Last month I have attended (and participated in) the Future of Marketing virtual conference. Format: 60 speakers in 60 minutes. Key takeaways from the conference are below (please note that some of the statements below are paraphrased):
- Brands need to start looking at integrating Paid, Owned, Earned Media effectively – Scott Monty, Ford
- it’s time to get past your obsession with channels and start looking at shopping as a process, look for patterns in the routes that shoppers take – Stefan Tornquist, Econsultancy
- Marketers should engage in true interactive marketing. And I’m not referring to websites or online marketing, but to engaging each customer in a relevant cross-channel dialogue that builds upon their past and current behavior – Paul McNulty, Unica
- Research shows if you run A/B tests on an ecommerce site that hasn’t been tested before, you’ll increase sales by 20-25% and generate 30-40 percent more leads. – Anne Holland, whichtestwon.com
- Mobile is a game-changer. There are a little more than a billion PCs. There are five billioncellphones around the world right now. That’s 73% of the world population. – Chuck Martin, Center for Media Research
- Social media is hot, but is by no means mutually exclusive of search. Search has expanded beyond Google, and marketers must now consider other search channels such as Facebook search and mobile search – Lee Odden, TopRank Marketing
- Focus your marketing on helping people. Produce engaging content that meets people’s insatiable demand for how-to information. And recognize people who help you.- Michael Stelzner, socialmediaexaminer.com
- Create remarkable content. Good content shares or solves; it doesn’t shill. – Ann Handley, MarketingProfs
- Content and storytelling is how you’ll break through all the clutter. Passion is contagious, and if you can get your customers passionate about you, then you win. – C.C. Chapman, Digital Dads
- Businesses have to start thinking about how to put digital at its core in everything they do – Bonin Bough, PepsiCo
- 2011 is the year of strong social media strategies and social search. Amber MacArthur, consultant
- Effective integration of the four planes: paid, owned, earned, and social is going to be the solution going forward to solve “infinite online, but limited attention span” problem – Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital
- Use Flowtown for you next email campaign and hone in on the most influencial customers – Laurel Touby, MediaBistro.com
- To me the future of marketing is actually about connecting people to things that they’re interested in – Ben Huh, Cheezburger Network
- It’s worthwhile to engage with the passionate people in your community, no matter how small they are – Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison
- The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human. Imagine how to mind-read your customers and what their transformative needs are at the top of the Maslow’spyramid, and you’ll be more successful as a marketer – Chip Conley
- Redefine your purpose from your customer’s point of view. Recognize that employees are the brand in so many interactions. Believe in them and nurture them. Be human and real in your communications. Honor customers’ lives in how you address them. Become a talk-able brand by delivering a reliable experience your customers can tell others about. – Jeanne Bliss, CustomerBliss.com
- Keep it real! Show the real face of your company. You may not be able to please everybody, but the people that you do please will become firm believers and loyalists. – Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media
- The future of marketing really isn’t marketing at all; it’s building something that’s meaningful, worth supporting, and ultimately worth sharing. – Brian Solis
- Don’t focus on technologies; focus on strategy (think about what you will do and won’t do, and where the relationships you build could go). – Charlene Li, Altimeter Group
- Start small. Communities are built by small groups of people who care about what you’re doing, and they become your core influencers, and they become the people who spread the word for you. – Liz Strauss, SobCon
- Take the top 10 questions your customers have about your company and answer them methodically across the social web with a variety of content: podcasts, webinars, video blog posts, etc. Do that, and you’ll increase your conversion rate, and you’ll close more business – Jay Baer, Convince and Convert
- You cannot afford to NOT get involved. There are five ways the Fortune 500 use social media to generate revenue: branding, ecommerce, lead generation, customer retention, and research. – Jamie Turner, 60 Second Marketer
- Future of marketing involves using more listening tools and incorporate it into both your lead development, your awareness, your sales, and your customer service. – Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs
- Marketers need to pay attention to Independent web (and not just horsemen of the Internet like Facebook)—where people create their own media, share it, and create their own engagement and passion. It is that part of the web that drives the value of the dependent web, the portals. – John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing
- For those people who are used to the tidy world of corporate communications, the “good old days” of controlling the message are really dead and gone. The best thing we can do these days is chime in. – Sonia Simone, Copyblogger Media
- Marketers need to focus less on whether it is B2B or B2C marketing and focus a little bit more on P2P participation, person to person, a personalized one-on-one proactive engagement to the customers. You need to start participating today. – Ekaterina Walter, Intel (yours truly)
