Thinking Digital: Our Review of this Year’s Nottingham Digital Summit

Digital events like this are an important part of development for our business. Digital marketing moves at the speed of light, and especially over the last 24 months, with the increase in use of AI, digital marketing is growing and changing.

Attending events like this means we can touch base on what everyone else is doing and make sure we are using the best techniques for the world of search, social and user experience.

Top Talks

This year, Terry and Alison attended the summit and went to several different talks throughout the day.

Terry focused on marketing strategy, as this is something we are considering more for 2025.

“For me, I really thought the talk by Jenna Kamal of GWI on ‘How to create an annual content plan that converts like crazy’. This was very insightful and thorough. Highlighting that we should start with a strategic objective and a problem to solve. Then, looking at Campaign, through to activation, Ideal customer profiles and what the end goal of a campaign might look like. For example, Use case = Demo, Mass appeal = Attend a webinar, sales = Buy.

Next up for me was a talk by Meave Larkin, Retail Sales Leader at Google. The theme for this was ‘AI and the search evolution’. While at Bubble, we mainly focus on B2B, I was really impressed by how Google is enabling the use of new Tech such as AI and Google Lens to maximise the user experience and engagement, giving people, as they call it, ‘Search Super Powers’, focusing on four key behaviour types: Searching, Streaming, Scrolling and Shopping. 

A key theme that I took away from the day was that, whatever marketing activities your business is carrying out and/or the use of technology being employed to assist this, it was very clear that ‘Strategy’ was fundamental to the success and implementation to maximise results. Interestingly, there was more talk around ROI, and where budgets are being tightened, there is a greater need for businesses to require a consistent marketing and detailed approach than ever. Truly understanding the target market and their buying behaviours helped set the tone. Digital marketing absolutely needs to be on point and tailored around not only the customer but also your business objectives and desired outcomes.

I personally would like to thank the Hallam Agency for putting on such a great event and all the key speakers who gave such valuable content and knowledge.”

Alison specialises in SEO and attends a lot of talks along these lines.

“I really enjoyed the more technical SEO talks as they reaffirmed that everything we are currently doing or recommending for our clients is correct. I particularly liked the talk from Barry Adams about the last 30 years of SEO. It was an interesting whistle-stop tour of what SEO has been in the past. I think we all had a good giggle at some of the old practices.

A lot of the talks I attended had some interesting thoughts on GEO and how similar or different it is to SEO. It seems to be a split as to who thinks there are new practices coming in and who thinks GEO is just SEO dressed up – I guess time will tell with this one.

There was also a lot of insight into Ads and customer data this year, which gave us a few tips on further improving conversions for some of our clients, which will be interesting to see.”

At Bubble, we’re always learning and researching so that we can keep ourselves and our clients up to date. This helps us provide a better service to our clients. If you would like to explore how Bubble can help you with your digital strategy, contact our team today.