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Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Welcome to a curated collection of thought-provoking reads and podcasts as a retrospective of 2023. Embark on a journey through the realms of AI, agile marketing, design thinking, and growth mindset with our carefully selected recommendations.

AI Insights for content marketers

Articles:

Podcast:

Activating agile marketing

Book:

  • Agile Marketing” by Neil Perkin – Explore adaptive marketing principles and practices, offering guidelines to redesign marketing structures fit for today’s changeable environment.

Design thinking unveiled

Books:

Podcast:

Embracing a growth mindset

Books:

Podcasts:

Dive into these resources to prepare yourself for 2024. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

December 13, 2023 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsJourney through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023
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The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

When it comes to engaging with your audience, you could have the most exciting, innovative product or piece of content, but if it’s not accessible then it won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. The concept of accessibility in design has reshaped the way we create products, experiences, websites, apps, and digital platforms, requiring designers to be even more creative in our approach to consider and deliver for all audiences and ultimately leading to increasingly innovative and inclusive design.

Understanding accessibility in design

Good design can connect with people around the world and across different cultures to create equity and accessibility, helping to foster an inclusive and socially responsible community. Embracing accessibility isn’t just a trend, but a commitment to designing with empathy and foresight to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s important to not think of accessibility requirements as a restriction, but instead an ignition to creativity, to innovate past basic delivery and offer different design layers.

Accessibility in design is about creating products and services that can be easily accessed, understood, and used by people, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. It is a key component of inclusive design, which puts accommodating diverse users’ needs and preferences at the core of a project.

Where to start with inclusive design

When you begin to consider how you can apply inclusive design thinking to your projects, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international standards that help creatives develop accessible web content. While guiding structures around design can feel limiting, these guidelines set a platform for diving deeper into the creative process and encourage an innovative approach to deliver for all, not just the majority.

These guidelines are built on four guiding principles that fit under the acronym POUR:

The Inclusive design principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust

Example infographic using inclusive design principles

Infographic using inclusive design principles

Creating an accessible design involves incorporating features and considerations that enable people with disabilities to use a product, website, or environment effectively. Here are some essential elements that make the examples below more accessible:

  • Consistent navigation and layout
  • Plain language and easy-to-understand content
  • Contrast and colour choices
  • Readable fonts and typography
  • Digestible content in sufficient time

Promoting inclusive design

So, how can we deliver content and experiences for our audiences across different platforms that are digestible for everyone without sacrificing creativity? We put together some practical tips to help promote inclusive engagement whilst also ensuring creativity.

Test alternatives for visual content

Whether you are producing for a website or another digital product, descriptive alternative text (alt text) for images and graphics allows you to get creative with your visual design, while ensuring users with visual impairments can interpret what you’re communicating. Include descriptive text for the mood, story or artistic intent behind the image, not just the practical explanation, to enhance the experience for everyone.

Business reports and data visualisation

Clear reporting and data presentations are crucial to bringing your audience on your journey and building confidence in your strategic direction. To make these documents accessible, formatting is everything. Accessible PDFs or data tables used alongside visually engaging charts and graphs will give you extra opportunities to represent your data in an effective and creative way, whilst ensuring you’re being inclusive of a broader audience.

Experiential event design

When you think of an event experience, your first considerations are sight and sound. However, by incorporating other sensory elements such as touch, smell or taste into a tactile exhibit, you allow further opportunities for your audience to engage with your brand. You’ll find your full audience benefits from this well-rounded and memorable approach to event design.

Captioning and transcripts for multimedia

Turning on subtitles is becoming more popular across different audiences for TV shows and movies regardless of ability. If your project involves multimedia content like videos or podcasts, tools such as closed captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions help ensure you will reach a wider audience. Within inclusive design, these additions don’t just make your content more accessible for users with hearing or visual impairments, but also open opportunities for creative storytelling through synchronised captions or tailored transcripts that can capture nuances in spoken content. In the same way that a script has stage directions for actors, you can create a more valuable experience for your audience with further direction on how they can interpret the content.

