CIM Fifth Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference - 14 July

The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Fifth Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference was held in the shadow of Concorde at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, near Cambridge on 14 July 2011.

The event yet again offered the opportunity to hear the online marketing industry's leading experts share their ideas and experience, and to take away tips and ideas to fuel digital marketing plans - the key to competitiveness in today's fast-moving marketing world.

Marketing professionals need to know what the future of marketing looks like and to make sure they’re using the right mix of tools to engage today's customers and stakeholders. The Fifth Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference once again helped to do just that by providing information, debate and examples of best practice in e-mail, mobile, social media, SEO, affiliate schemes and much more.

While the importance of marketing over the internet rang clear from every one of the presentations, whether harnessing the social media phenomenon for marketing purposes was being fully optimised was open to question.

Marketers and their clients have a staggering choice of digital media channels through which to communicate with customers but many still remain unsure where best to channel budgets to secure maximum visibility and engagement.

Michael Nutley, former editor-in-chief of New Media Age, set the scene superbly and stressed the need for relevance in every aspect of digital marketing.

Speakers covered best practice in digital marketing – right down to getting the tone, the look and the message of emails right for different target audiences.

DotMailer director, Tink Taylor, revealed the practical lessons to be learned from an expose of High Street retailers’ email marketing campaigns - including M&S, Next, HMV and Tesco. Tink helped the audience to learn from the successes and failures of some of the UK’s biggest online brands, and provided a checklist for producing successful email marketing campaigns, that every marketer should have to hand.

Social Media is bringing about a fundamental change in the way organisations interact with customers. Marketers are often responsible for educating their organisations about the risks and opportunities that new platforms like social media pose in the market.

Mark Ross-Innes from Softwerx helps customers build systems to support best practice customer engagement strategies, including social media strategy, and emphasised the need to capture more opportunities from web marketing by properly engaging with potential customers.

James Dening of Finesight stressed the importance of an attractive pricing structure to sell online in the face of strong competition. James has over 15 years experience as a highly successful business leader - ranging from leading Cambridge-based startups and, most recently, running the Enterprise sales division at Amazon UK. He launched Finesight using his extensive experience to help companies to succeed in the online world.

Full details of the Fifth Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference program and speakers together with posted presentations and podcasts are available at http://www.marketingconference.co.uk/