Unlocking potential and growing junior digital talent

Do you remember your lucky break?

N.B. This content was originally delivered as a talk at BrightonSEO in September 2021.

Do you remember your first day at your first job and the sense of anticipation, trepidation, worry even, as you walked into a group of strangers with no idea what you were doing. 

It’s easy to forget how vulnerable people can feel early on in their careers, but everyone has to start somewhere. Even Steve Jobs had a first day on the job after all. 

I suspect most of us had colleagues who took us under their wing while we built up our skills and confidence, or mentors supported our growth and ambitions throughout our working lives. 

I certainly did and wouldn’t be doing what I did today without the support and guidance of a variety of people throughout my career.

The digital talent divide

The UK in particular is heading towards a digital skills disaster, as demand outstrips supply. Anecdotal evidence from my network seems to back this up. A number of my clients report that they are struggling to fill entry level, mid-weight and senior roles.

This skills shortage comes in sharp contrast with the employment landscape experienced by young people, who have been especially hard hit by shifting pandemic workforce patterns. 

This comes on top of entrenched systemic issues in hiring such as “needing experience to gain experience” and the unwillingness of some companies to invest in junior staff.

We have a duty as an industry to nurture the next generation of talent. Not just because we altruistically owe it to young people, but because it is the right commercial decision to make for companies chasing a limited talent pool.

In this article, I’m going to be doing a mixture of mythbusting and setting out some best practices that companies can use to maximise the potential of their junior staff and ensure their staff have the best possible start to their careers.

House of Commons Youth Unemployment statistics

 Remote Working

A selection of industry myths

We worry juniors can’t learn on their own

Companies worry that unsupervised in a remote setting, junior staff will be twiddling their thumbs, sat behind screens in their houses.

This is interesting to me because when you think about the latest cohort of higher education leavers, these are people who have spent the last 18 months learning remotely. Most of them have performed exceptionally well in their exams under extremely challenging circumstances.

We simply aren’t giving our young people enough credit. If they're not the group best equipped with the ability to learn in a remote setting, who is at this point.

We worry we will harm the start of people’s career

Over the last year, I’ve overheard conversations with hiring managers who are putting off bringing onboard junior staff until the “situation becomes more stable and we can give them what they need.”

This is erroneous again, in my opinion, because our current pandemic situation is not going to get less unstable in the short to medium term. Yes, there are signs we may be leaving the worst of the restrictions behind, but can any of us accurately predict what will happen this winter and beyond? 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that uncertainty is the certainty in life. All we can do is act as best we can with the current information we have. There’s no point waiting for a mythical day where everything will suddenly be set in stone to act.

We are damaging people’s careers by not giving them a chance to start one.

We worry about preserving our existing culture

While it is absolutely right to be concerned about whether people are actually happy at work, I do think that when companies talk about “preserving culture” they are often using it as a proxy to talk about being non-inclusive in a supposedly acceptable way.

If your culture can not handle the addition of multiple age ranges, I suggest the problem lies with your cultural expectations, not with your candidates.

The truth is, it wasn’t working before

In an office setting, it’s often expected that junior staff will learn through osmosis. I certainly had roles early on in my career where I was expected to learn the ropes by overhearing office conversations, but I should never ask questions or interrupt the “adults” while they were working.

I was lucky to get 5 minutes for a water cooler discussion, but that was the limit of my structured training. Needless to say, this was an extremely piecemeal and demoralising way to learn.

While I’m hopeful mine is an extreme example, we have relied on this type of ambient learning for far too long as an industry. While I am a big believer in the serendipity of the office and the importance of human connections in person, I don’t believe we should go back to the old ways, which are both unstructured and inefficient.

We can do better.

Ed Zitron, Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future, The Atlantic

Remote Work Best Practices

So what does better look like? Here are some of my suggestions on how we can improve remote learning for everyone (not just juniors!)