Inclusive design is a journey that not only aligns with our social and ethical responsibility as creatives, but also expands the potential for innovation in design. It means designing with diversity in mind from the very beginning, rather than as an afterthought.

Whether we’re working on web projects, product packaging, or experiential events, inclusive design isn’t about compromise; it’s about expanding our horizons and reimagining the creative process. By thinking inclusively about our diverse user needs and providing alternative ways for people to engage, design can play an important role in making the world a more inclusive place. We encourage you to imagine and innovate without boundaries and explore how you can supercharge your creative design for your entire audience.

Resources/reading list:

October 20, 2023 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsThe power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all
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AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges

AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges

Elevate your marketing strategies and dive into the world of generative AI at our latest Smarter Marketer panel event. Whether you’re grappling with how to harness the potential of AI to drive business growth or seeking actionable tips on how to integrate AI into your marketing efforts, our event covers it all.

Our exclusive panel discussion simplifies the complexities of AI’s challenges and guides you towards pragmatic solutions that work for your organisation. Witness first-hand the positive impact generative AI is already having on marketing strategies and outputs.

Our Smarter Marketer panel event delves into:

  1. Generative AI tools unveiled: How AI is revolutionising content creation strategies.
  2. AI in action: Implementing AI for maximum effectiveness.
  3. Testing and adoption incubation: Implementing and testing AI tools.
  4. Operational excellence: Vital considerations for governance in your marketing operations.
  5. Risk management: Identifying, assessing and mitigating risks.

Missed the session, watch it on demand!

Unlock the AI advantage – activating AI

Ready to embark on your AI journey? Our tools and use cases for marketers resource is a great place to start – download yours today.

Meet the speakers

Mark Breslin

Chief Product & Technology Officer, Informa Tech

Mark is responsible for leading the Product & Technology at Informa Tech. This team focuses on working with the leadership teams across the business to shape and create product strategies and roadmaps for new and existing products and services.

Kate Cox

CMO, Bright Bid

Kate is an experienced CMO with a focus on marketing for the digital age and is a native AI marketer in her current role at Bright Bid, an adtech company using AI and human expertise to improve the effectiveness of paid digital activity

Zoe Merchant

Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies, Zoë founded Bright to help tech, engineering and consulting firms get the most from their marketing investment. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.

Interested in reading more about the capabilities of AI in marketing?

Check out our reading list here – Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

September 25, 2023 Paul Keegan , ,
Paul KeeganAI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges
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Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

As the days grow shorter and the nights get cozier, there’s no better time to embark on a journey into the world of AI. To kickstart your adventure, we’ve curated a list of unmissable reads and listens that will light up your path to AI enlightenment.

For the bookworms:

Rewired – The McKinsey & Company guide to outcompeting in the age of digital and AI.

MIT study: Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence – Examining the productivity impact of the assistive chatbot ChatGPT.

AI-powered marketing and sales reach new heights with generative AI – McKinsey & Company discuss how AI technology, particularly generative AI is transforming the fields of marketing and sales, impacting both B2B and B2C players.

10 Ways PPC Automation and AI Can Improve Your Campaigns – A look at AI and Automation in PPC campaigns from BrightBid.

Black Mirror meets marketing: the ethical implications of AI – A look at the privacy and ethical concerns around AI from Informa Tech.

Seven ChatGPT experiments content marketers should test now – Ideas from InformaTech on how to experiment with ChatGPT to create compelling content and improve market research and analysis.

For those always on the go:

The future of search in B2B marketing– Podcast with Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, which examines how AI will change Search Engine Marketing for B2B customers and B2B marketing.

AI will save the world with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado – Co-founder of a16z, dives into the world of AI, aiming to quell concerns about its impact on humanity.

Which tool to start with?

With so many AI tools out there, here are a few sites that can help you decide which tools to get started with:

There’s an AI for that: https://theresanaiforthat.com

Futurepedia: https://www.futurepedia.io

TopAI.tools: https://topai.tools

And finally here’s a site which lists all the comparison sites!

