Our head of search Sue Blatchford was invited to speak at CompTIA’s ANZ Channel quarterly meeting on a marketing panel in November. Joined by a number of women with key marketing industry insights, the panel discussed what forms of digital marketing are working best – from social media, artificial intelligence to hosting events.

The key takeaways of the panel were to be genuine, be different and add value to customers. In a world where we are constantly being marketed to, we have the power to choose what we consume and what we don’t. This is why it’s so important for business’s to correctly plan and target activity based on what the consumer will want to see. This planning should be consistent across always on activity and campaigns.

We learnt

• Search/ SEM is still one of the highest driving revenue activities.
• Partner with websites relevant to consumers and use sponsored content to reach your audience.
• Tracking performance across ALL activity is the most important action – without it you can’t truly evaluate how the activity went and its value.
• Instagram, Facebook ads have great reach but bounce rates are high – give users snackable and memorable content to have them coming back to your business later.
• Facebook video has taken off – the platform now offers video creation tools, which is a great way to produce video content without the cost of full production.
• Linkedin is still a great platform for business to business activity and to establish as thought leaders in an industry. Their targeting for promotions is very thorough – however the downfall is that the number of users is lower than FB & Instagram and people don’t check LinkedIn as frequently as other social networks.

Kat Warboys, the head of marketing for ANZ at Hubspot was the keynote speaker and shared ‘how to win friends and influence (sales) people’. The relationships between marketing and sales teams have been historically rocky with neither party seeing eye to eye.

Kat highlighted the importance of collaboration between both departments to drive sales and business goals. There is high value in marketing teams understanding what their customers need and require, this is where the sales team can assist. By using data, business’s can understand.