We need to invest time into training and L&D

The fundamental thing is we need to do as an industry is invest clearly defined and designated time into training and ongoing L&D. It can’t be an afterthought.

A lot of businesses expect people to pick things up as they go, either on the job or slotted ad-hoc around client work (in-house generally is a bit better with allocating clear time to training I have found).

If you want people to dedicate time to training you have to reflect this in your team’s workloads and your overall utilisation rates.

We need to encourage everyone to take collective responsibility for training

Training is not just a manager’s responsibility, the whole team should be helping to train junior employees, including the junior employees themselves! After all, one of the best ways to verify if someone knows a topic is to have them explain it to someone else.

Not only does this spread the load, but it also helps to create a culture of shared knowledge and continuous development for everyone.

We need to treat people as individuals

A lot of companies now offer personal development plans (PDPs), but in some places, there is still a persistent tickbox attitude when it comes to training programmes, especially in larger corporates.

There are of course subjects that require universal/standardised training procedures (first aid, fire safety etc.), however, in a field like digital marketing where there are so many career paths and specialisms to follow, it’s important to tailor training programmes to your organisation’s needs, the career ambitions of your staff and your skills gaps.

We need to give regular, consistent feedback

Six month or yearly performance reviews just don’t cut it.

By the time they roll around it’s often either too late to give positive feedback or too late to resolve performance issues (nobody likes a surprise after all).

Managers should be providing feedback on a weekly basis, monthly at a minimum. This doesn’t have to be an onerous, time-intensive or formal process though.

I stole the following format from Scrum retrospectives and have been using it with my team ever since to run check-ins. I like to do these collaboratively, asking team members to reflect on each point themselves before I provide my feedback. It’s also a great framework for self-reflection and assessing your own performance and even though I now I run my business, I tend to run my own mini-retro on a Friday using the structure.

Start - what should they start doing

Stop - what could they stop doing

Continue - what is working well and should be continued

Increase - what they should increase the amount/velocity of

Decrease - what they should decrease the amount/velocity of

Building Sustainable Skills

Another selection of industry myths

We say that graduates don’t come out of education with “soft skills”

Again, much like discourse around “culture”, I believe soft skills (which will be referred to as core skills henceforth) is another example of how language is used in our sector to marginalise.

While core communication and people skills are undoubtedly important, often people are using the term as a synonym for extroversion. This is especially prevalent in client-facing roles where there is an expectation that people will adhere to a certain personality type.

As a cohort, graduates are not lacking communication skills, it’s just that the communication landscape has changed and diverse people communicate in different ways.

I’ve worked in organisations with introverts who aren’t necessarily the most vocal in meetings but will send a blinder of an email after that clearly articulates a fantastic idea provoked by the wider discussion. Their strength was in written communication, not verbal, but that didn’t make them any less valuable as a team member.

We say that higher education doesn’t teach the “right” digital skills

I’m going to push back on this one with the question of whether it’s even higher education’s responsibility to teach cutting-edge digital skills?

In an industry where technology and methodologies move at a lightning pace, can we realistically expect higher education to keep pace when we struggle to as practitioners on the front line.

I firmly believe that the role of higher education is to teach people how to learn. It’s up to us as companies to invest in the right training to ensure our people stay ahead of the curve.

We say that young people are “lazy” and “special snowflakes”

Firstly young people aren’t lazy, they are questioning the merits of 24/7 work culture and advocating for better work practices. This isn’t limited to younger generations either, I think the majority of us have realised during the pandemic that we don’t want to go back to cultures of overwork and presenteeism.

Secondly, the connotations special snowflake and the supposed fragility of young people is particularly galling when we think of the resilience and fortitude they have shown throughout the pandemic. It’s not that younger generations are weaker, they are simply more comfortable talking about their mental health. Which can only be a good thing.

(Just because your staff never talked about anxiety and depression in “the old days” doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by it.)