Interested in hearing more about the capabilities of AI in marketing? Check out our panel discussion “AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges” for more insight, as well as helpful AI resources.

Happy reading from the Bright Team.

September 21, 2023 Paul Keegan ,
Paul KeeganIgnite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins
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Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

What does Continuous Improvement mean to you?

Identify, plan, execute, review. Continuous improvement is a well-known process in the world of supply chain and business operations, but its benefits in marketing activity and website management are often overlooked.

It’s a common misconception that once a website is launched, the hard work is done, and we move into the ‘set and forget’ phase. In reality ongoing maintenance and continual improvement of the site and its assets is crucial to performance and success.

The role of your website in achieving business goals

Technology updates and trends move so quickly that it’s easy to fill up your task list with changes and reworks. However, a website is often the greatest go to market tool a company has, and a comprehensive website strategy helps to give your work purpose, map a path to reach your overall goals and informs how you measure results. Here are five things to consider when building out your continuous improvement strategy for your website.

1.     Identify your current state

There are different considerations to make depending on the status of your website – have you just launched a new site? Are you aiming to drive new visitors or diversify and expand your offering? Understanding your priorities will help guide you towards your plan.

As soon as people begin visiting your site, behaviour data starts to build – what pages they’re visiting, whether they are on their phone or computer, what they like (and don’t!). This data helps you understand your current website and where potential gaps are.

Undertake a full evaluation of your current content. Having an aim to regularly update and refresh your content will ensure your website flexes and develops alongside your business. By analysing your content and identifying your strong and weak spots, your content plan will begin to develop.

2.     Map your goals and objectives

So now you know where you are, but how does this align with where you want to be? Your website is an important tool for your sales, business development, and customer engagement teams. Aligning your digital goals with your overall company vision and purpose will help you unlock the potential of your platform and ensure the work you are putting in will be delivering for the organisation in the long run.

As your website continuous improvement and content development has no real end-date, it’s easy to get disheartened and feel overwhelmed, but by outlining clear KPIs for the short, medium, and long term, you’ll be able to celebrate those successes along the way to keep energy levels up and stay focused on optimisation.

4.     Focus on your audience

There can sometimes be a gap between what your company thinks the audience wants and what your audience actually needs. To continue to build improvements into your platform, you need to think as the customer. Is it easy for your users to work out where they need to go to find the information they need? Optimise your navigation, page load times, and test different design elements and ways of using content.

5.     Create your content

Keep watch for opportunities to create fresh content and ensure you are getting the maximum value from it by implementing SEO best practices and technology updates. In the same way that a Google Bot will trawl your content and learn to adjust its own algorithms, you can keep your SEO practices up to date to stay ahead of any changes.

When in doubt, use targeted survey questions and feedback forms to get a direct line to your audience and make changes based on their feedback.

Bonus consideration: Experimentation

Experimentation is a great way to drive your continuous improvement. Improving understanding of your audiences, user design, conversion and doing it quickly. Using clear, time bound experiments to increase the effectiveness of your website. When experimenting with your website think about:

  • Your experimentation shouldn’t be about vanity metrics – it needs to focus on where you can drive the most business impact. So, places to start are:
    • Pages, sections or areas that have the highest impact
    • Starting at the end of the funnel
  • Don’t just focus on A/B testing – think about big radical ideas that drastically improve the user experience. This is where you’ll see the biggest improvements

Remember to be agile – when it comes to continuous improvement it should be about spending your time where you can drive the best possible results – for your audiences and for your business goals. Test, learn and build on your findings.

Your continuous improvement journey

While website development and maintenance is a never-ending cycle, the benefit it can bring your business is tangible. By being purposeful and consistent in your continuous improvement strategy, you’ll drive better engagement with your customers and ensure you are well positioned to adapt quickly to an ever-changing digital environment.

