Last Wednesday, 14 March, we attended the DMX Dublin conference, in association with the Marketing Institute of Ireland, at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. The conference brings together marketing, PR and communications professionals from across the country for a day of learning, sharing ideas and networking. There are also insights from global experts into recent notable campaign successes (such as Ariel’s groundbreaking Indian advert) and upcoming challenges and opportunities for the industry, from GDPR to the effect of Artificial Intelligence on marketing.

Here are our four key takeaways from the day:

Content is still king

At Springboard, we are advocates of the value of strong content, and that was a consistent theme throughout the day’s workshops and seminars. Alan O’Rourke of Audience Stack‘s advice was to create a bank of content, taking inspiration from across the web. He recommends utilising tools such as Quora, Reddit and Buzzsumo to find out what content your target audience is consuming, and, perhaps more importantly, what content they are looking for but can’t find.

Once you’ve  gone to the trouble of creating and publishing one good piece of content, that’s just the beginning of its journey. Put it to use – across platforms, in different formats, targeted at different audiences. Alan’s rule of thumb is to put 30% of your energy into content production, and 70% into the promotion of that content. At his workshop on ‘how to create and amplify your content like a boss’, Vincent Haywood of VH Digital‘s advice on maximising content was to ‘rinse it’, especially if the content is evergreen and can be reutilised throughout the year.

Know your potential customers better than they know themselves

If you really want to communicate effectively with your audience, you have to know them inside out, was the advice from Vincent Haywood – something we at Springboard are true believers in aswell.

Create characters, know their likes, loves and hates, where they live online, what media they consume, what TV programmes they watch, how old they are, what their politics are… This will all inform how you communicate to them, and where.

Most importantly, know their pain points, and how you can address them.

Measure, measure, measure…

To have any gauge on the effectiveness of your communications activities, you need to be able to quantify their impact. At Springboard, measurement is fundamental to show our clients the ROI in their investment.

Jennifer Hyland, Digital Account Director at Edelman, brought us through why a holistic approach to measurement is important, from helping optimise and evaluate your ongoing work to informing the development of a more effective strategy.

Her words of wisdom? Measurement should not be about the past – it should inform the future.

There’s no escaping GDPR  

As expected, with GDPR arriving in May, the upcoming changes to data protection were at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Evelyn Wolf is Co-Founder and Inbound Marketing Strategist at BusinessBrew took us through what constitutes holding personal data – your notebook, photographs, CRM tools all count – and gave us some immediate tasks to tackle:

• Understand and document all your data processes
• Segment your database and create lists based on your legitimate reason for processing
• Update your privacy statement with opt-out and complaint information

You can read Springboard’s recent blog post on GDPR here.

For more information on developing and implementing your digital marketing strategy,  optimising your content creation, developing collateral for employer branding or video content for social media, contact us today: info@springboardcommunications.ie

ARTICLE BY: CIARA FLAHERTY 

Post by Susie Horgan

Susie founded Springboard in 2011, and has developed the business into a leading, director-led communications agency. She has worked for over 20 years in senior marketing and public relations roles.