doing, unsurprisingly, the quality that comes out isn’t going to quite look right.”

The event ended with a keynote presentation from Fernanda Gurgel, global social media intelligence lead at Diageo. Gurgel shared how Diageo has been unlocking the true value of influencers by using social media intelligence.

“The right influencer partnerships can be valuable partners for brands, capable of building genuine connections in culture, amplifying reach and engagement rates,” she said. “However, most of the influencer marketplace evaluation counts on metrics such as new followers, engagement rates, cost per engagement. If your brand partners with influencers to drive authentic connections, then top level metrics alone won’t cut it.”

Social listening plays a critical role to find the perfect influencer match and assures that your brand is engaging in a positive and valuable relationship, according to Gurgel. The most important step is knowing what you want to achieve by partnering with influencers.

An example of this is Diageo’s JW My Edition campaign, where it introduced a premium personalised bottle just ahead of Father’s Day. It wanted influencers to spread the word about the limited gift and also link consumers to purchase online. This meant success could be measured both in terms of the conversations generated and the sales they drove.

The post Social Media & Influencer Marketing Masterclass – what you missed appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The protocol, which transforms messaging into a more interactive experience featuring high-resolution images, videos, and audio, first surfaced way back in 2007 when a group of industry promoters formed the Rich Communication Suite industry initiative. A year later, the project found a home at the GSM Association (GSMA) and an RCS steering committee was established. Long story short, the above developments eventually led to the RCS protocol initially being released in 2012.

In the here and now, companies are gradually starting to identify RCS as new way to effectively reach consumers via ‘text’ messages but, as it stands, on one mobile network in the UK only: Vodafone. Other UK mobile operators are expected to launch RCS capabilities in the near future.

To introduce to and guide businesses through RCS, Mobile Marketing parent Masterclassing hosted an event in association with IMImobile and its partners at MobileSquared and Vodafone.

“We know that the customer service experience is constantly rising and your customers expect to be served on new messaging channels. They want to engage and they want to communicate with you relatively quickly,” said Alex Klose, VP of marketing at IMImobile, introducing the audience to the RCS Masterclass event.

“Services and brand engagement will move toward a conversational messaging experience. That means three things. One, your consumers will want to discover you quicker… Secondly, you’ve got to be prepared for customer persistence on those new messaging channels… and, ultimately, messaging channels allow for faster customer service resolution and improved engagement.”

Traditional SMS messages sent between businesses and consumers is already booming business and, despite the rise of RCS, isn’t showing any sign of slowing down.

Last year, 1.67 trillion application-to-person (A2P) SMS messages were sent, a figure expected to rise to 2.8 trillion by 2022, according to Jo Hall, client services director at MobileSquared. Furthermore, the market is set to increase in worth dramatically from $11.86bn to $26.61bn in 2022.

It’s because of the booming SMS market that MobileSquared believes “it’s not going to be a straight switch out”.

“We don’t expect RCS to replace SMS on a one-for-one basis,” said Hall. “There will still be one-off SMS pushes and vouchers – after all nothing beats the open rate of SMS.”

With this will come a “dramatic” increase in messaging volumes, “taking into account sessions of conversational marketing and person-to-application traffic,” added Hall.

As mentioned, Vodafone is the only mobile network operator offering RCS capabilities. However, “we expect O2 to be next to the market following on from Telefonica’s rollout in Germany and Spain,” according to Hall. This will be followed eventually by EE – though it’s “focusing on its relationship with Apple and the rollout of Apple business chat” for now – and also Hutchison through it’s 3 brand. Therefore, it’ll be “at least another 18 months until we see cross-net reach on RCS in the UK,” continued Hall.

Vodafone boasts 5bn SMS users and sees 90 per cent of its messages opened without three minutes, as well as a 90 per cent read rate, according to Oscar Gallego, the companys global head of smart communications and security.

Though Vodafone experiences massive success on the SMS front, it understands the limitations associated with the service: it lacks branding, pictures, videos, read receipts, and is open to impersonation and limited interaction.

Alternatively, RCS messaging offers branding, a verified sender, QR codes, rich media, true metrics, suggested replies, and suggested actions.

“What I like the most is suggested actions. You can prompt the consumer what to do next and make it interactive,” said Gallego.

“With RCS you know when the message is delivered, you know when the message is read. In fact, from our RCS campaigns we know that 70 per cent of messages are read within one hour. That instant engagement is very powerful for brands and businesses.”

To take full advantage of the opportunity, Vodafone is working with IMImobile – which also works with its clients like Pizza Hut Delivery, British Gas, and Barclays to drive adoption of RCS business messaging.