- 3 SEO tips: 1. register your site with Google and Bing webmaster tools; 2. if you are Tweeting, use Bit.ly or another tracker that shows you your click-through rate; 3. create content that people want to share. – Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
- Mobile and QR codes – next big thing. – Maya Paveza, social media consultant
- The future of marketing will be giving people what they actually want, and not having to convince them that they want it. – Victoria Harres, PR Newswire
- Social media are tools; real-time is a mindset. However, most companies are planning based on a campaign mentality, drawing from information in the distant past, planning for things far into the future. You’ve got to focus on real-time, on the present. – David Meerman Scott
- Limiting information seduces people. Create the atmosphere of the intrigue, curiosity, and engagement – Matthew May
- The future of marketing isn’t about tools; it’s about the discipline to use them right. – Stephen Denny, stephendenny.com
- Your customers are already leaving reviews of your products, services, and location on these tools like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. You need to be there to read them. – Simon Salt
- The future of marketing is telling your story with video. Grab the camera and get started. – Steve Garfield, stevegarfield.com
- Try using Twitter to reach out to people who don’t know your brand already. Instead of monitoring your brand name, try generic mentions of your product. – Danny Sullivan, searchengineland.com
- Stop being faceless, use your personality. Personality matters, because people matter. – Rohit Bhargava
- Never stop being curious. Let your curiosity drive you to stay on top of the latest emerging trends in technology. Get out of your comfort zone, experiment, be ultra-observant! – Frank Gruber, techcocktail.com
- Start listening! – Scott Stratten, un-marketing.com
- Never stop innovating; it should be at the core of your DNA. – Porter Gale, Virgin America
- I think that we’re going to have a really interesting challenge in the next couple of months and years going forward as the value of anonymous content will be as valid today as someone who has self-proclaimed who they are really in the real world. – Mitch Joel, Twist Image
- Critical business decision: creating a website or a fan page? I vote for Facebook fan page these days. – Guy Kawasaki, alltop.com
- Fully connect what you promise to what you do across all your relationships. – Kevin Clark, Content Evolution
- To succeed with that think “IDEA.” “I” is identify the mass influencers in your market. “D”, develop groundswell customer service. “E”, empower them with mobile information. And “A”, amplify fan activity. – Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research
- The future of marketing is automation. – Aaron Kahlow, Online Marketing Connect
- The old interruptive model of marketing no longer works, whether you’re talking about traditional advertising or digital advertising. What we need today and what society expects from us increasingly is about creating marketing with meaning – Bob Gilbreath, Bridge Worldwide
- If you can tell a story that others identify as their own—if people can locate themselves in that story—then the need to persuade, convince, or sell people on anything disappears. – Michael Margolis, getstoried.com
- If you give your customer purpose, they will purchase. We’ve got to deliver our authentic story or purpose at every stage, from branding to sales to consumption to delivery. – Tim Sanders, sanderssays.com
- Collaboration is the new competition, so as the control of data shifts away from sellers towards buyers, the new opportunity is to become not just a force of transparency in your business, but in your entire category. – Alex Bogusky, fearlessrevolution.com
- 1. Marketing will move to being more automated. 2. Marketing will be ruled by virtual communities. 3. The “entertain me” culture will be the only way for marketers to break through the noise, so get ready with things like gaming, 3-D, and visualization. – Sandy Carter, IBM
- One of the really important things I see happening with technology over the next year is the rise of hyper-personalization with everything. – Nick Bilton
- It’s about people, always has been. We get to write the next chapter with our customers. – Robbin Phillips, Brains on Fire
- Company’s culture and a company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin. – Tony Hsieh, Zappos
- It’s a relationship-centric approach that all brands would be well advised to take a look at. – Todd Defren, SHIFT Communications
- Everything is becoming a network. That includes markets, including market conversations. What holds together the network, what actually holds it together, are shared interests. – David Weinberger
- I think that the trend towards more and more influence of direct word-of-mouth marketing applies to many, many kinds of brands. – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
- If you want to sell more stuff and leave customers more satisfied, you have to figure out what the sweet spot is for your particular products—enough choice so that there’s something for almost everyone, but not too much choice to drive people crazy – Barry Schwartz
- The thing that separates the greatest, the best CMOs, from the good is this concept of focus and engagement with employees like they’re your customers. – Pete Krainik, CMO Club
- being authentic and radically transparent is really key to your success in the future – Jeff Hayzlett
- The future of marketing is going to be one-on-one engagement. Context and actually giving a crap is going to mean a whole lot more. The humanization of business is upon us. – Gary Vaynerchuk
You can find the full trascript here.