Recap of Denver Digital Summit 2016

If you missed it, the 2016 Digital Summit in Denver took place June 15-16, and it was great! The vendors told me this was the largest Digital Summit on the west side of the Mississippi (yes, larger than the Los Angeles event). #DSDEN16 brought together hundreds of companies to share ideas and discuss the trends in digital marketing. After a bit of reflection, here are a few major takeaways worth sharing.

Community

Denver is a booming area for the Millennial generation, and the success of businesses here was epitomized at the Digital Summit. It was perfect weather, everyone was ecstatic, and the flow of ideas and discussions brought important strategies to the forefront of everyone’s mind. Several attendees stated of all the Digital Summit’s they’ve attended, this was one of the largest. Relative to where you are, anyone in this field should invest in going to the Digital Summit next year.

Mediums for Marketing
The big takeaways were video and social – as one “socialite”, @kirill_kniazev,   stated in 140: #snapchat – do, #email – still good, #seo – great ROI, #mobile – more important than ever, create experiences, stories.

Snapchat is currently the hot social media app, and there was plenty of discussion around how to implement it within marketing strategies. This app is the catalyst for a shift in video marketing, making the norm quantity over quality. Snapchat allows for instant video, which means instant marketing. Now anyone can record and quickly watch videos from their phones. So while the quality is not on a professional level, sharing it is much quicker since the content has to be efficiently put into ten seconds. We see this as a must for targeting Millennials in the consumer space. In the B2B Marketing world, however, it may be awhile. The social winners for B2B sales and marketing are still LinkedIn and Twitter.

Marketing Automation

There was some surprise at the conference – the acceptance of marketing automation and how few in the sales team actually use the tools. Even when talking to sales reps from the marketing automation vendors, they do not use the tools themselves for sending emails. It is an underutilization of the amazing technology that many companies are paying 1000’s of dollars for every month. For implementation of marketing automation for sales, take a look at our recent post.

The Denver Digital Summit was educational, fun and entertaining. Thank you #AskGaryVee for inspiring my team, and see you there next year!