Through IMImobile’s IMIconnect platform brands are able to communicate across channels and target consumers with both RCS and non-RCS messages, depending on those with the capability and those without it. Through the platform, IMImobile had success working with the above brands and effectively building new innovative RCS customer journeys in days.

“What RCS gives you is much more discoverability,” said Dan Garner, VP of products at IMImobile. “You can find out more information about your customers, you get more information sent to you… That conversation and that customer will stay, so all that information persists and can be used to address the engagement.”

One thing we can say for sure is that RCS will be big business for brands over the next few years. Creating a closer alignment between the standard messages app and platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp is only going to be seen in a positive light for consumers and drive interactions in a similar way to what we are seeing with chatbots in places like Messenger and the aforementioned WhatsApp.

The post RCS messaging: Changing the way brands communicate appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference, here are a selection of some of the best soundbites from the day.

“It’s great to optimise your accounts based on the number of calls you’re getting, but being able to optimise an account on the actual revenue that it’s driven, it involves an ROI model, it’s what we’re all about as marketers.

“Marketing teams and contact centres generally have completely different KPIs. A marketing team will want to say ‘this is what I’ve done, this is the activity, and this is the outcome’. Whereas, a contact centre will want to drive down call duration, increase the number of calls they’re having in a day, so they can keep going and have a seamless experience.”

Alex Hughes, account director at ResponseTap, kicked off proceedings giving attendees an insight into the importance of call tracking.

“All of our clients are on this data journey to connect on- and offline data. For them, it’s about trying to put together all these signals, all these pieces of information – whether it’s views, whether it’s app views, whether it’s web sessions, whether it’s store visits, whether it’s electronic point of sale data about revenue that’s feeding back into CRM. Ideally, all this data is then going back to a GDPR-compliant warehouse, which is then spinning out visuals and actionable data, so that they can start to manage location campaigns.”

Its important to back location-based PPC campaigns with both online and offline data to get the most out of them, according to Luke Regan, VP managing partner at Dac Group UK.

“From an SEO perspective, what does Google want? Well, they’ve told us. They want brands to provide high-quality content, give visitors the information they’re looking for, and content that’s ultimately shareable or is able to link back to your site.”

“Authority and trust comes through sharing content, creatives, or creative campaigns… that your audience will be interested in and share.”

Paul Hill, director at Stickyeyes advised that high-quality content that audiences are looking for is way to reach peak SEO performance.

“Attribution allows you to look at your budget, and where you’re spending, and prove that you’re a good marketer. The reason you’re here is because you’re good at your job. Proving that is actually quite difficult in today’s atmosphere with so many different channels working together. As things get more complex, as you’re working more channels, as you’re working with tighter budgets, data is becoming more vital.”

The importance of data and attribution in good marketing cannot be overlooked, says Sam Roberts, digital marketing consultant at Liberty.

“Strong collaboration and communication between teams really helps your SEO performance… Setting realistic targets from the start, getting SEO built in from the beginning into your active workflows, and being adult with it, really works.”

“It’s still a little disappointing when we see big brands not listening to their number one factor: their users. And it will affect your SEO. So, being more data-led can help you target the right markets.”

Elodie Partridge, digital account manager at Selesti believes that teamwork between staff and an understanding of users is the best way to improve SEO performance.

“As much as growth in non-brand CPCs has started to slow in the quarter, it’s still very much up and continues to rise when you look at it versus the historical average. This is the story that we’re seeing and we’re starting to see this within the TUI business. Pressures mounting around ‘how can we be more efficient?’”

“On the whole, organic share is struggling. We’re seeing a decline and paid search is one of the culprits for that… From an absolute perspective, we’re starting to feel the pain and starting to realise that we need to take steps to do something about that.”

The event was closed out by Jamie Peach, head of SEO & content at TUI Group, who looked at the challenges facing brands in getting search right and what the TUI Group is doing to address these problems.

The post The 10 best quotes from Masterclassings Search Masterclass appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference, here are a selection of some of the best soundbites from the day.

“Messaging is a bit of a global phenomenon that has absolutely boomed over the last few years. It’s now our most popular form of communication. It’s how we speak to each other, we speak to each other via emojis. It’s a much more relaxed form of communication and it’s available 24/7 – and this is what we’re starting to expect from brands.”

“Typically, brands will sell what they want to sell… Consumers are pretty savvy to this now. So, actually being able to take that conversation away from the brand trying to sell something into consumers getting the information that they need, but from somebody that they’ve got more trust in, is much more powerful.”

Lucinda McCaffrey, enterprise sales manager at iAdvize, kicked off the day giving the brands in the room an insight into the best ways to connect with consumers through conversation.

