#GIANTtalks

Last week, I attended my first GIANTtalks at the Orchard Events Venue in East Malling. As a marketing apprentice, digital events and seminars are a fantastic tool to help broaden my knowledge within the industry and to have the opportunity to listen to speakers sharing valuable industry knowledge and experiences.

After some networking over coffee and muffins, we excitedly entered the conference room, where we were welcomed by the CEO of Sleeping Giant Media, Luke Quilter. Luke introduced the event and gave us a background of the GIANTtalks superhero organisers, Sleeping Giant Media and Giant Campus. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sleeping Giant, for a small(ish) Kent based agency they have achieved tremendous amounts of success, particularly with their ongoing partnership with Google and the content they are creating for Google’s Digital Garage. Nice work guys!

Visual content

The first speaker was Danny Windsor from Giant Campus, who I must say was my favourite speaker of the morning. His energy and enthusiasm was second-to-none and his passion really resonated throughout his presentation. Danny’s talk had particular emphasis on the idea that ANYONE can create content, however, the content that we create should be based around the goals to inspire, educate and entertain and NOT be ‘content for content sake’ (Boo to Evil Dr.Spam!). Danny eloquently broke down 3 easy-to-follow steps that you can adopt to ensure that you are targeting your audience in the most efficient way;

1. Know what your value is;
2. Know who and where your customers are;
3. Define your content themes.

Once you have considered these steps you must focus on the content you are going to push out, on what platforms and what media, whether it be photos, GIFs or dare I say it…video. For each form of media, Danny gave us his top tips and tricks as well as his favourite apps used to create interesting and engaging content.

Going back to the comment I made about creating your own video if you (like myself) are daunted by the thought of failing at video… Danny bravely gave us a live demo which demonstrated the ease of creating this type of video content, when you have the right equipment and tools. Will we be brave enough?… Watch this space!

Making video work for social

Seamus McCauley from Holiday Extras was next to the ‘podium’, giving us an interesting insight into Holiday Extras’ marketing strategy, in particular, video. We watched some clips of the different types of video that works for them and those that didn’t for certain platforms, both gave me holiday blues! I took away some great tips for a video novice, such as best-shot-first and that you don’t need a hi-tech camera to make a video, just make sure it’s in focus, steady and exposed correctly.

Content Marketing

Luke finished off the day with a talk all about functional content and the idea that it can lead to direct conversion impact. Throughout his talk, Luke focused on a funnel diagram which can be used to plan and track an ongoing activity.

It was certainly an insightful morning and my superhero mask really topped off the goody bag! Thank you so much to the team at GIANTtalks. Looking forward to the next event in October. If you’re not signed up yet, sign up here!