UNH Today

More than 250 digital marketing professionals, faculty and students attended the 2018 Paul College Digital Marketing Symposium where they gleaned insight from eight high impact presentations by leading companies including Drinkwater Productions, C3 Metrics, BzzAgent, Vital Design, King Arthur Flour, Drift, and Sentient Decision Science.

Here are the Top 5 Takeaways:

1. Events continue to be a great way to connect with your customers and advance your brand, but you need to position them for our digital era. Consumers are saavy and expect an engaging experience, and cell phones give them the ability to interact in exciting ways. Think digital business card exchanges, live contest judging, bidding tools for auctions or raffles, digital walls that display social media coverage and engagement. A virtual or augmented reality experience that allows attendees to “experience” your product or service in exciting ways is a bonus.
2. Your best creative team is your consumers. They are the most authentic and trustworthy because their family and friends believe them more than your marketing team, celebrities or bloggers. Create campaigns where your customers, through their own stories, can help advance your product or service. An example might be setting up a contest in which your customers post pictures of their baby eating your baby food, with others voting on the cutest baby. Make sure you determine what your KPIs are before you launch a campaign so you can measure success. Are you looking for engagement, clicks, impressions, conversations, reach, sales?
3. Ask your customers 20 questions and those should drive your content strategy. Make sure you are addressing and answering those questions through all your marketing campaigns. Because if your focus group has these questions, it is likely that potentional customers do, as well.
4. You don’t have to be on every channel. A big “whew” on this, as it is hard for even the most seasoned marketer to keep up with all the new social media channels. Find out where your customers and prospective customers are and focus on those. Provide content that is distinct for those channels, particularly if they are drawing different demographics. Always listen and always answer.
5. Get started on video, be real, be human and be authentic. Most people avoid this powerful medium because it is costly, or they think they lack the technical skill. But most of us have the tools right at our fingertips. A cell phone or iPad works great and there is knowledge online for fee that will help you shoot and edit. Remember story is above everything. Make it concise, simple and relatable. Find good characters who evoke emotion as well as a good story arc that takes your audience from point A to B.