Our Social Media Executive, Jasmine Gilbert attended eCommerce Expo & Technology for Marketing at the end of September and came back inspired with new insights.
“It was my first time at the Excel for a marketing expo, and they’d done some really smart things including making headphones available at each seminar to block out the general convention noise, enabling you to really lock-in and engage fully with the seminars.
Day one of the conference featured a particularly interesting panel discussion on ‘Is social commerce the future or just a fad?’ featuring panelists from Britvic, De’Longhi and Look Fabulous Forever. The session was really eye-opening, with some pretty compelling evidence that it’s here to stay and needs to be taken seriously. With 5.2 billion social media users worldwide, social commerce is responsible for $80 billion revenue in the US this year and over $30 billion in the UK, and these figures are expected to double by 2029.
The panel discussed the importance of thinking long-term, having a culture-led strategy and building brand equity through ‘talkability’. Content is still critical, as is understanding your audience’s communication channel and frequency preferences. They also talked about social selling being intrinsically linked to understanding your audience’s motivators and lifestage. They raised the importance of executing a multi-channel strategy with audience and channel appropriate activity, alongside the value of connected campaigns. For example, paid ads commonly increase the reach of TikTok shops by a massive 25%.
Minnie Hinds and Grace Tullio of PURESEOUL shared their journey from pop-up shop to Westfield sensation in ‘Viral K-Beauty, real community: Our journey to defining our niche’. The brand makes extensive use of influencers and really does their homework, gaining insights into what their audiences follow them for and seeding product boxes specific to that before inviting them into store for IRL gifted shopping experiences. I loved the fact that they’ve learnt to avoid briefs, discovering that the greatest success comes from the authenticity of influencers releasing content that’s in their own style. The hype and demand generated ahead of their Westfield White City store opening, caused 1,200 people to queue to attend! Another thing that I love about this brand is that they’ve harnessed the power of personalisation to secure loyalty, whether that be celebrating birthdays or utilising insights on customer skin type information to make tailored recommendations. They’re a brand winning through investing in relational connection and the reality of their products and were a great case study.
Juliette Aiken, CMO of Dotdigital kicked off day two with a talk on ‘Gen Z to Boomer loyalty, decoded’ with some fascinating stats such as:
- 47% of Gen Z are loyal to 1-3 brands
- Gen Z customers are drawn by immediate value (gifts and freebies)
- Gen Z are 79% more likely to want a subscription based loyalty programme
- Gen Z and Millennials more influenced by product recommendations than Gen X and Baby Boomers who look for price and convenience
- Gen Z currently represents 5-6% of global spending, but that’s expected to grow to 20-25% in 5 years.
Joe Glover (Co-founder of The Marketing Meetup) spoke to marketers on ‘What’s changing in marketing? What’s staying the same?’. He noted the trend of ‘everything changing at once’, and the acceleration of 2024 carrying into 2025. Joe drew our attention to the peaking of ‘The Global Uncertainty Index’ with the influence of the changes of a post-covid world (return to office, role and workflow changes due to AI, the effect of politics and climate change on the market and what’s important). He encouraged the audience to:
- Choose which narrative to accept
- Be curious
- Make friends with the CFO
- Get back to building brand
- Think about how to reach the 5% of buyers who are in the market.
Robyn Hartley (Founder and Managing Director, Paper Kite Media) delivered a great talk on ‘People over PDFs: Why B2B employee voices are your best social strategy’ which highlighted the role of employees as the real differentiators and business Unique Selling Points. She spoke of how digital natives are shaping a new era for B2B decision making, including some eye-opening insights such as:
- Employee posts gain 8x more engagement than brand content
- Socially active salespeople are 45% more likely to exceed targets
- Companies with socially engaged teams are more likely to attract top talent
She encouraged us to think about social thought leadership as the new PR, and to consider who our bench of go-to voices are, and how we’re empowering them with best practice guidelines and foundational training. The opportunity for colleagues to represent our businesses by speaking and documenting their experiences of events was also highlighted, and a challenge posed as to whether organisations need a cultural shift to embrace social media engagement on company time.
Overall it was a great event, with some really high quality content. I came away having learnt a lot and look forward to putting some of these learnings into practice for us as an agency and for our clients.”