September 15, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyDeveloping a strategy for your website continuous improvement
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The power of an engaged social community

The power of an engaged social community

Building connections that drive success

Social media has become a cornerstone of communication, connection, and business growth. We’ve seen its growth in e-commerce, as a search engine and its use a channel to reach target audiences.

Gone are the days when your follower count would suffice. The quality of engagement matters just as much as the quantity of followers. But an engaged community isn’t just a mere collection of likes and comments either, it’s a vibrant ecosystem where authentic connections flourish – where members actively participate, share insights and initiate conversations.

What’s the magic of an engaged social community?

Build brand loyalty and trust

An engaged community can transform passive followers into brand advocates. Not only will they support your products or services but will likely promote them willingly.

Enhancing customer support

This is something you see a lot with B2C brands as well as SaaS firms and an engaged community can serve as a real-time customer support hub.

Own content amplification

An engaged community will actively amplify content you generate, increasing reach, visibility, and brand awareness.

Driving user generated content

We know content is king, but content from your users about your products and services? Gold dust. The challenge is getting it. An engaged community makes that process a lot simpler and they’ll show genuine enthusiasm for the brand.

Fostering social engagement

Here are some of the things to think about when focusing on increasing engagement from your audiences.

Creating valuable content

Engagement starts with content that resonates with your target audience. Invest time in developing personas and understanding their buyer journey to understand their interests, pain points and preference. Use these insights to craft content that educates, entertains, or inspires to encourage interaction.

Encourage two-way conversations

Engagement is a two-way street. Responding to comments, questions and messages demonstrates you value your community’s input, drives connection and belonging.

Blend the physical and the virtual

When focusing on engagement, it’s important not to look at virtual and physical in isolation. They should work together to increase your reach, drive engagement, and foster your community. Physical events like exhibitions, roundtables, and meetups alongside interactive events like contests, polls, online Q&A sessions, and live interviews inject an element of excitement into your community. These events encourage participation and provide an opportunity for followers to actively contribute.

Showcase user generated content

Peers like to hear from their peers so promoting, sharing, and celebrating user generated content is a great way to encourage contribution.

Don’t focus just on the brand

Your company pages and profiles are a great starting point to driving engagement, but building your community shouldn’t stop there. What can you do as individuals to foster the community? What subject matter experts and industry leaders are within your business that you can use to fuel your community building activity?

Measuring the success of your activity

Good engagement can be tricky to measure. It’s not just about the number of likes, comments, shares or engagement rate. That’s only part of the equation. The other parts of the equation are who is liking and engaging, are they in your ICP? And finally what’s the impact you’re seeing of that engagement? This could be increased conversion of unknowns to knowns, improved engagement and marketing audiences, brand sentiment and even increased revenue.

The future of engagement holds exciting possibilities. Virtual and augmented reality, and AI-driven interactions promise to create even more immersive and interactive experiences. As technology evolves, engagement strategies will evolve with them, redefining the way communities connect and thrive.

An engaged social media community is more than just a digital gathering—it’s a powerful catalyst for success. As the digital and social landscape continues to evolve, nurturing an engaged community will remain a cornerstone of successful social media strategies. Continue to research, use your social media data and audience data to develop strategies that not only increase your reach, but forge meaningful connections.

August 18, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyThe power of an engaged social community
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Amplifying the Customer’s Voice: The Key To Driving Engagement

Amplifying the Customer’s Voice: The Key To Driving Engagement

The key to driving engagement and marketing outcomes through customer perception

In a world dominated by digital noise and constant competition, the power to make or break your brand now lies in the hands of your customers. Their perceptions, opinions, and experiences with your brand carry significant weight, capable of influencing not only their own purchasing decisions but those of countless others. It is more important than ever for marketing professionals to understand and amplify the customer’s voice to create compelling, relevant, and successful marketing strategies.

In this post, we’ll examine the pivotal role of customer perception, explore the value of embracing the customer’s voice, and unveil the secrets to adopting a customer-centric marketing approach that drives engagement and delivers impressive business outcomes.

