Digital Summit Denver Recap 2018: Five Fierce Findings for Marketing Professionals

A few weeks ago, the Brandfolder team attended Digital Summit Denver, a two-day digital marketing extravaganza with expert sessions across content marketing, analytics, brand strategy and more. Couldn’t make it to the conference? Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered. We garnered so much marketing goodness during the summit, and thought we’d pass that knowledge along to you today.

Here are our top five takeaways you need to know from Digital Summit Denver:

1. On influencer marketing: Keynote speaker and renowned comedian Chelsea Handler opened up Digital Summit Denver with great advice for influencer marketing. “You can sniff out bullsh*t in 10 seconds,” she shared — so make sure the influencer you’re reaching out to is genuinely interested in your product.

2. On building your community: To create an engaged and authentic community around your brand, empower your employees to build their own personal brand. Travel and lifestyle blogger Mia Voss posed the thought: “Imagine if everyone in your company was building their own community of engaged people.” Personal branding has the power to amplify your company’s community tenfold.

3. On creating engaging emails: You have 8 seconds to engage a subscriber through email marketing. To capture their attention right away, put your most important content first, tell a story that takes your subscriber on a journey and write in “grandma text” (plain language that even your grandma would be able to understand). Oh, and don’t forget to design for accessibility — that’s a $1 trillion opportunity you’re missing out on by not optimizing your emails for people with disabilities.

4. On growing Instagram engagement: Opt for specific, community-branded hashtags instead of the generic, big-bucket hashtags to help you reach your target audience (for example, use #womanpreneur instead of #entrepreneur). Once you’ve found your audience, be proactive about engaging with them: like, follow and comment on their content to authentically grow your community. Finally, remember that you don’t own your followers on Instagram. Look for ways to bring them off the social platform and into your own email list.

5. On marketing to millennials: ¾ of millennials would rather spend money on an experience. Is your marketing about your product or the experience it enables? To effectively speak to a millennial audience, ensure your marketing message appeals to the deeper “why”, instead of the superficial “what” you do.

There was plenty of valuable knowledge shared at Digital Summit Denver, and we hope our summary gave you actionable tips to take away for your own organization. Did we miss any other digital marketing lessons? Tweet us @Brandfolder or let us know in the comments below.