By Victoria Patten
On the morning of November 2nd, 400 marketing professionals descended on Exeter University ready to soak up knowledge from some of the UK marketing community’s leading minds at Building Brands. The Forum at Exeter University was buzzing, coffee was glugged, and pens were at the ready to take notes.
If you missed it (where were you?), we’ve summarised some of our favourite takeaways from the sessions. Let’s get into it.
1. Use AnswerThePublic for content creation ideas
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tool recommended. Only, it’s usually in the context of SEO. This time, it was brought up in the context of video marketing, from Blinkback’s David Kilkelly.
Struggling to know what your videos should be about? Not sure which questions your audience want answers to? AnswerThePublic is a great place to start for idea gathering.
2. Join TikTok now before it’s too late
Abby Millar, Co-Founder of Altum Media showed the prevalence of this love-it-or-hate-it platform with some amazing statistics on TikTok’s surge of success.
TikTok isn’t just for Gen-Z anymore (though it remains enduringly popular with them). People are increasingly using TikTok to search, so if you’re not using it yet, get on it before you miss the boat entirely!
3. Standardise before you automate
Jon Payne, from our friends at Noisy Little Monkey, took to the stage to share automation tools that make marketers’ lives easier. Aside from the excellent recommendations, one key learning was that it’s really difficult to automate something that’s different each time.
Work on understanding your processes, why they are that way (should they be different?), standardise them, then you can start making the most of tools to save you time!
And if you’re wondering, Wordtune and voice typing were some top suggestions that we’ll be looking into.
4. YouTube Shorts: full of potential
While more time is currently spent per user on TikTok than on YouTube, that could all be set to change. Another gem of an insight from David’s video workshop was his prediction that YouTube Shorts could very quickly bring the fight to TikTok. Why?
Right now, TikTokers tend to make money through brand deals and sponsorships. YouTube has just announced its intentions to monetise Shorts for Creators, giving them 45% of ad revenue on their videos. So those who want to make a living from their videos may just start to favour the OG video giant. And with that, audiences seem likely to follow…
5. Beyond the website: SEO is omnichannel
Crystal Carter’s keynote on omnichannel SEO was illustrated brilliantly using Beyoncé as Queen of Being Everywhere. Albums, apps, websites, apparel, tours, advertising, media platforms… Bey and her team really know how to give the fans what they want and make it easy to find.
An interesting reminder: It’s an outdated view to believe that the Google SERP (search engine results page) just serves websites.
It serves information.
As a digital marketer, it’s your job to make that information accessible and interpretable by Google using tools like schema markup, great SEO and being on the platforms your customers are.
Crystal, Head of SEO Communications at Wix, is super active on her channels, so it’s well worth giving her a follow on Twitter or LinkedIn.
6. Don’t be part of the diversity problem
Azeem Ahmad delivered a brilliant talk showing how diversity and inclusion in marketing hasn’t moved on nearly enough. The point is this: we can all do better.
It’s not just about being invited to the party. It’s ensuring those you’ve invited are having a great time at the party.
7. Behaviours are not brand voice pillars
There were so many great learnings from brand voice strategist Bethany Joy that, honestly, you really just had to be there.
Still, among the most resonant was this gem: Brand values tell you how you should act, not how you should speak.
‘Honest’, ‘Reliable’ and ‘People-centric’ are all great, guiding values (although brand context and authenticity are also important here), but they don’t tell writers much about tone.
We loved Bethany’s examples of ‘unreservedly chirpy’, and ‘cheerfully mischievous’, which provide far more clarity and direction for your brand communications. A great presentation brimming with pragmatic pointers, useful reminders, and a breathless rant that was rightly met with rapturous applause from the audience.
8. Remember ‘users’ are customers
Our Founder Jaye animatedly illustrated the data problem facing marketers via the ghosts of Marketing Past, Present and Future. The problem? Marketers have become lazy, relying on data too heavily to influence key strategy decisions.
The industry is now facing is a reduction in data as we know it due to privacy directives, iOS14 updates, and major platform shifts such as GA4.
Jaye reminded us all that those ‘users’ we’ve labelled are real people, real customers, and it’s time to take the data challenge as an opportunity to refocus your strategy back to them. It’s time to humanise marketing again, telling your brand story, focusing on customer value and then designing your data strategy to measure that.
Want to know more? Pop your details in the form to access Jaye’s slides, a data health check and further resources.