The importance of customer perception

Customer perception is a powerful force that shapes how consumers perceive a brand, its products, and its services. It encompasses the emotions, beliefs, and attitudes they associate with your brand, all of which contribute to the overall customer experience. The key to unlocking the potential of customer perception lies in understanding it, harnessing its power, and aligning it with your marketing efforts.

As marketing professionals, it is essential to recognise that customers hold the power to make or break a brand. Negative perceptions of your brand can spread like wildfire through social media, online reviews, and word-of-mouth, greatly impacting your reputation, sales, and ultimately, your success. The opposite also holds true: word of mouth from a positive experience can do wonders for your business.

The customer’s voice: a catalyst for engagement

Above all, one of the most effective ways to understand and leverage customer perception is by actively listening to and engaging with the customer’s voice. This involves gathering customer feedback, opinions, and insights through various channels, such as surveys, reviews, social media, and direct interactions.

London City Airport worked with Bright to deep dive into consumer and market research, identifying five key personas which embody key characteristics and preferences to deliver a seamless customer experience. This resulted in a 54% increase in website revenue within the first six months.

 

Basically, by incorporating the customer’s voice into your marketing strategies, you can create content and campaigns that resonate with your target audience, driving engagement and fostering lasting relationships. Listening to and valuing the customer’s voice is key to meeting their needs and exceeding their expectations, leading to customer loyalty and advocacy.

Shifting to a customer-centric marketing approach

In today’s business environment, embracing a customer-centric marketing approach is not just beneficial—it’s vital for success. This transformative strategy encompasses a comprehensive process that begins with in-depth market research and the development of insightful buyer personas to effectively identify and understand your target audience. Achieving alignment between marketing efforts and customer needs and expectations is accomplished by delivering highly personalised content and messaging and offering unparalleled value via compelling unique selling propositions (USPs).

Measuring what matters: the 4 measurements to embed into your strategy

To measure the impact of customer-centric marketing on business outcomes, focus on:

  • Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction
  • Net promoter score (NPS)
  • Customer retention
  • Lifetime value (LTV) to effectively evaluate the success of your marketing strategies.

To learn more about how to track and measure the right metrics, read our blog here.

After all, the key to devising powerful and effective marketing strategies lies in wholeheartedly embracing customer perception. This means placing the customer’s voice at the forefront of your decision-making process. By steadfastly adopting a customer-centric approach, you can drive exceptional engagement and foster unwavering loyalty and propel your business towards unparalleled success.

At any rate, in today’s ever-evolving and fiercely competitive market, it is imperative to listen attentively, adapt swiftly, and seize every opportunity to thrive. Empower your brand by amplifying the customer’s voice and unleashing the full potential of customer-driven marketing success.

If you’re interested in refocusing your marketing strategies toward your customers or audience, get in touch with one of the Bright team here. And together let’s drive the engagement you and your business want to see with your customer at the heart.

May 3, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies , ,
Alexandra JefferiesAmplifying the Customer’s Voice: The Key To Driving Engagement
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Embracing Experimentation: Becoming a Marketist

Marketer + Scientist = Marketist (Ok, we may have made the word up, but the sentiment is the same)

Embracing Experimentation: Becoming a Marketist

In today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving marketing landscape, embracing experimentation is more important than ever before. For marketing teams looking to stay ahead of the curve, incorporating experimentation into their marketing strategies can lead to significant growth.

Experimentation matters

Experimentation serves as a powerful catalyst for marketers to drive growth and business value. By challenging assumptions, testing new ideas, and iterating based on data-driven insights, marketing teams can unlock new opportunities and optimise their strategies for maximum impact.

Not only does experimentation provide a valuable learning experience, but it also allows marketers to refine their approach and be responsive in a rapidly changing environment.