The power of mentoring

Alongside more formalised training programmes, I believe one of the most powerful ways of building skills and capabilities is through offering mentoring. Throughout my career, I have had several mentors, all of whom provided vital support in building my technical and core communication competencies. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am without them.

The best thing is that companies of any size can set up mentoring programmes, even if it initially takes the form of informal 1-2-1 catch-ups. There are also wider industry programmes which are well worth investigating. I recently took part in the WTS Mentorship Programme as a mentor and found it an extremely reciprocal experience. My mentee Jasmine was incredibly generous with her knowledge and expertise - so the mentor/mentee relationship can definitely support people both ways.

In terms of practically building a mentoring programme in your organisation, I have a few tips:

Try and find mutually good fits

Arbitrarily assigning people to a mentor can lead to poor matches. It’s important to have a process that allows both mentors and mentees to feedback on what they are hoping to get out of sessions (WTS did this really well through an online application process).

It should also be made clear that any party can choose to end the mentoring arrangement at any time if it doesn’t work for them.

Remember mentors need mentoring

There is a real difference between managing someone and mentoring them. In mentoring, the mentee drives the agenda.

It’s therefore important to ensure your mentors understand their role and how it differs from management responsibilities. Ideally, mentors should have an induction process to provide them with the right information and on-going support through their time as a mentor.

Again this was something the WTS programme did really well, as they held weekly drop-in sessions for mentors throughout the programme’s duration.

CIM: . According to Sage.com, of those with a mentor 97% say they are valuable

Providing real progression

A final selection of industry myths

We argue  some people aren’t suited to becoming managers

It’s true, management really isn’t the best or most desirable path for everyone. Some people prefer building their careers as Individual Contributors (ICs), where they focus on becoming a technical expert.

The issue comes when management is the only track for progression. If your organisation only promotes people on the basis of taking on people management responsibilities, then you’re again marginalising people who don’t conform to a narrow standard of what career progression can look like.

Engineering departments have typically been leading the way in offering IC progression routes and have a number of formats and best practices that wider digital departments can borrow from. GitLab offer some excellent details on their Engineering Career Development process and even offer people ways of trying out the people management track before they commit long term.

We argue we’re a small company and that means there’s no room to progress

This is an argument often heard at agencies, who often solve the problem by giving out inflated titles in an attempt to keep staff, usually without the corresponding pay rise….

Offering progression opportunities doesn’t have to always mean offering pay rises or better titles (though my caveat is that people should be paid fairly for their expertise and skill level and that title changes without pay increases often feel VERY hollow).

Progression can also mean giving people opportunities to work on bigger accounts, or investing in training that will boost someone’s long term skills and career opportunities. Junior employees in particular can gain a huge amount of value from being exposed to multiple areas of the business - could you offer some kind of secondment programme that allows people to spend a day or two in different departments each month?

You also need to accept that if you can’t offer people meaningful progression, at some point they are going to leave.

How to develop an inclusive promotion process

How do we ensure we engage employees in progression opportunities in a fair and transparent manner? These are my top tips on building an inclusive promotion process.

1. The process should have defined, transparent and published timescales

The promotion process can be extremely stressful and obscure for employees in organisations where decisions are made behind closed doors, with little information on how and when people can progress.

As with salary information, a lack of transparency also particularly affects minorities who may be less likely to self-advocate or be affected by the unconscious (or conscious) bias of decision-makers.

It’s therefore vital that organisations have a standardised promotion process that includes clear policies, procedures and milestones which are transparently communicated throughout the entire workforce.

Typically this takes the form of an internal document that can live on your internal wiki or knowledge base. Some companies, like GitLab again, have made their promotions documentation public-facing, which can be a great tool for recruitment (and very informative for anyone looking to develop their own documentation!)

1. The process should include diverse decision-makers

This is really about removing single gatekeepers and lessening the opportunity for biases to influence the process. Developing a promotions panel is also a great opportunity to bring in the viewpoints of multiple departments into the promotions processes and ensures that decisions are made with an appropriate level of scrutiny.

