The Premier Digital Marketing, Media and Advertising Conference & Exhibition in South Africa

If it feels like the giants of the web — Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, et al — are conspiring against you to make it vastly more difficult to spread your message or amplify your content… You’re right! They are. In this presentation Rand will boil down exactly why that’s happening and what smart marketers can do to build creative advantages and avoid these emerging pitfalls.

In today’s world, we only have between 3-6 seconds to capture someone’s attention and tell a story. What message are you trying to convey? Are you promoting the premiere date of a new TV series or cast of a movie? Are you a brand offering a new product? It’s not enough to simply post a 60- or 30-second movie trailer or other pieces of content directly to social media. It needs to be optimized for the social platform – think format and audience. When you have six seconds to convey your message, every second counts. Creating “snackable content”, is no longer optional in our mobile-driven world and doing it successfully is an art.

In January of 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act will go into effect and change marketing forever. At the same time, a decade of increased marketing budgets and growing technology stacks have failed to deliver customized content experiences at scale that consistently lead to more conversions and higher sales. The struggle is real in dealing with media and data volatility, but there’s no challenge that can’t be leveraged for greater marketing success. Let’s discuss five ways how you can be a compliant, lean and productive content marketer by the end of 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying Stories will overtake Feed – what did he mean, what’s behind the fast growth of this format, and why should marketers care?

Consumers today are more demanding than ever before. They expect custom tailored experiences personalized to their every need. They expect to be able to reach you 24/7/365 and get immediate answers to their questions. In this session you’ll learn how marketing roles can directly impact paid search performance, including the most common issues that arise, and how to immediately fix them to improve ROI and revenue growth and how you can innovate to leap frog ahead of your competition by starting your conversational AI marketing strategy today.

Discover what the Amazon Appstore learned when creating its Reward Campaigns and writing a service to run those campaigns. This presentation includes results from Amazon’s campaigns, results from partner campaigns, and a review of what rewards campaign practices worked well (and which didn’t). The practices section is structured to give you insight when building your own rewards campaign or drafting requirements for a partner supplied solution.

What does the road from bridging the gap to building the bridge look like for B2B brands today? Join us for an engaging, highly energized panel discussion that goes beyond marketing tools, fancy jargon and confusing rhetoric to truly focus on delivering value to our customers one moment at a time. With the deluge of marketing tools, data insights and customer data platforms we as marketers are now more equipped than ever to proactively anticipate and respond to customer needs. Yet we continue to miss the mark and customers are less enthused. Cisco will share its strategy (people, process, tools) & two case studies that show why getting back to basics is still effectively landing new prospects and nurturing existing relationships for demand and lead generation. The output will be a winning recipe for leveraging data from SEO, Social, and Customer Data Platforms to drive engagement & conversion.

How to push the envelope and stand out with what’s next in social content strategy. How many times have you thought about your story arc when planning your content calendar? You’re going to start to when you hear Jason Falls’s latest thoughts on social content strategy. Falls’s ideas have been engineering engaging social content efforts for brands since the early days of social. Join him on a fun and raucous ride through his latest approach of “authoring” a social storyline that keeps your audiences informed, engaged, sharing and wanting more. And yes, he’ll make you laugh a lot along the way.

Brands today have a matter of seconds to capture the attention of customers – who are more cynical than ever before. With time-frames getting shorter and screens getting smaller, brands are looking for creative strategies which engage audiences. However, creativity is often separated from digital strategy. Digital can be overlooked as a world of metrics and short-term thinking. Even though digital is highly measurable, this does not mean it should lack creative. In this session, Beverley D’Cruz, CMO at Pizza Hut UK, explains how to inject creativity into your digital marketing strategy.

The worlds of voice assistants, voice enabled speakers powering smart home devices are near the point of attrition. In a short space of time consumers are already looking for more practical use cases to cause less friction between the things they want to do and using their devices to do it. This talk will demonstrate some brilliant use cases and spur the marketing and design community to go and do it.

You’ve seen more and more methods for ranking #0 in search results lately, right? You’ve likely seen the People Also Ask (Related Questions) boxes – the accordion-like question and answer boxes are Google search result pages (SERPs). Introducing why Featured Snippets are an important part of SEO and digital marketing and how you can appear in them to drive increased traffic to your site.

