All Leads 2024 – What I Learned
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the All Leads 2024 event at Everyman Cinema in Leeds, hosted by Force24. My first speaking event in front of a live audience and it was an amazing experience. I thoroughly enjoyed giving my talk on How to Develop an Effective Media Strategy.
It was an incredible event, and I had front row seats to the excellent speakers before me, and so I wanted to share the top 5 things I learned on the day.
To create thumb stopping creative you need to be the same AND different at the same time!
Fantastic insight from Dave, to produce effective creative you need to make sure that what you create is similar in look and feel to the type of content that your audience will be seeing at that time, so that it feels natural and isn’t too jarring. Secondly, you have to be different, to stand out from your competitor set so that when your message is out there it cuts through and leaves an impression on your audience.
Bringing data to life isn’t just a bar chart
Thierry did an amazing job of bringing data to life, showcasing some really thought-provoking ways of utilising it to explain performance and predict trends, as well as how Kim Kardashian has the power to make or break brands and products! But it’s important not to fall into data traps and that correlation doesn’t always imply causality.
Striking a balance of short-term sales and long-term brand building is crucial for B2B brands
In B2B, and B2C as well, there is an on-going struggle about where to spend your media budget; on brand building and awareness activity, or on direct sales driving channels. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and ultimately both are important for long term success. Pete and Ross highlighted how approximately only 3% of your audience are looking to buy at any given time, yet we spend significantly more than that on media to drive sales, so it’s something that always needs challenging.
In the end – if you have the budgets that can support both, the best performance is achieved through having regular awareness activity combined with sales driving.
Be sure to understand the focus of what your content should be doing
Whether that’s content expected to drive sales and conversions, your visibility in search and elsewhere, or what your brand message is and how it stacks-up against your competitors in the marketplace. Tailoring what you’re doing and more importantly, understanding where you are in those categories is key to defining a coherent strategy moving forward.
Working collaboratively is essential
Lastly, I learnt a bit about myself, having never done anything like this before, there was a certain degree (loads) of trepidation about public speaking with all the usual intrusive thoughts that go with it. But going through the process I realised that whilst I happened to be the one on stage with the microphone, the whole talk was a massive team effort from everyone involved.
If you want to know more about creating an effective media strategy, or anything else we do here at CreativeRace then please get in touch!