1. Candidates should be assessed against consistent and relevant criteria

This is again about standardising things and ensuring a fair process.

(Also if it’s not in their job description, why are you assessing them on it?)

1. People should be able to self nominate for a progression opportunity

All employees should feel empowered to put themselves forward for internal opportunities (this should be made explicit when new job roles are posted).

However, it’s important to note that some groups are again less likely to self-advocate and put themselves forward. This is why it’s important that every employee is regularly reviewed and assessed so that amazing people aren’t overlooked simply because they don’t shout the loudest.

Microsoft Work Trend Index Report 2021

See the full slides

Unlocking potential and growing junior staff sustainably | Bethan Vincent | Brighton SEO Sep 2021 from Bethan Vincent

How to Run a Marketing Team Using the Agile/Scrum Framework

This post is based on my talk at MeasureFest in September 2019, which in turn is based on my experience running and consulting on cross-functional marketing teams using Agile/Scrum frameworks.

What is Agile?

Agile is a software development methodology that is described fully in the Agile Manifesto. The agile process has the following core values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile focuses on flexibility in the face of changing requirements and an emphasis on consistently shipping minimum viable software instead of an all-singing, all-dancing, comprehensive solution.

Alongside this focus on continuous delivery, agile also focuses on sustained improvement through continuous learning from new work pushed live and adjustment to fluctuating factors.

It’s a process that is tightly aligned to the software world, where speed to market and the ability to pivot are key factors in success.

What is Agile Marketing?

As cross-functional teams become more common, alongside the requirement for greater collaboration between Marketing/Product/Development, it is my opinion that marketing teams will be required to fully adopt agile processes.

Alongside better alignment with the speed and objectives of other teams and the wider organisation, adopting agile marketing processes can have a profound impact on productivity, team satisfaction and managing workloads.

If you want to delve into agile for marketing further, an Agile Marketing Manifesto already exists with the following seven core values:

• Validated learning over opinions and conventions

• Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy

• Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns

• The process of customer discovery over static prediction

• Flexible vs. rigid planning

• Responding to change over following a plan

• Many small experiments over a few large bets

  What is Scrum Marketing?

Scrum is an agile process framework for project management, with an emphasis on software development.

The best way I’ve found of thinking about it is to imagine Scrum as a flavour of Agile - a variant that shares the base underlying principles, with a layer of implementation guidelines added on top.

Atlassian do a really good job of describing the difference between agile and Scrum:

People often think Scrum and agile are the same thing because Scrum is centered around continuous improvement, which is a core principle of agile. However, Scrum is a framework for getting work done, where agile is a mindset. You can’t really “go agile”, as it takes dedication from the whole team to change the way they think about delivering value to your customers. But you can use a framework like Scrum to help you start thinking that way and to practice building agile principles into your everyday communication and work.

Scrum is designed for teams of three to nine members, who break their work into actions that can be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints, which can last between two and six weeks.

How to implement the Agile Marketing Framework

Now you may be thinking at this stage, “OK Bethan, all off the above sounds pretty good, if not very jargon-heavy - how do I actually make this work in a marketing context?”

That’s a really fair question.

Below are a number of my tips and thoughts on taking Scrum and making it work for a marketing team or department.

At this stage, I must be very clear that I am not an accredited agile professional. However, everything I lay out below is based on my experience of trying to implement a Scrum process in a cross-functional marketing team.

We certainly had a number of our own situational factors that made this transition both harder and easier - you will undoubtedly have your own.

Getting this right is going to take a leap of faith and a focus on both continuous improvement and experimentation. Thankfully this build -> measure -> learn -> try again process is absolutely at the heart of the Scrum methodology.

