Last night I attended the first event of the year from Create in Leicester’s city centre. If you don’t know, Create is a series of quarterly events for digital creators, producers, managers and administrators which aims to inspire Leicester’s digital design community. I’ve always been an advocate for learning and collaboration. I don’t think you can truly call yourself an expert in your chosen field unless you are keeping up with the latest trends and ideas!
Last night involved talks from Jason Nesbitt and Sophie Hainsworth, founders and developers of an app, LoyalFree, and Ben Potter, who spoke about marketing your proposition effectively and the effects it can have on your business.
Here’s a breakdown of the five big things I took away from the event:
1) It’s important to think about your audience and what they want or need. Marketing is fundamentally the art of understanding people. To do this we must ask the right questions from the beginning: 1) Who is your audience? 2) How do you connect? 3) How do you build that relationship? and 4) How do you ultimately sell them your solution or persuade them that the thing they are currently doing isn’t the answer?
2) Functionality and the way the audience uses technology should always be considered. The way you interact with your audience, young or old, is going to be different depending on the nature of your business. Therefore, it’s vital your audience is considered in every step you take. This will in turn feel more relevant to your user, which will lead to connection and interaction.
3) Finding unique incentives and standing out from other brands in an overcrowded market place is the challenge. What resonates with audiences more than anything is the message and story you are sharing with them. If your audience feels they are being emotionally connected with and that you are producing relevant content for them, you are more likely to build brand loyalty and retain an audience.
4) Last night’s speakers talked about the importance of fulfilling a need or a problem. In trying to give your consumer what they need or want, we should be putting the emphasis back onto the audience by spending more time considering what our audience really wants from us. The key is to align content to the user intent and consumption. Instead of doing 10 things adequately, do five consistent things brilliantly.
5) It’s been talked about for a while now, but user-generated content is big, and marketers are using it to engage and create a connection which would otherwise be hard to achieve. A hugely successful campaign was Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a coke’ initiative that became a social media craze, encouraging its audience to share bottles with loved ones and share content with a hashtag. LoyalFree also proved that by creating trails for users to follow, share, comment on and in time upload user images, it is able to provide a platform for the local community on a potentially global scale. That means not only is it organic content, it’s extremely quantifiable.
It was great to be out in the thriving creative community and hear thought-provoking talks to engage with fellow creatives and marketers. We are looking forward to the next!
