Recent Marketing Events and Conferences

Marketing

The team have had the opportunity to visit some exciting industry conferences in the last few weeks – read our thoughts here!

Introduction

Keeping your ear to the ground and digesting the larger picture is a vital part of what keeps Equator at the cutting edge of what we do. Learning from key players in the industry and adapting insight into our processes allows us to take on tomorrow for our clients. To help us keep on top of the latest news and engage with other people in the wider industry, we do our best to get along to as many conferences and events as possible.

 

In the last couple of weeks, several members of our Marketing team have been all over the country seeing the latest industry events. Here’s a summary of some of the different things we’ve enjoyed.

"Learning from key players in the industry and adapting insight into our processes allows us to take on tomorrow for our clients."

Digital PR Fringe Event

BrightonSEO

Anyone in the world of organic search will have heard of BrightonSEO. It’s one of the world’s most respected industry conferences and attracts speakers and guests from around the globe to the English South Coast. A few weeks ago, Andy and Stacey went along to a fringe event specifically on Digital PR. This growing area of the digital landscape has exciting implications for our Outreach Team, and we’re using our learnings from the session to inform the expansion of our offering over the coming months.


A few highlights from the sessions in the Brighton Centre throughout the day included some great campaigns, insights, and perspectives from the invited speakers. Here are a few of the stand-out points from the day;

Jon Mowat

Jon shared some insights from a ranging career in creating video content. He was really keen to hammer home the power of bringing an element of emotional investment into marketing activity. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling if your message can make your target audience really feel something, you can actually change their brain chemistry. This can profoundly affect everyday decision-making – incredibly powerful from a marketing perspective!

Gemma Flinders

The next speaker was Gemma, who brought some fascinating ideas to the table around using data to tell a story. She has extensive experience in taking datasets and using a bit of Excel trickery to surface some exciting narratives. These can subsequently be used to gain the attention of editors and reporters, meaning you can get your brand on some prominent publications!

Tom Telford

Among the other speakers, was Tom Telford, who gave us a fascinating talk on how you can inspire a creative mindset amongst your clients. He used an example of how a client approaching an agency to say, “I want better links” is not an effective way of igniting a creative mindset when developing a strategy. Sometimes, simply asking your client to surface the “why?” can bring you up the ladder on their long-term goals and help to align you in creating a piece of work that is both creative and suitable for helping your client meet their goals.

The brightest minds from the world of Paid Search

PPC Live UK

In late September, David from our Search Team made a trip to London to join the exciting and ranging PPC Live UK event held in the Shard. This event brought together some of the best and brightest minds from the world of Paid Search for an evening of discussion, debate, and idea sharing.


David was impressed at the calibre of conversation the event held and is confident that there are some learnings we can take into account while we continue to evolve the offering at Equator. David called out the following speakers as having some of the best insight of the evening.

Crystal Carter

Speaker Crystal Carter highlighted that while the relationship between SEO and PPC is often seen as a sparring match, both channels need to support each other. SEO can help manage data feeds, and Core Web Vitals for things like page speed and on-site copy – these can all help improve the conversion rate for PPC and PPC Return on Ad Spend. Conversely, PPC insights into keyword trends, audience segmentation and traffic resilience can be very useful for developing an SEO strategy.

Veronica Ruiz Morcillo

Digital marketing consultant Veronica Ruiz Morcillo stressed the importance of “speaking the same language” as your client and how data interpretation can help you to tell a story that ties to their long-term goals. Focussing on detailed PPC reporting metrics like Click Through Rates and Cost Per Click can keep you from looking at the bigger picture. A holistic view of data can allow you to create a story that is more engaging for your client – this is essential in gathering the right data to help you grow your business.

Chris Ridley

Speaker Chris Ridley gave his assessment on Performance Max as an all-in-one campaign type targeting users across the whole Google ecosystem from YouTube, Maps, Search, Gmail and Discover. He acknowledged that there is a fear that with increasing the automation of campaigns, the PPC manager’s role will go extinct. However, this is not the case; the human factor will always remain essential and relevant for running campaigns and ensuring they go smoothly. We just need to learn what machine learning does and which levers can be used. Humans can provide context and control the environment in which PPC exists.

He used the analogy that a PPC manager’s role in running a Performance Max campaign can be seen as:

- The Teacher – educates the campaign’s machine learning by providing the assets, ad copy and budget to ensure the campaign’s goal is achieved.

- The Pilot – initiates the launch and puts the campaign on autopilot while staying vigilant and not losing focus. They’re able to take control and action changes if the campaign is not performing at all as it should.

- The Doctor – evaluates any major issues and finds solutions. If assets are performing poorly, they can put elements in some sort of quarantine and eventually rehabilitate them back into the campaign.

Technology for Marketing 2022

MarTech

Another London-based event was the only dedicated conference in the UK for MarTech – Technology for Marketing. The event was held in ExCeL London in late September and was attended by Stacey from the Marketing team. With over ten thousand brands in attendance, this was an unmissable opportunity to get on the pulse of technology in marketing.

Key highlights in the world of MarTech

With the move to a cookie-less world, there is a shift in the programmatic space as behavioural targeting becomes more difficult. Key industry players are leveraging contextual targeting to achieve better results. There are several tools on the market that bring AI together with traditional contextual targeting.

 

The conference also focused on CRM and how this is evolving with consumers being increasingly data-aware. With CRM, industry voices have identified that consumers care about mutual value. An interesting stat pulled from the sessions demonstrated that 66% of consumers will provide data for something meaningful in return – brands should therefore focus on user experiences to turn customers into influencers and leverage data to transform services and journeys.

 

Stacey also attended a couple of sessions on creative automation. While some of these touched on regular article-style content, the main focus was on creative assets and being able to automate the creation of display banners, social assets etc.

 

Automating creative asset creation would be a massive time and investment saver and streamline a sometimes arduous process. It would also allow brands to be more relevant and personalised as you can create many more ad variants rather than just one or two. An example of automated asset creation in action would be, rather than having a branded display ad, a digital marketer could have tailored individual ads for specific campaigns but with the same time investment on creation.

 

This is just a tiny area where automation has the potential to create better working efficiencies.

"This was an unmissable opportunity to get on the pulse of technology in marketing"

We hope this has helped show you some of the latest developments in the world of digital. If you want more information on how we might be able to help you, please get in touch today!