I was lucky enough to grab one of the last remaining tickets for Connective3 Up North Marketing Event 2024. Described as ‘Not your average marketing event’ and with a great speaker line-up, I was intrigued to see what the day had in store.
I got there nice and early, and enjoyed a coffee and pastry whilst planning what talks I was interested in hearing.
The day was so well organised, and I loved how each talk was just 25 minutes giving us enough bitesized content in a way that was engaging and memorable.
Here are some of my key learnings from the Up North Event 2024:
First up was Luciana Beker from Google ‘Put Google AI to work for you’
With the departure of third parties cookies and the rapid acceleration of AI, she talked about how 2024 is an inflection point.
Consumer search has changed. On average, we use 5 online sources before making a purchase – the cycle is getting longer and longer. She referenced some useful AI tools that we can use at various customer touchpoints to make our job as marketers easier.
She also talked about the fact that consumers demand privacy and how, as businesses, the trust needs to be earned, not bought.
My biggest takeaway from this was:
We are the marketer, AI is the enabler.
I love this, and it stuck with me all day. We can’t ignore AI, it’s rapidly accelerating, so let’s be savvy with the way we use it.
Charlie Georghehan from Refy Beauty talked about ‘The power of people and the new era of influence’
I was keen to hear her take on influencers, and how accessible these are for smaller brands with less budget.
Her key message was that with platforms such as TikTok, anyone has the ability to go viral. You don’t need a huge following to be an influencer. You don’t even have to be famous!
I loved her story about one of her customers whose TikTok went viral when she did a product demo of a mascara, and how this led to a huge uplift in sales.
In short, even your customers can be influencers, you just need to give them the best product experience, reward advocacy and encourage them to be part of your online community.
I was so fired up after this talk, and was well and truly into the swing of the day’s events.
Claire Stanley-Manock took the stage with: ‘The dark art of persuasion’
Claire talked about the different psychological effects that we as marketers can use, including scarcity bias, the endowment effect, power of free and the power of now.
I was encouraged to apply all these elements of persuasion with the work I’m doing with clients. She stressed the importance of testing different forms of persuasion to see which works best for your audience.
After a well-needed refreshment break, Will Brittain talked about ‘The 7 paid tests social tests you can’t afford to not run’
This felt so relatable for me when he talked about how paid social is getting much harder, yet businesses still want the same results. I’ve really noticed this, mainly since the IOS14 update that has made attribution so much more difficult.
I loved Will’s summary of testing more text within the creative assets, repurposing social proof to use as content and utilising UGC to gain attention.
He introduced me to the ‘Pope in the Pool’ strategy on video, having two things going on at the same time. Like a juxtaposition of content. Something entertaining in the background that distracts the audience whilst the main information is being communicated.
The final talk, and the highlight of my morning as a talk by Elle-Louise Wilmot:
‘How to supercharge your career through creativity, community and connection’
I wasn’t expecting this talk to be soooo good, as I thought it was going to be around marketing recruitment, but how wrong could I be!
She told a compelling story of how she made her way to the Creative team of TikTok by reformatting her CV into short video snippets and sending them to TikTok to get hired. It worked!
Her story of passion and resilience after being made redundant was so authentic and she was so relatable with it. “Your personal brand never sleeps” was my biggest takeaway.
Elle was so inspiring, and it encouraged me to think that nothing is out of our reach. We just have to be creative and think about how we are going to engage and stand out to reach our goals.
I was disappointed I had to head back to the office after Elle’s talk, but I managed to catch her on my way out to say how much I enjoyed it.
I felt so privileged to get to hear all these great speakers and it brought home to me the importance of networking with our own peers in our industry to learn more.
I can’t wait for next year’s Up North event and will keep the whole day free next time.