How do you stand out in your marketing? It’s a theme I keep coming back to and one of my favourite events for inspiration is MarketEd.Live. This year, as budgets are tightened, people turn to AI for a quick fix, and we are all oh so tired of living in interesting times, the conference theme was Challenge Everything. The speakers shared great insights from creating chaos to noticing bias. Here are my 7 marketing tips for 2023 from MarketEd.Live.
1. Go for rejection
Liz Mosley spoke about deliberately trying to get rejected and how it made her go for opportunities she might have previously talked herself out of, in case she got rejected. Here’s to not sabotaging ourselves before we’ve even begun.
2. Do deeper research
Talking of scary things, Janine Coombes spoke about market research and actually getting people on a call. The worst that will happen will be people say no they don’t want to talk to you, and you’ll get useful information you can use to help more people.
3. Be yourself
I’m not the funny one. I never have been. But you can share your personality in lots of ways and we’re all coming on here to escape whatever we’re meant to be doing, so let’s treat social media more like a coffee break, and less like a sales pitch.
4. “If you’re 70% sure, go for it”
John Thornton, from Surreal Cereals, who is funny, and used to work at Innocent, gave a great talk about experimenting, engaging with the conversation and seeing where it leads, trust, and how calamities are opportunities.
5. AI is a puppy
Someone else has trained it and it’s eager to please, but it doesn’t necessarily behave how we want. Joyann Boyce spoke about bias, AI, and power. Here’s a video snippet of her talk recorded by Tim Lewis.
Joyann said AI has learned the negatives in society. We need to make sure that when we use material from AI, whether it’s words or images, we’re thinking critically about what it’s telling us.
6. Do your own measurements
What’s a good result for you? What do your clients want? Experiment with video and audio. Use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to see how far down your web pages peoples scroll and how much video they watch (yes, you can do that! I didn’t realise so I’ll be adding some reports to my GA4 – thanks to Azeem Ahmad for pointing that out).
7. Give yourself freedom to do things your way
We all want to know the magic formula but what works for your business buddy or others in your industry might not work for you. Be curious and test. Polly Buckland argues that being prescriptive, for example by having a set number of posts a day/week.month is damaging your creativity. Don’t post for the sake of it because you think you should.
Thank you to Paul Ince and everyone at Like Mind Media for putting on such an engaging event. I really enjoyed it.