In A Sea of Marketers, The Customer Reigned Supreme at Web Summit

We recently had the pleasure of attending Web Summit, the largest tech conference and global gathering of CEO’s on the planet — so in other words, it’s one not to miss! Every year, a mix of journalists, startup founders, VCs, and the world’s leading companies attend to connect on a variety of topics around technology, innovation, digital marketing, and more.

This year, we decided to immerse ourselves in the exciting digital marketing talk track at PandaConf. With talks from LEGO, Heineken, Casper, Sprinklr, HubSpot, and more, two key themes emerged: The power of knowing your customer and how data and insights can inspire highly creative marketing campaigns.

The Power of Knowing Your Customer

In a sea of marketers, the customer reigned supreme at Web Summit. The CEO of Shell International, Dean Aragon, captured the sentiment perfectly when he said, “It’s impossible to humanize your brand if you do not humanize your customer.”

Ragy Thomas, Founder and CEO of Sprinklr, offered some powerful data to showcase why the customer matters more than ever before, highlighting that companies spend $563 billion to find new customers when they’re missing a powerful opportunity right in front of them: their current customers.

Research from Gartner shows that at most companies, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your existing customers.

Furthermore, 9 times out of 10, what customers say impacts someone else’s purchase decision. Yet, how many companies are properly capturing and actioning upon customer word-of-mouth?

Ragy cited Microsoft as an example of a company that goes above and beyond to leverage data and insights to better understand their customers. With Sprinklr’s software, the company pulled 150 million social conversations and took a sample of five million to filter and analyze. Key themes emerged and were integrated with existing customer data. The company then shared actionable insights across multiple departments within Microsoft to leverage.

Key Takeaway: It’s never been more important to understand the power data and insights have to make your marketing more actionable and customer-oriented. If you do not deeply understand your customer as a human, you are missing a significant opportunity to grow and differentiate your business.

Insights-Driven Content Drives Customer Delight

By deeply understanding your customers, companies can deliver personalized content, campaigns, and experiences that they will love. At Web Summit, talks from companies like LEGO, Heineken and Casper, spoke about how insights-driven content drives customer delight.

Lars Silberbauer, Senior Global Director of Social Media and Video at LEGO, spoke about how the company’s key to social media success comes from understanding their customer’s social needs.

Social media enhances our social nature, so structuring your program strategy around what moves, motivates, and inspires your customers has never been more important. Inspired by their customer’s needs, LEGO shapes its social media program around building together and the pride of creation.

One example of a programme LEGO launched is called #Kronkiwongi. Don’t know what a Kronkiwongi is, let alone how to build one with LEGO bricks? Ask a child. Research from The LEGO Foundation found that on average, 98% of three year old children have genius levels of creative thinking and their brains constantly look for different opportunities and solutions. However, creative thinking declines as we grow older, with just two percent of people over the age of 25 retaining the same level of creativity they had as a child.

To raise awareness with parents that LEGO play is about creativity, the company created a video targeting Mums with children from around the world explaining what a Kronkiwongi was and showing their creative interpretations of the creature.

As a result of leveraging customer insights and industry research to design this campaign, LEGO reached 24 million mums in 15 countries across the world, representing 80% of all mums in these countries on Facebook. 160 million impressions were delivered, generating 37 million video views.

Key Takeaway: Data and insights are incredibly powerful, but only take you so far. Pair your data and insights team with your creative marketing team to inspire innovative program strategies and campaigns. Just like the many different interpretations of the Kronkiwongi, data and insights can inspire highly creative campaigns that your customers will love.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it was an incredible year at Web Summit. From jam-packed days learning from inspiring marketers, to meeting with innovative startups and exploring emerging technologies, we literally did not stop! Thank you to the Web Summit team for putting on another fantastic conference and giving us many powerful insights to bring back to our colleagues and customers.

Jessica Gioglio is the Marketing and PR Director for SHARE Creative and the co-author of The Power of Visual Storytelling.