This year in Singapore a big conference when knocked the floors of the World Trade Centre, the entire world was on its toe to grab a seat in the event. “DigiMarCon”, which stands for ‘DIGITAL MARKETING CONFERENCE’ showcased the most audacious and thought-provoking speakers from the digital marketing industry. With their tagline, “If you want to be successful in digital marketing, you can’t miss attending a DigiMarCon Conference!” it did deliver what it promised. Attendees were able to grab knowledge on:

• Digital strategy
• Programmatic advertising
• Web experience management
• Usability / design
• Mobile marketing & retargeting
• Customer engagement
• User acquisition
• Social media marketing
• Targeting & optimization
• Video marketing, data science & big data
• Web analytics & A/B testing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Conversion rate optimization
• Search engine optimization
• Paid search marketing
• Geo-targeting
• Predictive analysis & attribution
• Growth hacking
• Conversion rate optimization
• Growth marketing tools
• Marketing & sales automation
• Sustainable growth strategies
• Product marketing & UX / UI and much, much more!

One of our associates, Mrs. Aarti Sharma in Singapore attended the conference to represent KVR Webtech at DigiMarCon, Asia Pacific 2018.

With a nice warm coffee on the table, we were greeted with a welcome speech by Mr. Tony Eades CEO (APAC) and also serve as a Chief Strategy Officer at the Salted Stone. The speech was followed by a very fruitful conversation between Mr. Gaurav Gupta, who is a marketing evangelist of Omni-Channel, Mr. Tony Eades and Mr. Yiwen Chan, the head of commercials at Content.co. The topic of the agenda was, “growing and ever-changing digital marketing industry.”

He told the entire attendees about the Omni-channel marketing and how they stitch all their customers together with the digital platform like messenger apps, chatbots etc. and how it can be an impactful tactic for upcoming and established companies. A lot of things like the consumer behavior, data collection, study of the analytics, filtering and use them to get a potential customer, and the entire session was focused on it. He also shared his take on strategizing offline and online marketing tactics to churn the maximum benefit for the business. Few of his major discussions were on making good headings but not overpromising and how to get more personal in marketing strategy.

A panelist came up with his take on chatbots and said, “May take a bit more time to become smarter but will always require human intelligence along with it“.
It was best explained by Gaurav Gupta, giving an example of one of the new technology – self-projection. It is similar to as if you go to a cloth shop and there a magic mirror reflects clothing on your body. It is clear that you need to try new technologies with a pinch of salt.
Following the same was the perfect quote by Gaurav Gupta, related to quality data partnership, -“When you living in the desert- you don’t ask water bearer how good the water is, you simply take it”.

The next person on the stage was catalyzed by Mr. Ben Soubies, The Head of APAC, Talwalkar.
He came up with the consumer behavior and how it affected when it was digitally studied and analyzed, and how it leads to a successful profitable campaign. He stressed using appropriate keyword selection on the basis of consumer behavior for a specific region, city or a country. One should refine the research and must use the protective measure to promote the business. The online space controllers must study social analytics and try to gather information about their competitor’s active digital medium. The session was concluded with dozens of illustrations and insights into the impact of digital data on business.

The Head of Marketing, Almitra Karnick from Clever Tap came up with an exceptional informational session:
She enthralled everyone into the marketing history and enlightens us about the use of artificial intelligence with marketers and how it helps them in their work. She ‘pinpointed’ us into the needs of a customer and how I must use the SEO quality content and market them smartly. There was a moment when she came up with analyzing a customer’s data and how we must offer a discount to the potential customers. As a fact and reality, she was pretty right then we as a marketing person should be updating ourselves with the latest digital technologies and must focus on the customer retention as she said about Starbucks, a brand worth a billion.

Sharanya Ramachandran came up with the discussion on an evolving role of a marketer in the digital world. She holds the position of Product Marketing Leader in ZOHO.

She discussed the challenges us as a digital marketer face and how things are getting aggressive in this digitally evolving era. She stressed the understanding of consumer behavior to involve an audience. She also came up with a discussion on email marketing and marketing automation. She drew our attention to understand email marketing and how minimalistic emails can prove to be more impactful and how we must add a personal touch in the email write-ups.

The afternoon lunch was more of a networking than eating. It was extremely amazing when we went across people from overseas and got to know them and their takes on digital marketing. It’s one world and we are never complete until a union is formed.

BLOCKCHAIN was next on the list and how it has affected the social media and banks.

Ian Farmer took the mic and as a stroke on a canvas, he took one of the most amazing hours of the conference. Ian Farmer holds the position of Managing Director, at Frontiering and Ian McKee. The agenda of the discussion was brought to a relationship between social media, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency which is new to the society and how fast it is evolving. The sigh of relief from the attendees to know that the Facebook might consider Blockchain Technology for it data privacy concerns.

Astha Kalbag, from FACEBOOK SINGAPORE, works as a Marketing Science Expert came up with, “Where did my dollar go? How to measure the real business outcomes”

Now this topic is something that every marketing staff would love to get their hands on, and grabbing pieces of advice would be like digging a gold mine as “spending and expecting” is the biggest question of every campaign. As per Astha, ‘Attribution’ is a hyped word in the digital world. She confidently claimed that the industry leaders like Netflix, Airbnb and many more not only have achieved a medal of honor in the digital world, also have achieved success using incrementality to measure their ad effectiveness. She stressed on measuring the value of marketing investments on business results. With the examples of Netflix and Airbnb, she came up with an advice that said, “We as a digital Marketer have to move away from the number of clicks, clicks through rate, cookies and last clicks.” She focused on the incrementality tool that helps the digital marketers to know the effect of actions taken in marketing in view of a business. She also put a light on the benefits of incrementality with analyzing and understanding business in the digital world and how one can channel out profits from it.

Luca Destefanis, the GBS & Industry Marketing Leader, IBM Asia Pacific was next in queue.
“Modern Marketing Mandate” was the subject of the hour. As per him, the clients never change and they always look for business value. He stressed on the analytics and how the data is changing the way of marketers. Artificial Intelligence and its influence in the new era was one of the topics, and he discussed on an “Individual Value” and “Personal Motivation“. A very informational discussion was done on the consumer behavior in the past and modern era.
A wide range of nationalities was found in the venue. People from Srilanka, Australia, USA, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines were among the few participants whom she managed to talk with.

Busting the myth of B2B Social Media was one of the major attracted discussion for which the entire attendees were waiting. It was undertaken by Moderator Kelvin Lee, Global Director, Social Media, and Thomson Reuters. The panelists were Anna Rokina, Social Selling Lead, Oracle Digital Tech APAC and, Elaine Adoptante from Veritas Technologies. They gave a fine time on a discussion of measuring ROI through quality leads, quantity, and velocity.

The last but not the least, David Fallarme the SEA Head of Marketing at Hub Spot shared his view on rounding up Facebook Messenger as the next marketing channel. One should be including Facebook Messenger in their marketing strategy and further, he came up with the ways to give a personal touch to each and every customer who uses facebook. The inception of Facebook Messenger also came up in the discussion and he described how important we chat was then and how it became the reason for FACEBOOK MESSENGER and what it is today. He told, how messaging apps surpassed.

The night was welcomed with a wrap-up speech by Mr. Tony Eades with a nice and warm farewell reception on the go. Mrs. Aarti Singh ended up this wonderful diary call with the KVR Webtech with an advice that, “hearing the leaders always end up reaping new fruitful results“.