Conference Notes: Local in the Post Digital World

In August of this year I attended the Brandify Client Summit. The two day conference covered digital marketing techniques and trends with a heavy focus on local search and emerging tech.

Conference presenters were from smart companies including Bing, Foursquare, Forrest, Walgreen’s, Underarmour and others.

Topics covered include digital marketing, voice search’s impact on SERP, the convergence of technology and marketing, the importance of online reviews, and more. Here are some striking observations from one of the presentations.

Marketers today should be Helpful, Handy, and Human

Collin Colburn presented a very straight-shooting bit of advice in his superior presentation to help post-digital marketers lead the way.

Here are some curated notes from the Brandify blog. You can see the presentation deck, or Brandify’s blog recaps for more information.

• We now live in a post-digital world where customers expect immediacy, personalization and follow-through.
• Today’s customers have been empowered by technology and it has led them to become entitled.

Customers are no longer interested in seeing ads, and want to see what a brand will do to provide value and transparency for them.

• Customers have grown accustomed to the speed and immediacy of digital technology. They want something, they want it now, and if you can’t provide it with the speed and digital ease that they have come to expect, they will go and find it somewhere else.
• Post-digital marketers ask themselves how they can understand customer problems, they strive to reduce the stress of customers’ decision processes and they work to consistently demonstrate their brand’s promise.

Post-digital marketers do what they say.

• Marketers need to be human, be helpful and be handy, said Colburn. In order to be successful in a post-digital world, local businesses need to abandon the advertising mindset and become accountable for following through on their brand’s promises.
• Data should be used to create systems of insight that close the loop between systems of people, processes and technology and allow brands to act on those insights when customers need it most.
• Building trust between customers and your brand is one of the most important things you can do in this post-digital world. Once you have obtained a customer’s trust, keeping that trust and building loyalty should be one of your brand’s top priorities.