Step 1: You’re going to need to put in the work to get buy-in

When changing any process, whether at a team, departmental or organisational level, you need to recognise that humans aren’t robots. We can’t just ask people to flick a switch and accept change without question, especially when people have been using the same old processes for a long time without any deviation.

Before switching over to Scrum, whether you’ve been working using some kind of agile framework or not, you need to sit down your team and explain the reasons for change and why you think it’s worth trying out a new process. This can be a difficult discussion, but putting aside a reasonable amount time to do this ensures you can respond to any objections or worries in an open and honest forum. You’ll know the dynamics of your own team and whether you want to do this in a group or individual setting, but it’s really important you don’t skip this step.

Alongside getting the buy-in of your immediate team/department, you may also need to convince “higher-ups.” My best advice for this is to ask for a test period - it’s much easier to push through change if you can frame it as a reversible experiment.

Ask for a 6 month period in which to test out a Scrum process and outline what you’ll be measuring to evidence whether this experiment is a success or not (the great thing is that the Scrum process has an in-built mechanism for measuring output and velocity).

Step 2: Creating the right agile Marketing organisational structure

Before I start talking about Scrum roles and responsibilities, I want to make it clear that I’m not talking about job titles - those do not need to change to facilitate this process.

Below I will outline the “traditional” scrum roles and the names I would use in a marketing context. The responsibilities each role takes on don’t change substantially whether you’re in a development or marketing team, I have changed some names just to avoid any confusion.

Product Owner becomes Marketing Owner

The PO/MO sets the direction for the rest of the team and represents the needs and desires of wider stakeholders (anyone with skin in the game concerning the output of the work undertaken by the team).

They are responsible for curating the backlog of work to be done and ensuring this is ready to be presented to the team.

In the case of a marketing team, this role will probably be held by the marketing lead (marketing manager, director, etc.)

It can, in theory, be held by more than one person, but I would caution against this unless your team is extremely aligned to clear goals and values. Too many cooks and all that.

Scrum Development Team becomes Scrum Marketing Team

A Scrum Team consists of three to nine members who are able to self-organize so they can make decisions to get work done. They are responsible for delivering the work through the sprint.

Scrum recognises no titles for team members, regardless of the work being undertaken. The team are trusted to self-organise to ensure that the work defined in the sprint is completed.

Scrum Master (This stays the same)

The scrum master assists the PO/MO with sprint planning and sprint reviews to ensure that deliverables and values are clearly communicated to the team.

They also help the team in the daily standups by ensuring that work is happening and that blockers are being removed (e.g. when the team/individuals are asked to do work that falls outside of the current sprint). They’re kind of like the team medic, staying on-hand to ensure the team functions efficiently and that team members stay on track.

This role is undoubtedly challenging and requires excellent people/negotiation skills, however, I personally felt it was a great way of giving junior members of my team real responsibility and the chance to really understand how work is delivered and the external forces acting on the team.

The Scrum Master role doesn’t have to be assigned to one person forever. We used to rotate it in each sprint in order to give everyone exposure to the role and the wider context of the work.

Step 3: Developing and defining your marketing backlog

The backlog is essentially a prioritised to-do list of deliverables the team want to get out the door. In the traditional Scrum process this is called a Product Backlog, in the case of marketing we will simply call it a Marketing Backlog. The most important items are shown at the top of the backlog so the team knows what to deliver first.

This list should contain all the work you wish your marketing team to execute on, from large campaigns to quick down and dirty press releases - we included everything. This list forms the roadmap for your team - the path they are going to follow to reach strategic team and company goals.

These roadmap initiatives are broken down into epics (big themes), and each epic will have several user stories, which then have tasks attached to them.

