Our MD John Campbell had the pleasure of presenting and attending DigiMarConUK at the Sofitel Hotel at Heathrow Airport. The two day conference which tours around the world covered a wide range of topics including social, paid, strategy, linking offline to online and John was there to cover all things voice.
Here are the highlights from the two days;
Day 1
John Campbell – Rabbit & Pork – Voice Marketing Master Class
John was first to take to the stage covering voice search and the growing Alexa Skills / Google Actions market. The session aimed to introduce the audience to what voice search is and how brands should approach optimisation. He also had the chance to explain a little more around the recent Q2 2019 Voice Search Ranking Report results which have seen a step change in Google’s ability to answer questions.
Becky Simms Founder and CEO , Reflect Digital – Gamification Master Class
Becky told the story about how an internal project to create fun game on their agency website turned into a new service they offer for clients. The quiz was a mural with visual clues of football team, so a paddling pool filled with black water…. Blackpool! Becky reviewed the number behind the campaign, traffic, links, coverage and engagement.
With that to inspire Becky then reviewed the top tips for creating your own game on the website, the hook, difficulty rating, how to gain customer data, outreach.
Day 2
Sharon Geervliet – Social Media Manager , KLM Royal Dutch Airlines – How KLM is Using Social Media as an R&D Lab for Customer-centric Innovation
KLM are one of the first airlines to have an Google Action and it was great to have insights on the strategy about how the Google Action / Alexa Skill came about and other innovations from the KLM team.
Sharon spoke about how KML are world famous in their native Nertherlands but worldwide not as well know, so their strategy was to make sure KML had a presence on all major social media platforms such as a Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Trip Advisor. Rather than trying to get customers to come to the KLM website, go to where the customers already are located.
The first success story was their Facebook Messenger bot which allows customers to download their boarding pass as well as interact with customer service.
Customer server was also mentioned with around 50% of customer questioned being answered using Artificial Intelligence.
Moving onto the Google Action / Alexa Skill the team had build a voice app which deployed onto both platforms. The app featured a number of different features including inspiration for your trip, booking a ticket, help packing your bag and prompts to leave on time for your flight.
KML’s latest venture “Family Updates” was born out of a social media insight, across most of their social platforms they would see people asking about delays, flight landing and departure times. However the request were coming from friends and family members of those travelling with KML.
Armed with this insight they created a WhatsApp bot where customers could create a WhatsApp group to invite family and friends and the KLM bot. The bot would then post updates to the group as the person travelled with KLM.
To educate customers about these different tools the team created https://social.klm.com/ which documents all the different ways you can connect to KLM via social channels.
Lee Wilcox – CEO / Founder , On The Tools – Creative Content – The Good, The Bad and the Unsharable
Midlands based Lee Wilcox told the story about how he and a mate launched On The Tools in 2014. Initially a B2B app for trade people to connect he quickly adjusted the business when the Facebook group to promote the app took off to become one of the biggest and engages Facebook groups in the UK.
Lee went onto explain what makes good content, topic, format, how much brands exposure to include in paid content. It was already really interesting to learn about how the team have and are adjusting content formats with the trends of the platform. For example Facebook moving towards longer content in Facebook Watch.
Above all Lee spoke about how whatever you publish it needs to be thumb stopping (yes, its our new favourite term). People can sit for hours a day scrolling down content in social platforms so your content needs to stop that thumb and get people watching or reading!
Lee also covered off the exciting plans for On The Tool as they move to central Birmingham office and launch Electric House a new agency to offer brand partnerships, campaign strategy, creative content and production.
Big shout out to David Schulhof for MC’ing the event over the two days.