“Consumers nowadays are more wary of brand messages than ever because they’ve been bombarded with information – a lot of it in the form of advertising. Having been sold to everywhere their guard is firmly up. And, personally, I would have to count myself among them.”

Consumers are no longer oblivious to what brands are trying to do, so brands need to be more intelligent with their content, according to Thomas Thorburn, business development manager at StoryStream.

“Retail advertising is an experience that starts almost everywhere. In most of these environments, it seems pretty native. Channels like connected TV and out-of-home are now using data to shift from targeting as many people as possible to targeting a specific audience.”

“Multichannel shoppers buy three times more than single channel shoppers. It’s really important that it starts with the website.”

Corina Chercheja, managing partner at Chalk Global believes that retail brands need to be aware of the multiple channels that consumers use and advertise effectively across these environments.

“Very few brands have the luxury of only selling direct. They rely on supermarkets or rely on retailers to generate their sales and, as a result, they relinquish all of those direct insights that you would normally get on your own site. For instance, which product pages are being viewed on your site to how your products are also converting on your site.”

 “One of the main challenges for a retailer or brand is trying to keep their exclusive audience exclusive and coming back to them. For us, at Hitwise, the answers to that major challenge are quite simple: understand why your audience goes to you and also understand why your audience goes to your competitors.”

Retail brands face many challenges when it comes to selling to consumers but can alleviate these potential issues by understanding their audience better, say Lisa Luu, manager of innovation & insights at Hitwise.

“We’re seeing a lot of buzz in marketing around personalisation in recent years and one-to-one personalisation is something that a lot of marketers aspire to now. So, it makes absolute sense that we’re seeing this applied to video as well.”

Willem Challenger, digital marketing account executive at Brightcove gave the audience an insight into the effectiveness of video advertising.

“We decided to drive brand awareness by working with a ‘gift with purchase’ mechanic. And the great thing about gift with purchase is that not only through your marketing are you able to drive brand awareness, at the point of purchase, but also at home because the consumer then keeps that gift hopefully forever, depending on the gift.”

“I’ve spoken to a few people today and they’ve said it’s ‘difficult when we have so many different teams in the business’. We have a different team that looks after social media but obviously making sure that we’re all working together to align these campaigns is really important.”

Closing the event, Kate Vliestra, shopper marketing manager at Dairy Crest gave the brands in the room a peak at the popular dairy products company’s approach to reaching consumers effectively.

The post The 10 best quotes from Masterclassings Digital Retail & FMCG Masterclass appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, here are a selection of some of the best soundbites from the day.

“You really have to understand those audiences behind AMP pages and how could you apply more of that audience with the right content, the right messaging, depending on their search behaviours.”

“Understanding the unique searches for each of those audiences, and how you can better serve and make better connections.”

The event was kicked off by Emma Moorman, senior product manager at Hitwise, who took a look at how publishers can utilise search to gain a better understanding of their audience.

“Most publishers have various different versions of their website ready to go at any point and all of these versions should have the same URL. If they don’t have this, you run the risk of Google treating your website as different entities and that’s going to have a huge impact on your SEO. So, in a nutshell: no m. sites, no redirections.”

Heather Mungin, strategic partnership manager at Marfeel, offered some advice on SEO.

“There is a feeling in the market, that we get from our publishers and the ad tech market at large, that somebody, somewhere is quite likely to get caught on a meat hook quite quickly and not exist anymore as a direct result of this new regulation. I think in general terms, if we take a step back and think about it from the consumer’s perspective, handing that power to an individual in terms of their own data and their own privacy has got to be a laudable approach. But, obviously, it’s creating quite a lot of turmoil within the marketplace.”

James MacDonald, global CRO at Thirdpresence, believes that GDPR will spell the end for a few companies but still thinks it’s for the best.

“Within publishing PPC campaigns, audience management is so important because we have large volume and large-scale traffic, a lot of which isn’t going to convert to anything. Of course, it’s helpful for advertising or if you’ve got revenue target to hit as well.”

The importance of audience management cannot be stressed enough, according to Laura Davidson, director at Tag Digital.

“Agencies are under pressure from their clients and their competition. They are being challenged and one of their solutions for that, their new USP, is creating their own data asset.”

“Publishers must understand the value of their data, especially if you’re collecting data from on your app or your website about where the user is accessing your publication. If you’re doing that, you’re generating a resource that marketers are looking for.”

Aymeric de Lansalut, director of data partnerships in Europe at AdSquare,  knows the importance of data right across the industry.

“A little while back we launched a strand of content on the web called ‘travel news’… We avoid the hard-hitting news and leave that to the established news brands. The idea is very much social, very much shareable, and very much mobile. So, we’ve made all of those travel news posts AMP. We’ve seen pretty good success with this content, especially on Apple News over the last six months.”