In case you’re a bit confused (I was in the beginning!), this is the difference between epics, requirements and stories:

• Epics - large bodies of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller chunks (called stories). An example of an epic could be “ensure all marketing ops are GDPR compliant by the deadline”

• User Stories - short requirements or requests written from the perspective of an end user - e.g. “as a user I want to be able to opt-in to our newsletter in a GDPR compliant manner” (please note the user could be a team member’s perspective - e.g. “as a marketing assistant, I want all of our web properties analytics to be contained within a single account so that I can access them easily”

• Tasks - self-contained (e.g. fully executable on their own) tasks that form part of a user story. e.g. to facilitate the user story above, one task might be “ensure all analytics properties have centralised access from user@company.com”

Epics usually have several user stories and user stories can have several tasks associated with them. It’s essentially a granular hierarchy that breaks work down into exactly what needs to happen for the work to be “done” - e.g. completed and shipped by the team.

These tasks form the acceptance criteria of each story - for the story to be considered done. All acceptance criteria must be done. The team may also reject stories presented in the planning meeting if the acceptance criteria are not clear - they need to know the definition of done.

The backlog is reviewed by the marketing owner before each sprint to ensure that it has been correctly prioritised and feedback from the last sprint has been incorporated.

Step 4: Undertaking your first marketing sprint

So by this point I’m going to assume you’ve bought in your team, defined team roles and developed your backlog.

How do we get going with our first sprint?

Decide how long your sprint is going to be

For development teams working on software, sprints can be up to 6 weeks.

Marketing has always been a bit faster paced, so I would argue you’d want to get down to 2-3 weeks. This is the pace I worked at with my team and it seemed to work well.

Set a start date and an end date and let the team know beforehand when kickoff and the retrospective (we’ll get onto that), is going to be.

Hold a Sprint Planning meeting

The purpose of this meeting is to define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved. The meeting will also present the sprint goal - a short, one- or two-sentence, description of what the team plans to achieve during the sprint.

The whole team attends the sprint planning meeting and during this meeting they will estimate how long the work will take - as they need to define what can or cannot be done in the sprint.

As I said above, ideally the team would be working during the sprint on nothing but the work defined during this meeting.

Marketing is undoubtedly a reactive environment and it’s sometimes impossible to predict some great media coverage that needs to be capitalised on, or a PR emergency that requires immediate attention.

To give my team breathing room for reactive tasks, I always made sure 20% of their time was left unallocated to deal with last minute requests. This gave us breathing room and if we didn't use it up, we simply added the next highest priority user story into the mix to ensure everyone still had work.

Also a note for managers - I always estimated the available time managers had as half. This ensured they always had time to be effective managers to their team.

A final note on training - I personally think training should form part of the user stories that go into the sprint. E.g. “As a team, we want to run a workshop on Google Tag Manager to ensure everyone has a basic understanding to help with future tasks”

Run the sprint

During the sprint the team will work through the selected work in the order it has been prioritised.

If anyone gets stuck or needs assistance to complete the work, the Scrum Master should be on-hand to help team members find answers and get help.

If it becomes clear that you won’t complete all the work selected in the planning meeting, don’t sweat. It just means you might want to re-think estimations or the scope of work for the next sprint.

During the Sprint the team will check in together daily for a quick stand-up meeting (the name comes from the idea that this meeting should be short enough that team members can stand throughout). Each team member will cover:

• What they did yesterday

• What they are planning on doing today

• What (if anything) is standing in their way - e.g. I don’t have correct permissions on Google Analytics

Stories are considered complete when all of the tasks (acceptance criteria) associated with them have been completed.

Hold a sprint demo

The sprint demo takes place at the end of the sprint and is attended by the whole Scrum team, including Product Owner and Scrum Master, as well as relevant stakeholders, management and developers from other teams.

During this meeting, the team shows off the work that has been completed during the sprint. It’s important to understand that the Sprint demo is not a sign-off meeting.

Sign-off is top-loaded in this process and should have happened before the PO/MO presents the stories for the sprint planning meeting. Discussion and feedback are welcome, but it shouldn’t change whether existing items are considered done. That’s why you have acceptance criteria.

Hold a sprint retrospective

The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.

