At todays (22 May) Masterclassing Digital Retail & FMCG Masterclass event in London, members of senior management from B2C retail and FMCG brands were brought together with digital marketing experts to discuss how digital marketing tools can be used to reach and retain customers across all touchpoints. Themes explored included search, social media, mobile marketing, 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.

“Messaging is a bit of a global phenomenon that has absolutely boomed over the last few years. It’s now our most popular form of communication. It’s how we speak to each other, we speak to each other via emojis. It’s a much more relaxed form of communication and it’s available 24/7 – and this is what we’re starting to expect from brands.”

“Typically, brands will sell what they want to sell… Consumers are pretty savvy to this now. So, actually being able to take that conversation away from the brand trying to sell something into consumers getting the information that they need, but from somebody that they’ve got more trust in, is much more powerful.”

Lucinda McCaffrey, enterprise sales manager at iAdvize, kicked off the day giving the brands in the room an insight into the best ways to connect with consumers through conversation.

“Consumers nowadays are more wary of brand messages than ever because they’ve been bombarded with information – a lot of it in the form of advertising. Having been sold to everywhere their guard is firmly up. And, personally, I would have to count myself among them.”

Consumers are no longer oblivious to what brands are trying to do, so brands need to be more intelligent with their content, according to Thomas Thorburn, business development manager at StoryStream.

“Retail advertising is an experience that starts almost everywhere. In most of these environments, it seems pretty native. Channels like connected TV and out-of-home are now using data to shift from targeting as many people as possible to targeting a specific audience.”

“Multichannel shoppers buy three times more than single channel shoppers. It’s really important that it starts with the website.”

Corina Chercheja, managing partner at Chalk Global believes that retail brands need to be aware of the multiple channels that consumers use and advertise effectively across these environments.

“Very few brands have the luxury of only selling direct. They rely on supermarkets or rely on retailers to generate their sales and, as a result, they relinquish all of those direct insights that you would normally get on your own site. For instance, which product pages are being viewed on your site to how your products are also converting on your site.”

 “One of the main challenges for a retailer or brand is trying to keep their exclusive audience exclusive and coming back to them. For us, at Hitwise, the answers to that major challenge are quite simple: understand why your audience goes to you and also understand why your audience goes to your competitors.”

Retail brands face many challenges when it comes to selling to consumers but can alleviate these potential issues by understanding their audience better, say Lisa Luu, manager of innovation & insights at Hitwise.

“We’re seeing a lot of buzz in marketing around personalisation in recent years and one-to-one personalisation is something that a lot of marketers aspire to now. So, it makes absolute sense that we’re seeing this applied to video as well.”

Willem Challenger, digital marketing account executive at Brightcove gave the audience an insight into the effectiveness of video advertising.

“We decided to drive brand awareness by working with a ‘gift with purchase’ mechanic. And the great thing about gift with purchase is that not only through your marketing are you able to drive brand awareness, at the point of purchase, but also at home because the consumer then keeps that gift hopefully forever, depending on the gift.”

“I’ve spoken to a few people today and they’ve said it’s ‘difficult when we have so many different teams in the business’. We have a different team that looks after social media but obviously making sure that we’re all working together to align these campaigns is really important.”

Closing the event, Kate Vliestra, shopper marketing manager at Dairy Crest gave the brands in the room a peak at the popular dairy products company’s approach to reaching consumers effectively.