Digital In Kent Conference

I was eagerly anticipating the Digital in Kent Conference, not only because of the chance to revisit Folkestone for the first time since childhood but because of the fantastic speaker lineup this year. The programme was packed with great talks from different areas of digital, from a range of speakers.

The location was the Quarterhouse, right next to Folkestone Harbour. The venue itself was a good size, and the layout of the conference was roundtable which provided a great opportunity to network and speak with other attendees.

The day started with a talk from Bob Barker and introduced the 21st Century Human Skills required by all people in the workplace. Bob discussed the variety of skills you now need to ensure you remain employable and promotable, and the talk itself offered tips and insights into how to do this. With 35 years experience in the technology industry, Bob now works as a Digital Coach helping people utilise modern day technology to bring their skills into the 21st century.

Kenda McDonald from Automation Ninjas held the second discussion which focused on the importance of utilising marketing automation to its full potential. Kenda showed that the customer experience always needs to override the importance of the technology. The customer experience itself falls into 4 main categories – attract, engage, sell and wow. Your activities and tasks should always have one these goals, and the key is to not rush each part. In the presentation itself, Kenda shared a customer journey flowchart linking all the activities required throughout the journey, which was a key takeaway of mine.

My favourite talk of the day came from Matt Skinner of Proctor + Stevenson. Matt covered how to measure success in B2B. Matt talked about the need for marketing and sales to work in tandem with one another, and the importance to have metrics at each stage of the customer journey. Matt addressed that B2B marketing is generally all about facilitating 1:1 relationships. When it comes to social and digital engagement, we should be using this information to create prospect lists. Once contact has been made with the prospect, Matt suggested letting sales lead the relationship. The key takeaway from this session was the need to ensure that the whole team is focused on achieving the same metric.

Stephen Lloyd-Barlow from Vidbuild took the next session, and his talk championed the need to create and utilise video content in your marketing strategy. Using the VidBuild platform, Stephen showed us the ease of creating video content in the same time that it would take you to drink a cup of coffee – the results were rather impressive.

Once we returned from lunch, Josh Whitten took to the stage to share the results that could be experienced from adopting an agile marketing strategy. The overall notion was that working in an agile environment enables you to work faster-achieving results more quickly.

The last talk of the day came from David Shaw from BCS who covered the important over client retention, and how acquiring new customers tends to take precedent. David noted the importance of understanding your client’s objectives and reasons for working with you, and that you regularly update them on the progress towards achieving them.

Overall I had a fantastic day and got the opportunity to meet some great people. I’m sure the Digital in Kent Conference will be in my calendar next year.

Happy 10th birthday Digital in Kent, and thank you for hosting such a great day!