Outside Insight - a tasty marketing event

This week, a couple of us went to a very well-stocked insights event in the lovely surroundings of 30 Euston Road (seriously, the canapés - provided by Pret - were to die for!). The theme was brain food, and we got a lot of food for thought around the power of social, the impact of visual marketing, and the strength of influencer engagement.

 There were two great speakers, Kate Russell from BBC Click and Mark Palmer, the global marketing director for Pret. So, we wanted to share our top five learnings from each presentation...

Mark @ Pret:

• Word of Mouth (WOM) is key for new markets and products, like Pret’s new store rollout in the US.
• The thinking behind the well-known free coffee available in store (if you’re lucky) is to get customers to properly engage face-to-face and not just be on their phones!
• Pret does six big integrated campaigns a year, all on owned assets like shop windows, coffee cups, and napkins. Storytelling is their main comms style and they measure trust and attraction.
• Mark sees tech as a brand's shortcut between customer feedback and the people who can do something about it within a company. Pret uses social channels as tools for live customer research.
• Did you know that Pret is 30 years old?

Kate Russell, on how to influence the influencer:

• Speaking to an influencer? Keep it short and sweet and tailored.
• Instagram is the hottest property right now for marketers wanting to connect with real influencers (400m users).
• The most overlooked influencers are often a company's own staff!
• Don't just measure influencers by klout score, likes, or followers - what about how much they engage with those followers? It is better to be focused and have an ongoing conversation with a smaller group of people who will create a good WOM impact than to work to get retweeted by someone with millions of followers only for that post to be a distant memory in ten minutes.
• No-one is too time poor to pay attention to what people are telling them - social listening is her big tip.

Social media does have a short memory, but when it’s a client’s reputation on the line do you really want to pull at that thread and take that risk? The way I see it, in order to cut through ALL the noise online, the key is quality content that will truly interest great influencers and spread a company's story. By putting content at the forefront of every industry conversation, audiences have a real reason to engage because that marketing provides a genuine two-way communication. On top of that, personalisation is an important element in content creation, as it gives each customer a relevant and timely message that makes them feel they are in control of the marketing relationship (which consumers increasingly are in this digital age).

Finally, here are some things we learned from Meltwater:

•  80% of internet users prefer to connect with brands through social media
• 28% of 18-34 year olds say that they’re ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to make a purchase based solely on reading a social media post
• All consumers are 5 times more likely to make a purchasing decision based on social media than traditional marketing channels
• 67% of B2B buyers are increasingly relying on content to help drive their decisions
• 66% of B2B buyers believe that too much online content is full of filler, and lacks quality

Meltwater's Outside Insight is data outside (i.e. coverage clips) and processing that data into reports for clients and other insights. What is yours?