B2B Marketing Forum – Day 3: wrapping up

Here’s the lowdown on what you might have missed:

Creating Lifelong Customers with Laughter

Tim Washer, Ridiculous Media

• We’re faced with a trust crisis: If you want to understand the value of trust, think what would happen if you didn’t have it
• Laughter will save us: “If you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you” (George Bernard Shaw)
• “Now more than ever, people want – no, make that need – to laugh a little” (Dan Kellerher, Chief Creative Officer, Deutsch)
• Try putting your product or service into an absurd application – see how Cisco pitched its $250k router as a Valentine’s gift
• A formula for laughter:
  1) Start with a customer’s pain point
  2) Explore what would happen if there were no solution
  3) Exaggerate to the nth degree
• Everyone’s creative: You might not think you are, but you’ve just got a stronger inner critic than the rest of us

How Voice Search is Impacting Your Business – And What to Do About It

JoAnna Dettmann & Kaysha Hanock, Founders, tSunela

• By 2020, more than 50% of all searches will be voice-based: As more people use voice, the more normal it will become – and the better it will become
• Amazon is the dominant platform: it has a 64.6% of the smart speaker installed base (in the US) v Google 19.6% v Apple 4.5%
• If you ask a question, Amazon uses its own database to answer it, but if it can’t it uses Bing: so make sure you’re optimised for Bing
• Voice trends we can expect to see:
  i) More complex search queries
  ii) Decline in visual mediums
  iii) Even shorter interaction times
  iv) Higher importance of top positions
  v) More local results
• Recommendations:
  1) Optimise for long tail keyword phrases (typically 3-4 words long)
  2) Ask the questions your customers would ask
  3) Optimise content for voice (using natural language – read it outloud)
  4) Develop FAQ pages (an easy way to optimise content for Q&As)
  5) Use structured data (makes it easy for search engines to categorise your data)
  6) and ultimately, aim for ‘Position Zero’
• Don’t forget to optimise for mobile: 90% of executives do research from their mobile phone before a purchase

Turn Marketing Data into a DataStory

Nancy Duarte, Author, Duarte, Inc

• Data is revolutionising business: 67% of new job openings are ‘analytics enabled’ (PWC)
• There’s a three part process we go through with data:
  1) Explore (an analytical process) – where we identify a problem or opportunity. There are so many ways to crank out charts today – but there are 3 types that are fundamental (a bar, a pie, a line). Everyone understands these
  2) Explain (an intuitive process) – where we explain the data and make a recommendation. Data people move from being tactical to strategic leaders when they add their gut and intuition, becoming bold enough to make a recommendation
  3) Influence (a creative process) – where we move to action. This is where words are important. Use strong verbs that compel people to act – e.g. disrupt, capture, invest
• Communicate up: Your exec stakeholders are focused on 3 key areas:
  1) Money (Drive up revenue & perf; Drive down cost)
  2) Market (Drive up share; Drive down time to market)
  3) Exposure (Drive up retention; Drive down risk)
• Turn your data into stories: 5% of people remember statistics; 63% remember stories
• Stories are highly structured into 3 acts:
  Act 1: The beginning – outlines the problem or opportunity
  Act 2: The Middle – shows it’s messy to solve
  Act 3: The end – the happy ending
• Beware of data freeze: Don’t be afraid to go with the gut – sometimes it’s not in the data because it hasn’t been invented yet
• We as marketers are ‘meaning making machines’ – we need to move from data to meaning making

And that, my friends, was the B2B Marketing Forum 2018. Thoroughly insightful, hugely enjoyable and utterly exhausting. Until next year.

Big thanks to MarketingProfs, all the great speakers and socialisers.

In case you missed them, please check out my write ups from Day 1 and Day 2.