4 key elements to enable experimentation

  1. Measure what matters: Develop a set of clear, well-defined metrics that align with your business goals. By measuring what truly matters, you’ll be able to effectively evaluate the success of your experiments and make data-driven decisions for future initiatives.
  2. Confidence to fail, cultivating psychological safety: Cultivate an environment where team members feel safe to take risks, learn from failure, and embrace a growth mindset. This will promote a culture of continuous improvement and foster innovation in your marketing efforts.
  3. Utilise cross-functional teams: Encourage collaboration between different departments and skill sets within your organisation. Cross-functional teams can generate diverse perspectives and ideas, leading to more effective experimentation and better overall results.
  4. Starting small and asking for help: Begin your experimentation journey by starting small and seeking help when needed. Reach out to experts like Bright (hello, that’s us!) for guidance and support and remember that even small-scale experiments can yield valuable insights and drive growth.

By understanding the fundamentals of experimentation and implementing these four key elements, your marketing team will be well-equipped to tackle new challenges, innovate, and ultimately achieve greater success.

So, don’t just tell your team how to do it—get stuck in, embrace experimentation, and watch your marketing efforts incrementally improve.

Wherever you are on your experimentation journey, get in touch with one of the Bright team and let us help you reach your goals faster, optimising existing experiments or getting started, we’re here to help.

March 28, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies
Alexandra JefferiesEmbracing Experimentation: Becoming a Marketist
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Making the most of your martech stack

Making the most of your martech stack

How to optimise your existing marketing tools and empower your team to use them effectively through agile ways of working

The world of martech (marketing technology) can be quite a murky place. What tools are out there? Which ones are best for your needs? And how do you make them work for you to achieve your goals? Let’s wade through the muck to find the answers.

Picture this: You’ve got data spread across your organisation in various CRMs, data lakes and even a few Excel sheets. To put it plainly, your data has more duplicates than an identical twin convention – but you know there’s valuable customer and prospect data hidden deep within, just waiting to be utilised. If only you had the tools to get it all in order, you’d be the marketing Rockstar of your organisation!

And so begins your quest for the latest and greatest martech tool, suffering through demos with approximately 34 different sales reps. They make each tool look better than the last and you agree that you would like to use every single one. But, here’s the catch – you don’t actually need them. Well, not all of them at least.

Evaluate your existing tools

Like the old adage that your mother used to say, “we have food at home” – or in other words, take a look at what you already have, then decide what you really need. So, before you go on that endless hunt for a new marketing tool, make sure you’re really making the most of your current tools and take a real look at the goals you want to achieve. To do this properly, there are two crucial places to start: data and education.

1. Get your databases clean, up to date, and most importantly, compliant, before deciding on your next steps, or you risk falling into the same pitfall as many organisations before you. You’ll take your bad data from one tool to the next which then won’t deliver any tangible business benefits, because guess what? The data you’re feeding it is terrible. You’ll need a solid foundation to clean your database – clear targeting criteria and personas.

2. The next step is to make sure your team is using your marketing tech properly. Take marketing automation tools for example – we love them for the power they give us to run campaigns, send emails, create landing pages and much more with great ease. Their downside? That power is available to all your colleagues, and the temptation to abuse it is strong – why not send this email to a few more personas? Will it really hurt the click / open / bounce rate? Yes, yes it will.

And on top of that, marketing automation tools will happily put restrictions in place to stop unnecessary email sends that may hurt their bounce rates. Suddenly that great tool you had doesn’t look so shiny and bright when you have one hand tied behind your back because the new marketing intern sent the quarterly newsletter to your entire database. How can you avoid this? To quote a mid-90’s Tony Blair, ‘education, education, education’.

Inject agile into your marketing

A simple solution is to adopt agile ways of working.

With a test, learn and build approach, your team will gain the skills and know-how for using and optimising your tools properly and effectively. With an expert team you can trust, you’ll make the most of your existing tools while testing new tools with ease. What’s more, you’ll learn to integrate and maximise the value of your automation tools across your business as a team – streamlining marketing activities and delivering reports with clear KPIs.

It’s easy to assume that the perfect martech mix is only achievable with the latest top tools on the market.  However, the more you invest in your current marketing tools with greater support, knowledge-sharing and training within your team, the more value your users will get out of your system – making it more effective and better performing. A winner all round. Rock on, Rockstar.

