Specialists from agencies and freelancers recognised the value of this conference as early as 2013, when the first edition took place. Since then, the Marketing Festival has grown into an international event, featuring talks by world-renowned marketers such as Avinash Kaushik, Marty Neumeier and Larry Kim.
This time in Ostrava… day one
The fourth edition in 2016 took place in the stunning surroundings of the Gong multifunctional hall in Ostrava, and we at AITOM simply couldn’t miss it.
When a journalist from MSM’s equipment fails, AITOM saves the day…
Although this year’s event didn’t quite match last year’s quality, it was once again a source of inspiration and interesting ideas. We’d like to share some of them with you.
Marcus Tober, founder of Searchmetrics, used his data to show how SEO has changed. Factors that were previously important are now being overtaken by content relevance. User searches (on Google) are more flexible; Google evaluates factors in real time, estimates the relevance and type of query, takes data localisation into account, and reflects all of this in the search results. What does this mean? That everything is much more flexible and complex, that Google is changing its approach to website ranking, and that keywords (search queries) will change, because queries with different motivations require different types of content. Here is the presentation for download
Is this complicated for ordinary marketers? Perhaps, but the future won’t just revolve around data; it will be directly driven by it. Indeed, other speakers also touched upon the topic of data analytics.
Lukas Vermeer, a data professional, spoke about data primarily in the context of A/B testing and experiments. He also pointed out that it is necessary to be wary of the risks arising from incorrect interpretation of data or erroneous correlation of results.
Lucie Šperková, a data analyst at Adexpres, focused on analysing which channels or attribution models will deliver the best results, all based on various statistical models and calculations (e.g. Markov). In other words, predicting customer behaviour.
So is the ideal marketer a ‘science nerd’ with a knowledge of statistics? Hmmm… Fortunately, we also have stories, emotions and intuitive behaviour – things that don’t entirely correspond with reason, but work surprisingly well.
Michal Pastier, creative director at Zaraguza, used several examples to show how a story can save a brand. The Japanese racecourse Koci, through the “worst” racehorse Haru Urara, managed to convey a message to people about how important it is never to give up. This saved the racecourse and provided the content and icon for its campaign for the next four years.
We are already familiar with another story from our own country: the well-known Kofola campaign featuring the dog “Fofola?”. In addition to the interesting origins of the campaign and the character, important insights were shared regarding how we evaluate an experience (with advertising, with a story). We judge this based on the most intense moment during the experience and the experience at the end. A good video for the online generation has a good middle and end (peak, end); that is the formula that works.
Ostrava… day two
The second day was also packed with interesting talks. Once again, we could say that an analytical view of marketing clashed here with an intuitive approach focused on behaviour and psychology.
Andrej Pančík, co-founder of Represent.com, knows his stuff when it comes to data and marketing automation. For example, he highlighted the problem of automated bidding and overlapping audiences – so be careful not to ‘outbid’ yourselves.
Frederick Vallaeys, a leading figure in the PPC world who worked on the development of AdWords and founded Optmyzr (an AdWords management tool), showed us the world of large-scale automated PPC campaigns. He uses ‘single keyword campaigns’, for instance, because of the bidding possibilities; when all options are combined, this can result in up to 160,000 different bidding variations for a single keyword! He mentioned the ‘Google Predictive API’, which allows you to adjust bidding based on the weather, stock market results or sports matches. In fact, he recommended automatically increasing bids by 10% in bad weather. He found it effective to use dynamically generated ad headlines (ETA), which replicate the user’s search query; such ads had a higher CTR than the original ones.
If you’d like to make use of Optmyzr’s capabilities for automating PPC campaigns in AdWords, Frederick recommended a minimum budget of $10,000.
Playful minds stay sharp… or rather, ‘customer experience’ rules the roost
Stephen P. Anderson, UX designer at BloomBoard. At first glance, a talk about board games seemed out of place in the context of online marketing, but the opposite was true. Stephen spoke about user experience, game mechanics, game dynamics and aesthetics. Who plays and what they play, and what they feel afterwards… These feelings, experiences and emotions are intangible, difficult to measure, but extremely important to users, even if they may not realise it directly. This customer experience also applies in connection with services or products. This confirmed the previous talk by Michal Pastier on building the Kofola brand.
Michael Lykke Aagaard, Senior Conversion Optimizer at Unbounce and the “Danish Viking”, who provided a brilliant conclusion to the festival. Using examples, he described two types of thinking: analytical (logical, slow, used in web development) and intuitive (fast, subconscious, important for a website’s first impression) and the way they influence our behaviour. Essentially, we can reiterate the old adage: “don’t make users think”. Don’t make them have to make decisions, don’t put up barriers, guide users naturally as they browse the website, and ensure that buttons and other CTA elements are truthful; otherwise, you’ll leave users feeling disappointed. Also, be wary of redundant or misleading information. If you remove these obstacles from your website, the overall user experience will improve, and with it, conversion rates. It is therefore important to balance both approaches (analytical and intuitive).
TIP: try the 5-second test on your website. Show a stranger your ‘home page’ for 5 seconds and then ask them what the page was about, what it promotes or offers. The results might surprise you…
And finally…
What can we say to wrap things up? That you really shouldn’t miss next year’s event… A great atmosphere, plenty of inspiring ideas and people. This event will certainly give you a boost for your future work; at the very least, you’ll break free from the trap of usual stereotypes in your thinking. You’ll get to try your hand at ‘networking’, chat with other conference attendees and make new contacts. The excellent catering and, above all, the evening parties are already becoming ‘legendary’!
Photo credit: © MKTFest 2016