At todays (10 July) Masterclassing Digital Marketing Masterclass event in London, members of senior management from B2C brands were brought together with digital marketing experts to discuss all the latest in digital and how digital marketing tools can be used to reach and retain customers across all touchpoints. Themes explored included influencer marketing, paid social, and content marketing

If you weren’t able to attend the conference, here are a selection of some of the best soundbites from the day.

“56 per cent of marketeers plan to personalise their marketing in 2018. And this isn’t surprising as the feedback we got from 43 per cent of consumers was that they’re much more likely to become repeat customers if the experience they have is much more customised.”

“We’re seeing that there is no real tool for managing [the amount of content]. There are huge delays in getting things signed off. The amount of content that is recreated and already exists is huge. With this increase in content creation, you need to protect your brand. There needs to be tools in place to ensure that this huge amount of content that is going is in fact on brand.”

Mike Kingston, UK&I sales executive at Bynder, kicked off proceedings with a look at the importance of managing the vast array of content at a brand’s disposal.

“A hyperlocal approach matters because the context changes… If you’re going for a coffee, you see a lot of places, you’ve got your familiar brands – your Costas, your Café Neros etc. And so, these guys are competing with each other for people who like coffee. However, if you are in East London, these guys are competing with bearded hipsters.”

Location-based marketing needs to be hyperlocal in order for brands to compete with the right rivals in communities and gain the most attention for the brand, according to Koen Smeets, strategy director Europe at DAC.

“We use the encrypted version of an email address as the unique identifier to identify audiences. This is far more effective than other identifiers, such as cookies, and that’s because an email address is unique, it’s tied to a human being, it’s durable, it works cross-device, and you need to have one in order to do anything.”

Anthony White, director of publisher sales at LiveIntent, guided the audience through why identifying people via email works a lot better than any other digital identifiers.

“We’re starting to see the sorts of technologies that we previously associated with desktops and smartphones moving into things like your car systems, smart speakers, smart assistants, smart TVs – all these smart things – and these are all increasing the touchpoints that brands have with consumers. They’re places that consumers can interact with brands in a way that brands are able to understand and, hopefully, control in a way that’s positive for the consumer and the brand.”

“If you’re a consumer, you’re really able to demand a brand acts with you on your own terms… They’re always-on… And that creates a challenge for us as marketers because what it means we need to create a really seamless experience across our products and marketing channels that we have access to.”

Connections with people need to happen across channels and on the terms of the consumer, due to the always-on nature of today’s society, said James Manderson, general manager and success director EMEA at Braze.

“Identity is authoritative; deterministic; persistent; it grows over time as your consumers do, whether they change devices and their behaviours and habits change across the different touchpoints of your business; it’s omnichannel, as individuals we exist in the digital space but we also exist online and we go in stores and we do loads of different things; and it’s also safe, which is very important in a post-GDPR world.”

“80 per cent of your profit will typically come from 20 per cent of your most valuable audience… If I’ve never come across a brand before, then fair enough show me a brand acquisition message. But if I’m one of your most loyal customers, you shouldn’t really be marketing to me in this day and age without thinking about some sort of personalised content or offer directed to me.”

Michael Hand, managing director EMEA at Signal emphasised the importance of correctly identifying consumers in order to offer them the correct and most personalised marketing.

“[The Orla Kiely linkup] is a very visually pleasing activation, so it works very well on Instagram. And it’s also one of our favourite channels on the brand side to reach out to consumers… We get on average 20,000 to 25,000 likes per post, which is about 15 to 20 per cent higher than posts on the rest of our range.”

”[Influencers], in terms of brand affinity, those guys are amazing. I didn’t used to believe in influencers until two years ago when I actually started working with them. It’s pretty impressive what they can do with a brand and how much affect they can have on them.”

The day was brought to a close by Francois Brugiere, senior brand manager of Light & Free at Danone, who gave an insight into the digital marketing strategy used by the brand in its linkup with fashion designer Orla Kiely.