Want to learn more about agile marketing? Check out our agile marketing hubs.

November 1, 2022 Lydia Kirby
Lydia KirbyMaking the most of your martech stack
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How will Web3 and the Metaverse affect B2B marketers?

How will Web3 and the Metaverse affect B2B marketers?

Women in Crypto event takeaways:

Check out the event here

Last week I attended a great event with some fantastic speakers – Women in Crypto: How will the metaverse affect you? It got me thinking as a B2B marketer – there is a lot to unpack and explore to harness the opportunities Web3 presents. The event made clear that Web3 is a long-term strategy; spanning a 3 to 5-year time horizon and needs to be considered alongside other marketing channels and tactics. As the world becomes more immersive B2B marketers need to think about how they will complement Web2 experiences and how it can be used to build their brand and generate leads.

Lavinia D Osbourne founder of the Women in Blockchain talks brought blockchain to life by sharing a simple train metaphor – think of blockchain as the train tracks, the trains as the platform providers (such as Coinbase) and the train carriages as the assets such as NFTs and tokens. Lavinia focused on the opportunities for mass adoption to create a more diverse and inclusive web experience within the Metaverse.

Seema Khinda Johnson, founder and COO of Nuggets, a leading self-sovereign verified identity and payments platform, spoke about the potential for Web3 to level the playing field. One area that is ripe for change is KYC (know your customer). In Web2 you provide a lot of data to organisations who then control that data. With Web3, you own your data and can share it with organisations on a permission basis. This has massive implications for marketing as we know it today, where organisations have access to large amounts of data that they can use to target individuals, including selling it off to unknown buyers, and presents a huge risk if it falls into the wrong hands.

Kerry Elsdon, VP of Global Digital Marketing at Mastercard talked about three areas that we’ll see shifts in and marketers need to consider. Firstly, fun & social interactions will change hugely and we’re already seeing a shift in newer generations focusing on how they present and express themselves via avatars, wearables and NFTs. Secondly, the way we shop and why we shop – how shopping will become more immersive, interesting and accurate (yes! the demise of multi-buying and endless trips to the post office for returns!). Finally, shifts in how we learn and work as the Metaverse provide new immersive and interactive experiences.

A thought that I agreed with was that marketers should avoid feeling overwhelmed by the new environment by asking questions and not being afraid to seek assistance and advice; much is still developing, and you’ll get there sooner if you’re nimbler in your approach.

It was reassuring to hear some war stories from Camilla McFarland, VP & Head of Customer Success at Mojito, an NFT platform for brands entering Web3. Camilla shared how major brands such as Nike are taking a long-term 3 to 5-year view of their Web3 strategies and projects and are still very experimental.

Marketers have a huge opportunity with Web3 to become more inclusive and create truly engaging and immersive experiences that transcend geographic and economic boundaries. Now is the time for B2B marketers to get Web3 ready and take an agile approach to understand how they can offer a valuable and meaningful experience to clients, partners and employees. Start small, test, learn and improve to build out a strategy that works harmoniously with their Web2 presence and will allow users to direct how they want to engage in a Web3 world.

The event was informative (Bravo to Lauren Ingram from Women of Web3, Wirex and The Cryptonomist for a great real-life event). It was great to hear from some of the industry leaders about their thoughts on Web3 and the Metaverse. My biggest takeaway was the importance of being agile and taking a long-term view when developing a Web3 strategy. It’s also important to remember that we are still in the early stages of adoption and experimentation so it’s important to be open-minded and willing to learn.  Web3 and the metaverse will provide new opportunities for B2B marketers to reach their target audiences through more engaging and interactive content whilst allowing more efficiently and accurate data collection.

What did you think of the event? What was your biggest takeaway? Let me know in the comments.

Zoe Merchant Banner

September 21, 2022 Zoe Merchant
Zoe MerchantHow will Web3 and the Metaverse affect B2B marketers?
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