35+ key takeaways and soundbites from Funnel 2013

Yesterday over 1,500 members of sales and marketing teams from B2B companies around the globe attended Old Billingsgate conference centre in London for Econsultancy's Funnel event, part of the inaugural Festival of Marketing.

The agenda for the annual multichannel conference included speakers from Barclaycard, Adestra, Microsoft, Pardot and Dell.

Obviously it's not possible to condense all the different tips and recommendations from the whole day into one blog post, but here's a selection of the most interesting points.

For up to the minute tweets please follow @FestofMarketing and #FoM13.

Clevertouch

Just 9% of CEOs refer to marketing data for decision making, and just 6% of CFOs. 

You must take a look at SOSTAC.

Intelligent engagement requires responsive design – same campaigns, but optimized for different platforms.

If your campaigns are shorter than your average buying cycle (nine months) then you are leaving much to chance – a one in three chance if your average campaign length is three months.

Before you start thinking outside the box, you need to build it first.

There are six priorites for B2B CMOs in 2014.

Adestra

'Big data' doesn't exist. It's just data.

There are three Vs you should be aware of – Volume. Velocity. Variety

Email is a killer app. The number of emails sent in one second = 1,670,000.

Reacquaint yourself with AIDA.

Attribute revenue across multiple channels – determine the relative lift given by each channel then measure statistically which channel is working. 

Silverpop

The more relevant and personal we are to the customer, the more revenue there will be.

Apple has a blanket, homogenous email marketing strategy.

The segmented audience approach is failing.

Businesses should better understand the context of where a customer is right now on their journey to a purchase.

Silverpop's guide to behavioural marketing and how to get your customers to love you.

Reading Room & Lewis Silkin 

Digital requires a conversational approach.

Bringing in LinkdIn profiles to your site humanizes the suits behind he company.

Social media users prefer to follow individuals within companies rather than the company itself.

Microsoft

Monitoring user journey is relatively new to Microsoft UK

Digital Marketing = 1. Keep it simple. 2. Be helpful. 3. Monitor user's stories. 4. Measure.

Content drives conversations with your audience.

Search Laboratory 

21% of B2B traffic comes from search engines. The majority of which are organic results.

SEO is device agnostic.

Sound site structure and useful on-site content must exist concurrently to provide good SEO. 

Google is smarter than anyone in the room, so why spend time trying to trick it, when you could just give it what it wants.

Pardot

There are seven tips for nurturing leads.

When Google started in 1998, 26 million web pages were indexed, ten years later in 2008 = one trillion.

77% of consumers want different content at each stage.

71% of consumers want less than five pages of content and then a link

Nurturing shouldn't be email only. It's cross channel.

Marketo

Marketing is investment, not just a bulk of money that you need to figure out where to spend.

Marketing is not about shouting louder, it's about being different.

90% of all digital data has been created over the past two years.

The Economist Intelligence Unit

CRM and Lead Generation systems must be connected - you must be able to see what sales do with your leads.

Dell

Projects should be contemplated for connections, not impressions, which drive real conversions.

If marketing is too fast-paced, none of it is relevant and none of it sticks.