I am writing this blog immediately after I had a fantastic experience of attending DigiMarCon conference in Singapore today. I was very excited to know about the eminent speakers which were going to speak at the conference. They were all from experienced backgrounds in digital marketing who established themselves in their respective fields. It was a good learning to understand digital marketing trends from such distinguished speakers.

I would like to summarize some of the points which were discussed during the sessions.

The conference started with a speech from Tony Eades CEO (APAC) and Chief Strategy Officer at Salted Stone. He was DigiMarCon Asia Pacific conference Emcee as well.

There was an informative conversation between Gaurav Gupta Omni-channel marketing evangelist, Tony Eades and Yiwen Chan, Head of commercial, content.co, on the growing and ever-changing digital marketing industry.

It was about the omni-channel marketing that how it stitches all customers together, messenger apps, chatbots etc. and how they are going to impact the upcoming and established companies.

The consumer behavior, data collection, study of the analytics, filtering and using them in a profitable way to get potential customers was the point of focus as well.  It is best to strategize offline and online marketing tactics to get the maximum benefit for the business, making good headings but not over promising and to get more personalized in marketing strategy were some main point of discussion.

According to a panelist, the chatbot may take a bit more time to become smarter but will always require human intelligence along with it. The best example was given by Gaurav Gupta on one of the new technology the self-projection. For example, if we go to a cloth shop then a magic mirror will reflect clothing on your body. They also mentioned that we should always take a new technology with a pinch of salt. One of the best quote by Gaurav Gupta, for quality data partnership, was, “When you living in the desert- you don’t ask water bearer how good the water is, you simply take it” They gave many examples and elaborated the topic further.

The next session was covered by Ben Soubies, Head of APAC, Talkwalker was another eminent personality.

He spoke about how digital has productively increased the profits of businesses if consumer behavior is studied and analyzed in a right way. He accentuated on appropriate keyword selection on the basis of consumer behavior in a specific city or country and should do the refine research, use protective measures and promote the business. The online marketer should study social analytics and try to gather information about their competitor’s active digital medium. He gave many illustrations and elaborated further on the insight and impact of digital data on business.

Then there was an informational session by Almitra Karnick, Head of Marketing CleverTap.

She dived into the history of marketing and how marketers need Artificial Intelligence to help them in their work. She stressed on the insight into customer needs, to use the SEO quality content and market it smartly. She emphasized on analyzing customer data and suggested to give a discount to potential customers. She said that marketers need to keep themselves updated with the latest digital technologies and focus on customer retention and gave awesome examples of Starbucks and many more. She detailed on digital marketing and data analysis further.

The evolving role of a marketer in the digital world was the adjoining topic covered by Sharanya Ramachandran, Senior Product Marketing Leader in Zoho.

According to her in this digitally evolving era, the challenges for a digital marketer are getting more aggressive to communicate with their clients. She also focused on understanding consumer behavior in order to involve your audience. She further emphasized on email marketing and marketing automation. She accentuated on analytics to understand email marketing, minimalism in email and a personal touch in the email write-ups.

After a chatty lunch break, our session proceeded with a remarkable panel discussion on Blockchain and how it can put an impact on social media and banks. There was the moderator Ian Farmer, Managing Director, Frontiering and Ian McKee. It was a good discussion on the relationship between social media, bitcoin, and crypto currency, which is new and evolving effectively. It was good to know that it is expected that Facebook is considering Blockchain technology for its data privacy concerns on its platform.

“Where did my dollar go? How to measure the real business outcomes” was the next topic covered by Astha Kalbag, Marketing Science Expert in Facebook Singapore.

Her main emphasis was on how we should measure the value of our marketing investments on business results. She said that digital marketer should move away from the number of clicks, click through rate, cookies and last clicks. According to her attribution is an overused word in the digital world. She said that industry leaders like Netflix, Airbnb etc have achieved success using incrementality to measure their ad effectiveness. She emphasized on incrementality tool that helps the digital marketer to know the effect of actions he takes in marketing to improve businesses. She further detailed with different illustration about the benefits of incrementality on analyzing and understanding businesses in the digital world and how to gain profit with it.

Next speaker was Luca Destefanis, GBS & Industry Marketing Leader, IBM Asia Pacific.

He spoke on the “Modern Marketing Mandate”. According to him clients never change. They are always looking for business value. He focused on how are analytics and data changing the way marketers should work. He discussed how artificial intelligence influenced the new era. He stressed on Individual value and personal motivation. He explained the topic with informational examples on consumer behavior in the past and modern era.

Then we got 45 mins refreshment break. I again got the opportunity to meet different digital marketers from varied parts of the world like Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, USA, Australia, Srilanka etc.

After the networking break, there was the panel discussion about, “Busting the Myth of B2B Social Media” by Moderator Kelvin Lee, Global Director, Social Media, Thomson Reuters. The panelists were Anna Rokina, Social Selling Lead, Oracle Digital Tech APAC and, Elaine Adoptante from Veritas Technologies. Their point of focus was to measure ROI through quality leads, quantity, and velocity.

David Fallarme, SEA Head of Marketing at HubSpot, spoke about Facebook messenger as the next marketing channel.

He advised on including Facebook messenger in marketing strategy. He further elaborated on Facebook Messenger as the best way to give a personal touch to each and every customer who uses Facebook. He told how Wechat inspired Facebook messenger. He emphasized on the fact how messaging apps surpassed social network and other apps.

The conversation was wrapped up nicely by Tony Eades, which was followed by a farewell reception.

About the author

I worked with Yellowpage Singapore as SEO Strategy Manager and iProperty Singapore as Internet Marketing Manager. I was employee of Currency Solutions in Central London, UK as Search Engine Optimisation Specialist Currency Solutions. My previous experience is with MNC’s from USA and UK, in India as a Web Marketing Associate and Business Development Associate.