5 take-aways from the 2019 Digital Summit

On Friday 19 July, the Milky-B team had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Interactive Minds Digital Summit this year, held at the Atlantic Group in Docklands.

As with every year, the Interactive Minds team pulled together a diverse and topical lineup of speakers who divulged their industry advice and future digital marketing predictions. Data became the major theme throughout the day: how to find it, use it, share it, protect it. Complementary to this was the personalisation of digital content production to customers, events and trends, and how to centre this in your marketing strategy.

It was a great day filled with insightful presentations, friendly networking and epic catering (a food break every 2 hours? Big yes!). Needless to say, we left the event with our brains (and stomachs) stuffed! And while we can’t share the buttery pastries with you, we CAN share the top 5 take-aways from our time at the 2019 Digital Summit:

1. Data to Reward

Digital content is a valuable part of any digital marketing strategy for many reasons. But as International Keynote speaker Cathy Tanimura of Strava reminded us during her ‘Powered by Data’ presentation, the most valuable content you can create for your customers is one which rewards them for the data they give you.

More and more, brands are using the data they collect to create personalised digital content for their customers. Take Facebook’s ‘Monthly Memories’ collage, or Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’ yearly playlists. Whatever your brand is, finding a way to reflect a customer’s experience with your brand back to them is an increasingly important aspect of digital content creation. Personalised content not only results in more shares from customers, it also aligns your brand more closely to your customers sense of identity – the highest form of brand resonance we can hope for.

2. Big Fan Energy

If your brand doesn’t garner huge amounts of data on your customer, there are other ways to still create personalised experiences for your customer. In ‘How to Make a Commodity Cool through creativity and Innovation’, Olivia Dickinson of Chobani Australia talked about Chobani wedding rings as a product created to celebrate their Biggest Fan’s special day – one of the many activities the brand does on the daily to create personalised experiences for customers.

As Ursula Ringham (SAP) adds in her Keynote ‘Influencer Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Audience’ – your customers are your most valuable influencers. By simply rewarding your loyal customers with the kind of special, personalised treatment you might give your influencers, you are on your way to producing better content with higher value to your customers.

 3. Hunt Those Trends

Another great piece of advice that surfaced throughout the summit was the reminder to stay on top of trends and find ways to tie your brand to them. Olivia Dickinson recommended signing up to the mailing lists of cultural and marketing leaders such as Trendhunter, The Hustle and Adweek. She also encouraged us to look outside our industries to see what content trends could be borrowed – another great piece of advice on how to innovate rather than recreate. Bec Thexton of ME Bank went further and challenged us to think creatively on how we can insert our brands into the day’s conversation – which looks further than brands and competitors into popular culture, politics and wider community concerns.

4. Get that SEO

An eye-opening presentation from Online Marketing Gurus (OMG) Mez Homayunfard and Safwan Chowdhury outlined the three elements of a website which affects its search ranking on Google. In a nutshell, Google cares about:

1. Your Schema Markup (bits of code which tell Google what on your website is a heading, what is an image etc).
2. Your Relevance (the quality of your site’s content).
3. Your Domain Authority (how many other websites link back to yours).

There are many quick ways that you can improve the SEO of your brand’s website by better understanding these three elements, but the biggest takeaway from this presentation was the revelation that Google rewards webpages that have a word count of roughly 1,900! Ever wondered why online shopping sites add social tiles, FAQs, Reviews and ‘About’ sections at the footer of their pages? It’s to boost the word count!

 5. The Future of Voice

While most presentations focused on what brands are doing now, Mo Bhargava of BIG4 Holiday Parks of Australia presented a list of hypotheses for the future of marketing. Significantly, he emphasised the transition from type to voice in how consumers seek and engage with information. “Whoever wins this space wins the internet” – says Mo.

While using voice search is not exactly the norm in Australia yet, we can already see from the number of ‘Alexa play…’ memes on the Internet – its ubiquity is not too far in our future. At the close of the summit, Mo encouraged us to think critically of how our brands will play out in this new age of voice.

We left the summit inspired and excited to implement our newest learnings on the brands we work with. A big thank you to the team at Interactive Minds for putting on a great lineup of international and domestic speakers across a diverse range of industries and expertise. See you next year!