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In this episode of the One Minute Digital podcast Daniel talks about his experiences from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. What trends can we expect for the next year? What are the real marketing applications for AI? Are companies getting back to basics when it comes to customer experience?
TRANSCRIPT-
A SUMMARY OF THE NEXT WEB CONFERENCE
Welcome to the One Minute Digital podcast with your host Daniel Westerstal.
Hi everyone, and welcome!
Today I will talk about The Next Web, which I participated in last week in Amsterdam. The Next Web is a big tech conference with a lot of different companies and speakers attending, covering various areas related to tech and digital marketing.
I have been attending this conference for the last three years, It’s always nice to be there and you always come away with new insights that you want to try. However I think the conference has changed somewhat over the years, now there are more enterprises and government organisations participating while three years ago it was more of a start-up conference.
Enough about that!
Let’s dig in to some trends. I think the first trend I saw on the conference and you can see it everywhere in the teach world, is the AI buzz word floating around. It think it’s always nice to see some examples on how AI would impact marketing. There were a few speakers covering this.
For example I looked at HubSpot, they were talking about their new predictive lead scoring system. Which basically means that the system…or actually it’s an algorithm can identify customers based on their online behavior that are more or less inclined to buy. Then you can target those customers in various ways.
I think we will see much more of this, there were a few other speakers covering the same thing. Especially from the e-Commerce side there were a few companies working with this as well.
Another trend was voice search, everyone was talking about it and its’ impact on marketing and the importance of optimizing your content to rank high in different voice searches. I will probably cover voice search more in another episode. I think voice search is here to stay, but I think the real traction has already begun with Amazon Alexa. But I also think that Apple really need to fix voice search, and I think there will be more traction when Siri is actually a good voice search application, which is not the case today.
Some other trends…Let’s see here what do I got.
One thing that I thought was really interesting is that a few years ago there were similar buzzwords on the conference, such as AR, VR and 3D printing. I actually didn’t hear anything about these technologies this year, there were some small talks about it but nothing major.
I think that we as digital marketers are always looking for the next big thing, and trying to leverage that. A lot of influencers are promoting this kind of tactics. On the other hand I think there are already some technologies out there that brands and companies haven’t really leveraged yet. Like AR and VR for example.
Some other trends.. I mean I have been doing this for.. ten years and I think that some things made a come back this year.
One of them was e-mail, there was a lot of talk about e-mail how it’s great, creating conversions and engagement and everything.
The other thing that made a comeback is the importance of focusing on your own website and building great content and customer experiences in your own touchpoints. The last few years it has been a lot of talk about how you market on Facebook, build great content on Instagram and YouTube. How you sell on Amazon and other marketplaces.
But this year I really felt that a lot of brands were working on their own websites, trying to update their content, creating communities and creating good customer experiences in their own touchpoint.
This will be really important moving forward. Because if you as a brand is able to create great experiences you will own the customer. If you are not able to do this and you are only relying on third party platforms to get engagement you are relying in the big tech companies in Silicon Valley to run things for you. No company want to be reliant on another company.
Another interesting development was that we were talking about data, AI, predictive analysis etc. But there were a few speakers who were talking more about getting back to basics, go out there and put your customer shoes on. Try to understand what it’s like to buy your product, what it’s like to interact with your website asking your customer questions. This to understand what the customer needs and what gaps there are. This is one of my favourite topics when it comes to digital marketing. Get out there and try your products, your services and your competitors.
Alright that’s it for this time, thank you so much for listening. If you want to reach out to me just go to www.digitaldaniel.com and you can e-mail me there, tweet me or what ever you want.
Have a great day, bye bye!