Optix Solutions Insights From #MarTechFest 2019

Crystal and Xenia were very lucky to win free tickets for the MarTechFest event in London, through a Women in Tech SEO Twitter competition (make sure you follow them!). They decided to summarise their most interesting learnings from this event, so that people who haven’t been able to go, can still have some of the best insights.

Here are our top points from the MarTechFest:

Let data inform you, not make the decision

Speakers from HubSpot, MarTech Alliance and others explained that businesses have so much data available that it’s easy to rely entirely on data. However, teams should also consider the human element and think of data as a guide.

• Don’t focus only on the positive, also look deeply at the negative data to see opportunities for improvement

• Data is like a GPS: it helps you but you always need to have the last say

• Let data inform you, not make the decision

• You need to do a lot of testing and accept that things will go wrong sometimes to be able to learn and improve

• Data tells you the past, not the future

Users expectations from voice search keep increasing

Voice is something that we’ve been talking about at Optix for while now and was one of the key points at our Optix annual conference last year. The conference, Bauer Media’s shared their insights on implementing voice apps for brands like Empire and Kiss. They suggested that businesses:

• Think of how voice search queries are different to the written ones

• Expect for queries interactions with voice devices to progress from Directive, to conversational and then assistive

• Now is the time to experiment with creating voice ‘skills’ while customers expectation is still in a discovery phase

Marketing technology is as essential as investing in your employees’ skills.

Marketing teams across the world are investing in marketing technology to help automate emails and improve customer relationship management. However, one of the dominant themes of the event was the need to ensure that teams had the marketing knowledge and skills to make the most of the tech. Top-performing marketing teams are…

• Investing in upskilling their teams. This year, Optix Solutions has launched the Digital Academy to help businesses improve their knowledge and digital skills.

• Working to recruit teams with a wide range of skills and using agencies (like ours) to support on projects and ongoing expertise. 

Make sure you connect marketing and sales 

Digital marketing needs to help the business achieve its targets efficiently. Sometimes businesses can focus too much on irrelevant clicks or video views that didn’t help generate leads or sales.  Ensure good communication between the Sales team and the Marketing team is essential to make this happen.

Think about your objective first 

This point is related to the previous one. In order to set digital marketing strategies and goals, you need to think about the business objective first. Set your sales targets and calculate which percentage of leads end up converting. Then you will know the number of leads marketing needs to generate. From here, Marketing should calculate the number of clicks/impressions needed to generate a lead and set up a marketing budget to achieve it.

If you have any questions, want to learn more, or want to upskill your team, do not hesitate to get in touch!