Our flagship 3-day Virtual MarTech Summit had been successfully held on 24th to 26th August 2021. Thank you to all our inspiring guest speakers, supportive sponsors, audience members, partners and our dedicated teammates.

The 3-day Virtual MarTech Summit gathered 41 pioneering thought-leaders from global companies around the world operating in various verticals to focus on topics of Digital Experience, Next Generation CX and Future Trends. A total of 11 fireside chats, 4 panel discussions, 3 keynote presentations and 1 lightning talk had been delivered to 1800+ attendees from 53 countries throughout the 3-day Summit.

We covered a wide range of topics in our summit agenda, from disruptive MarTech to Agile Marketing Strategies, from Customer Centricity to Brand Loyalty, from existing challenges to foreseeable opportunities.

Here are some of our team’s key takeaways from this remarkable summit:

• Marry the message with the medium. Don’t use the same content everywhere as people have different expectations when logging on to different platforms.
• Start small, test a lot, build a community. Think of this as a long-term investment and that you are building your own social network. Try to remember that engagement is key, and never forget your brand values.
• Digital capability and AI are increasingly important in what they can do for us, but people will always need the human touch, our human creativity and our collective knowledge of what we value.

And without our valuable audience members, the 3-day summit couldn’t be that successful. Thank you again to you all who have been actively participating in the poll questions, Q&A and providing us feedback both on- and off-line!

Let’s recall some of the interesting results from the poll questions:

Both challenges and opportunities from a cookieless world. Keeping a consumer-centric approach is always crucial no matter which stage your company is in.

Yes! We all understand the user experience from the audience in a virtual summit is significantly essential. This is how companies tailor their event to target audience.

It is always important for companies to manage well on their diversity in teams, functions and departments. How to utilise it and make the best out of it would be the biggest challenge.

During COVID-19, the lack of social interaction would lead companies to reply on online surveys. Yet, new means to conduct focus groups and social listening via digital platforms have been helpful to keep us connected with customers

Apart from the external obstacles all businesses are currently facing, how to internally cope with this under the new normal has also been a huge challenge. Transparency and accountability have always been the key to business to sustain.

We’d love to share a few insightful speakers quotes & takeaways with you as well!

“Replicating the real life event experiences in a virtual environment helps attendees interact more, enjoy the content they are consuming and eventually stay longer. From experience we found gamification is also a great factor for higher interactivity.”

– Liad Eshkar, VP, Strategic BD and Partnerships – Kaltura

“Brands need to understand who their audience is and what they care about to form a connection, brands should strive to create a compelling story. Consumers are likely to switch brands if they don’t have that emotional connection, therefore increasing brand loyalty should be a top priority.” – Elise Ngobi, Director of International Growth – Dash Hudson

“We have to marry our messages with the medium. We cannot use the same content on all mediums and should add value at every level of the communication.”

– Rahul Bibhuti, Marketing Director (Health, Nutrition & Hygiene) – Reckitt Indonesia

“To get started on planning your creative strategy, a few good starting blocks to think about are conceptualisation, preparing your data, creative setup and launch & optimisation. You should work closely with your media planner as well as evaluating the data throughout.” – Travis Teo, Executive Director – Adzymic

“Agile Marketing is not just about speed, in fact, speed is not everything. Agile Marketing is a sharp vision in what we are going to achieve at the end of the day. Focus on and collaborate with customers is more important to provide a coherent experience to them.”

– Annabelle Lim, VP, Campaigns Center of Excellence, Global Marketing – Schneider Electric

“In these days there has to be a middle ground to Customer Experience and Employee Experience, having the ability to pivot, having the balance and removing the friction is the ultimate goal, you do to look at both sides of the coin.” – Santos Salinas, Customer Workflow Solution Sales Lead, Asia – ServiceNow

“Brands should always put privacy first. Today’s customer are mindful that we’re collecting their data and they are expecting a value in return.”

– Sean Valencia, Marketing Strategist, APAC Marketing Lead – Treasure Data

“For video ads on social media, shorter the better. However, when it comes to videos on landing pages, longer videos help lowering the bounce rates!”

– Valeria Hamilton, Senior Marketing Manager, Emerging – Vidyard

“It’s very important to tell authentic stories because, empty promises and empty stories, customers can tell.”

– Maybelyne Ng, Head of Marketing & Communications, APAC – Benoy

“It is difficult to pinpoint the most effective channel to communicate, people have a shorter attention span now, we need to be even more engaging and immediate now in the first 2-3 seconds otherwise the attention is gone. Focus on your strategy rather than the channel” – Filippo Stefanelli, Chief Marketing Officer – StashAway

“We value what content we give out to our prospects and clients. The persona massively changed when the pandemic started, you need to understand your customer behaviour and do a content audit, you may need to repurpose and identify new channels.” – Karyn Jones, Director of Marketing, APAC – Wolters Kluwer

“Think of both the short term around meeting immediate customer needs and the longer term of communicating the brand purpose within and outside of the organisation.”

“Digital capability and AI are increasingly important in what they can do for us, but people will always need the human touch, our human creativity and our collective knowledge of what we value.”

– Akira Mitsumasu, VP of Global Customer Experience & Marketing – Japan Airlines

“Listen to consumers, understand their data signals through technology, and meet expectations on their terms. Your brand image is ultimately defined by what consumers think. Listen and act!”

“Consumer at the center, omni channel communication! We are not buying media and channels any more. We are cultivating a consumer experience based on their needs. If you are not offering a consumer utility and making their lives better, what are you doing?”

– William Ferrell, Associate Director, Digital Brand APAC – Colgate-Palmolive

“The biggest fall down in these new technology projects is often communication. Different functions have different ways of communication in different languages, be collaborative in your approach and bring everyone along in the journey so that they get what you’re trying to achieve.” – Tim Armstrong, Head of Digital Platforms, Capability and Audience – NOVA Entertainment

“Marketers often feel overwhelmed with the choices of technology available, don’t over pursue and be drawn in by buzzwords. Technology can only be an aid, marketers are still ultimately the decision maker and shouldn’t have an overreliance on technology.” – Airing Wang, Head of Marketing, China – PharmaCare Laboratories

“You need to be able to identify key activities or milestones that identify the profession your customer is making through the journey, once identified, you need to set specific targets against those milestones. Make sure you have the ability to adjust your journeys in real-time.” – Paul Erickson, Unica Solutions Delivery Leader – HCL Software

Coming to the end, please allow us to send our gratitude to all the parties who have joined us at The Virtual MarTech Summit: Digital Experience to listen, learn, and reflect on what the future holds for us as a team, as an industry, and as a society. For those who couldn’t make it to our live sessions and felt like you’ve missed out, don’t worry, you still have the opportunity to relive the summit on-demand here.

Registration for our upcoming Virtual MarTech Summit Thailand on 19th & 20th October is now open. Simply register a pass for you and your team here – https://themartechsummit.com/virtual-thailand (Please feel free to send the link to your overseas teams too!)

Register your pass today! The earlier the better to benefit from discounted prices.

The MarTech Summit Team is proud and pleased to have hosted an elite and engaging community once again. Stay tuned for more to come by following our social media accounts and joining The MarTech Community on Slack!

By: Teddy Fung