After meeting Roger 9 months ago at a Chartered Institute of Marketing event, when the opportunity to network with Marketing professionals in London came up I jumped at the chance. A week of eating, drinking, learning and networking – ideal!

The week consisted of insightful seminars from a vast array of businesses, networking evenings and working on a pitch for Havas Helia. So, what did I learn? In true e-marketer fashion here’s 9 things I learnt during the week:

    1. Simplicity is the fastest route to success – don’t try and prove you know it all, keep it as simple as possible
    2. Storytelling, storytelling, storytelling – every seminar told a story, and why? Because that’s all we like listening to
    3. Read, read, read – to tell a story you need stories to tell, the seminars paraphrased and used quotes from books to great effect
    4. Clients aren’t the problem… you are – this one reflected our (Actionable Insight) need to change and use all platforms to be compatible with clients
    5. Ask, ask ,ask – challenge a brief and really understand the personal motivations for the client, what they want out of the project and the KPI’s
    6. Put yourself if the customers shoes – when creating a campaign it is too easy to say “they would” (post that on social media)”, by thinking would I actually do that or, would my sister actually do that, so campaigns are more grounded
    7. Automation – the days of manually entering data are dead, why manually enter when you can use API’s to work for you automatically
    8. Hire from the IDM Summer school – it was mentioned that many of the sponsor agencies hire only from the IDM summer school, I can see why, the calibre of students was impressive and I have recommended to Roger that if we expand, we should look to hire from the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing Summer School in coming years
    9. Starting a point by repeating the same word 3 times can be quite annoying but it works

Suggested reading list after the week:

Books

Happiness by design – Paul Dolan , Twitter power – Joel Comm , Purple Cow – Seth Godin , Contagious – Jonah Berger

Websites

Brand republic , The Drum , searchengineland.com , searchengingejournal.com , Socialmediatoday , Mashable

Blogs

Dave Trotts blog , Seth Godin’s blog , Experian / Hitwise , Actionable Insight