Are my ads causing incremental actions to be taken? This is the key question we’d like our media measurement to address. However, a lion’s share of solutions are still based off correlation and cannot prove that your ad caused the action or if you took credit for an action that would have occurred regardless of advertising. Lift testing is the solution to help you escape the biases of correlated based methods, allowing you to fully understand if your ads are causing incremental actions to be taken. Learn more about lift testing, common pitfalls to avoid and how you can get started.

“We want it to go viral.” The hardest brief when cats aren’t the subject matter. Priceless Productions has been able to find the perfect middle ground of cracking briefs for clients and achieve huge organic reach, with massive viral results. See founder Max Price talk about the science behind the creative and managing expectation.

With over 350 agents, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has the largest social media service team in the world. The over 200.000 unique individuals that contact KLM every week via social media are a huge source of feedback and inspiration for the airline that aims to be the most customer-centric European network carrier. They inspired many KLM innovations – from hyper personalised social ads to automated boarding passes (>50% of digital boarding passes are now sent via Messenger), full travel journeys on voice and augmented reality (from luggage scan to entertainment). Sharon Geervliet will highlight several recent social innovations, KLM’s immensely successful augmented reality luggage scan (world’s first), KLM’s Family Update service on Whatsapp (world’s first) and KLM’s GIFs (over half a billion impression without media budget).

The digital marketing industry is changing faster than ever and those who don’t adapt with the times are losing market share. Where should marketers be focusing their efforts? What strategies are the experts seeing get the best results? Get up-to-speed with the latest industry insights, trends and predictions for the future in this panel discussion with some leading digital marketing experts.

Join Becky Simms for a first-hand account of how you can use the proven technique of gamification in your content marketing strategy. This talk will take you on a journey from the background data of 2k consumers and their views on gamification, through to how to plan a gamification campaign for your business. Looking at how to succeed and what the metrics for success are. This talk will allow you to understand what gamification is and the benefits that can be woven into a gamification strategy. It will give you a clear planning strategy for your first gamification campaign that you can implement. Finally, it will help you qualify what measures you should have in place to ensure you can report on the campaign successes.

We have moved into a new era of marketing – one where the creation of value through content-driven experiences is the focus. Yes, the entire practice of marketing has changed – again. So, if it’s such an important part of the equation, why is the struggle to measure the effectiveness of content such a struggle for the business? It’s because we’re measuring precisely the wrong thing: the content. Let’s reboot the whole notion of content marketing, and understand what it is we’re actually solving for. In this session, we’ll discuss the current transformation of the marketing department inside out. Let’s examine the business model of content, and walk step by step on how to develop the optimal business purpose and focus for a truly measurable content marketing strategy.

Artificial Intelligence has been a buzz word in martech. Many martech vendors position their products as AI-based platforms. What does that mean to marketers ? What do marketers need to know about AI to either evaluate vendors’ platforms or modify their existing sales and marketing processes? Pam Didner, Author of Global Content Marketing and Effective Sales Enablement, will share examples and case studies so that you can easily evaluate AI or build AI-centric martech stacks that fit your processes and flows.

How engaged is your brand with your prospects and customers? Whether you are B2B or B2C – today is all about B2H (Business To Human) and with it a demand for a personal, fast and relevant user experience at every touch point across the buyer journey. In this session, we’ll show how business strategy, user experience and real-time data are driving today’s marketing and sales experience.

In a world where content is king and audiences have the attention span of a gold fish, it is becoming harder for content marketers to drive views, engagement and conversion. Understanding your competitors’ strategies, successes and challenges can provide you with important insights that can supercharge your content marketing with new ideas, tactics and breakthrough messaging. This session will give practical tools to stay ahead of your competitors.

LTV in the User Acquisition Equation – Playing the Long Game. The benchmark of a successful marketing strategy hinges on a continual increase in customer acquisition numbers at an ever-decreasing acquisition cost. This approach, though efficient and expected, forces even strategic marketers into taking a short-term view, resulting in leaky funnels and increasing retention costs. In this chat, we will explore strategies to take a more holistic, long term view – by moving from Cost of New Acquisition to a more balanced LTV:CAC view. Find inspiration in dissecting the funnel, hacking a smart acquisition strategy that aids retention, engagement and churn reduction to positively contribute to revenue goals.