“What we’ve seen in various industries, but in particular with travel with the phenomenal success of Airbnb, is you can’t have a good brand without a community.”

 “What have we learnt as a media brand? Consider the context behind the content, expand but don’t forget your core purpose, and community really matters.”

To close the event, Sebastian Neylan, director of online marketing at Lonely Planet, took the audience on a journey through Lonely Planet’s history and its digital strategy.

The post The 10 best quotes from Masterclassings Digital Publishing Masterclass appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

At todays (1 May) Masterclassing Digital Marketing Masterclass event in London, members of senior management from B2C brands were brought together with digital marketing experts to discuss the use of digital tools – such as influencer marketing, paid social, AI, and content marketing – and how they can be used for a more effective marketing strategy.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference, here are a selection of some of the best soundbites from the day.

“It’s clear we’re working in an increasingly opaque environment, which is becoming increasingly fragmented. It makes it difficult when you’re running marketing campaigns to figure out what’s working well, where are we spending our money, where are there performance inefficiencies and areas to improve performance. And it’s difficult to know what’s happening under the surface.”

“The goal is to turn data into insight, and you have to use that insight to fuel performance… You really want to get to a place where you’ve got data blended. You have single consistent view of all your marketing activity – where you can quickly see what’s going on, chop and dice between whatever’s important to you, and figure out what are the levers you have to really drive the business forward and impact growth.”

Phil Dance, commercial director at Datorama got the event off to a flying start giving the brands in the room advice on using data to grow a business effectively.

“It’s about capturing consumer attention in the right way, and making sure that any digital campaign that’s running appeals to these consumers. So, putting ourselves in the consumer’s shoes. Remembering that they’ve got so many things vying for their attention at any given time.”

The best digital marketing campaigns come from knowing your consumers and appealing directly to their needs, says Tanya Alden, UK account director at Taboola.

“We’re at forefront of two giant paradigm shifts. On one side, you have this mass adoption of social media – where 87 per cent of the people that have access to the internet today are using social media and are using it about two hours a day. On top of that, it’s how we drive this shift in how we trust in consumer information – from institutional trust in consumption of data to distributing. On the other side of the equation, you have this mass proliferation of data… 90 per cent of the data was created within the last two years.”

“Marketers are starting to move to a larger spectrum of different types of influencers. Traditionally, you think of celebrities, athletes, actors, artists. Today, you have folks that make their living as a content creator – whether they’re a blogger, a YouTuber, a freelance journalist. These macro influencers pay their bills, and send their kids to school, with their content creation.”

Social media and the emergence of a different kind of influencer have become a go-to for effective digital marketers, according to Lyle Stevens, founder and CEO at Mavrck.

“It’s no longer on exit ‘enter your email address to get 10 per cent off’ – don’t give away margins. It’s about letting your data do the talking. Understand how got there, why they are here and who they are.”

“Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. It is that customer journey – why are they here, what do they want, and who are they. CRO means focus on one goal, it means line of best fit to get there and it can compromise the customer experience. So, what’s alternative? CJO, customer journey optimisation. It’s using a data-driven approach to improve the whole journey to get more conversions. So, you stop focusing on the conversion and you start focus on the journey.”

Daniella Gregory, global partnerships director at Yieldify thinks that brands need to start focusing on understanding the journey that customers have taken to reach a webpage, rather than putting all their energy into focusing on converting these customers.

“If you people lose trust in you, they’re less likely to engage with you. And, in this GDPR world, it’s a really bad thing to happen because they’re then going to opt out of communicating with you and allowing you to communicate with them. You’ll do well to keep that in mind at all times.”

“We all know that our job as marketers is to take risks to find the sweet spot and find those new consumers. What you know about people around their data and their engagement with you should be combined with context – just because I like driving my car really fast, doesn’t mean I want to see ads about going fast all the time when I’m looking at stuff with my daughter around what she’s into. So, understand the content of a page and serve a relevant ad at the right time.”

Richard Sharp, VP for EMEA at Grapeshot knows the importance of gaining the trust of consumers and targeting them with the right advertising at the right time to help aid this.

“As your tactics improve, you begin automating more-and-more, you get really efficient. But if you’re serving up the wrong propositions to people, people get bored very quickly… So, it’s great to become efficient but you really need the right strategy to underpin that. You have to make sure everything that you’re serving is the right stuff and not just really efficient.”

Closing the event, James Heimers, manager of CRM planning and insight at Virgin Atlantic, provided brands with an insight into how Virgin Atlantic users digital to market flights to customers by being efficient, while maintaining relevance.  

The post The 10 best quotes from Masterclassings Digital Marketing Masterclass appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.