The team will ask together:

• What should we start doing?

• What should we continue doing?

• What should we stop doing?

The Scrum Master usually facilities this meeting an ensures any appropriate actions are taken before the start of the next spring.

Iterate and know it won’t be perfect the first time (or the second, or third)

If you’re not used to this process, the first time you do it will feel uncomfortable. Your team will feel clunky - definitions of done won’t be good enough, there will be confusion about who’s responsible for what, your backlog won’t be very well defined.

This is totally normal. Scrum is a process designed to facilitate iteration and it itself is a process designed to be iterated on. You will want to make changes to a lot of my suggestions above to find what works for you. That’s why checking in with your team during the daily standup or sprint retrospective

Looking for help with introducing Agile or Scrum processes to your marketing team?

I work with technology companies and digital agencies to help teams transition away from rigid waterfall processes to agile ways of working. Get in touch today to find out how I can help your company align cross-functional workflows, deliver impact faster and empower teams to do their best work.

What I learned about the future of marketing at Turing Festival

Last week I was lucky enough to attend Turing Festival!

Turing Festival is a two day tech conference in Edinburgh comprising of two days of expert speakers focusing on Product, Marketing, Engineering and Strategy.

As a Marketing Manager, I spent most of my time in the Marketing and Strategy tracks, with a couple of Product topics thrown in for good measure.

I came away feeling enlightened, inspired and to be honest, slightly overwhelmed. The speakers were all incredible and obviously at the top of their game. There was so much information to take in and many new ideas to reflect on as we move forward into the latter half of the year.

To both share some knowledge and selfishly help digest it myself, I thought I would write down some of the key takeaways from my two days up in Scotland.

1. User experience is everything

"Everything is a product and every product has a user experience" - @sitar

If I take anything away from my two days at Turing Festival, it's this.  UX and its vital role in marketing/product came up in pretty much every single talk I attended.

If you ignore the user, they will ignore your product.

2. We need to start thinking about voice search

This again was a frequent observation made in the Marketing track, though few speakers could define an absolute strategy for dealing with this shift. 

I got the impression many were adopting a "wait and see" position, especially whilst the war of dominance plays out between Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

3. Do fewer things better; go deep and narrow to focus on three to four outcomes (Supriya Uchil)

4. A customer is someone who is paying you money - focus on them. (@JohnJPeebles)

The number of "users" your product has is a vanity metric, focus on the people who actually pay you money for what you're selling.

5. Growth is a product of both successful acquisition and then retention of customers. It should also be measurable, repeatable, predictable and scaleable. (@andyy)

6. We need to start leveraging AI and ML to gain insights from big data as marketeers (as demonstrated by @wilreynolds)

7. We need to rethink team structures to organise around growth (@joannalord)

"We need to start thinking of growth as a decentralised responsibility"

Instead of sitting in our traditional silos (Product, Marketing, Engineering etc.) Joanna convincingly argued for interdisciplinary teams, which all work towards the same goal; growth.

8. Chatbots will be (and basically are already) the next frontier of engagement and interaction. (@purnavirji)

The rise of AI assisted chatbots will fundamentally change SEO as we know it, as answers will be served by seeimgly stand alone intelligent progammes rather than aggregate search engines.

Purna highlighted how brands will have to shift their marketing strategy as a result of this from asking customers to "buy now" to asking "what do you need right now"

9. We are playing in Google's world, but we can still find ways to win. (@randfish)

We can't change what Google does when it comes to algorithms and rankings - marketeers have to be reactive in some respects and adapt to the conditions imposed on them.

There are however a few things we can be in control of:

Our brand - we need to make our content so engaging and useful that users come to us first, without even needing to perform a search.

The usefulness of our content - this ties in with the point above, but we need to get people engaged before they realise they have a problem and provide them the answer before they have formulated the question. (E.g. provide answers to multiple logically connected questions in one post, rather then just answering a small section of a larger topic.)