Community is king
I recently had the pleasure of attending a free event that was actually really good. Usually, I feel that ‘free’ usually comes with a handful of disappointing drawbacks. Not this time, Clicky’s free launch event to celebrate the opening of their new office in Nottingham had a fantastic collection of speakers and presented a great opportunity to socialise with others in the community.
After a brief introduction the mic was passed over to Shane Cahill, Agency Development Manager at Google who offered a variety of statistics and insights that demonstrate the ever-changing behaviour of searchers and internet users.
He identified 4 key points to focus on:
- Speed
- Video
- Knowing your audience and customising their experience
- Assign credit correctly
Speed
So the first point is nothing we didn’t already know, there are statistics for load speed and website abandonment across the web but one particular example really stuck in my mind. A client of his managed to increase their load speed by 1 second and they witnessed a 27% increase on their conversion rate. Admittedly, we don’t know how slow their load speed was in the first place but it’s impressive to know how much of an impact an extra second off can have.
Video
Apparently it was common knowledge, but by 2019 80% of the internet will be consumed by video with live video being huge. It came as a bit of a shock to me as having never gone live, with no plans to in the future, I felt perhaps I needed to reconsider.
Knowing your audience
Personas and customising experiences for your audience sounds like common sense but it is no walk in the park. There is no excuse for a catch-all approach to customer experience and satisfaction, I know that trying to get a group of 10 friends to do one thing requires a variation of tactics, so are businesses slow to catch on?
Assigning credit
The last point hit home as I am very guilty of assigning credit falsely but what does this mean? Essentially it’s the mindset that the last action a person takes before completing a CTA or coming to your sites is the thing that influenced them the most or holds the most value. The point that I forget is that they could have seen a variety of things before that vital advert click or a search engine and this is becoming more relevant now as we start to use more mediums to promote ourselves.
In fact I have a true to life example. I saw a promoted ad or possibly a Facebook post of a page that a few of my friends had liked, it was a picture of a very nice 50’s retro dress and I therefore liked the page. I have no intention of buying from them anytime soon but luckily for them, my mum is a frivolous shopper and she went browsing and bought a dress from them instantly.
Let’s say instead of going through Facebook to the seller’s website following my like, instead, she Googled the company and completed a goal that way. It would be easy for the company to assign all the credit for this purchase to their organic efforts whereas we know that actually, Facebook had a much greater influence on this purchase than anything else.
Another talk that really aroused my curiosity was Olaf Sperwer’s piece on the future of VR. Although his background wasn’t in marketing, as VR Med use virtual reality technology as a solution or treatment program for a variety of medical illnesses, which was exciting in itself; correcting ‘lazy eyes’ with VR had never occurred to me, why would it?
As the technology is still considered ‘new’, he addressed the issue that no one really knows how to market VR but argued that it’s greatest potential is B2B apart from gaming and events industries. He did show us a great example of the BMW i visualiser which depicted an entire VR narrative of how you must deliver this futuristic energy source to a certain place whilst also escaping the pursuit of the men chasing after you, all the while driving the new BMW i3.
Although, I doubt I would be convinced to take an interest in the new BMW range, the company did receive an inbound of inquiries and purchase requests off the back of the campaign. (I didn’t make note of the figure he said and subsequently can’t find one either).
Tech Nottingham’s, Andrew Seward expressed that ‘community is king’ which works very well at an event where you get an opportunity to meet people in your industry and area. With events coming up like Hack 24 and attendees like Esendex, Fatfree Media and D2N2 Growth Hub community is so important to sparking discussion and future developments.
The best ideas come from conversations and people.
