November 14, 2019 by Bridget Watkins

How to Market to Goldfish and Other Learnings from our First Marketers Summit

 

The 2019 Calix ConneXions conference is but a memory at this point. But the question is… what stuck with you?

For me and many attendees of Sunday’s Marketers’ Summit, it was just like the title of every Friends episode, “The one where you find out you don’t know what you don’t know.”

The half-day workshop was started to provide marketers with the opportunity to network and learn something new. For context, I’ve been a marketer in the telecommunications industry for over 20 years. I go into new events with the intent of taking at least one thing back with me that I actually implement, not just learn or think about, but actually take action on. Because honestly, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Some of my favorites were the following:

  • Are you selling to goldfish?  If so, you have nine seconds of their attention. If you, however, are selling to humans you have only eight seconds. You’d better get to your point quickly!
  • As you create videos that represent your company or brand, ask yourself this question. “Would I watch this video if I didn’t work at the company?” If your answer is no, fix it.
  • Finally, one of the offers was to share your logo via email with our presenters. They would throw it up on the screen, provide feedback in front of the whole group from both a technical perspective, and open it up for audience feedback. This was a gutsy group! So many people submitted their logos they didn’t have time to share them all. The conversation was fascinating, and everyone learned so much.

I had one attendee share, “I’ve been in marketing a long time and was skeptical if I would really take anything away from this, but I was blown away by everything I learned and all the new people I met that I can reach out to and learn from.”

We did underestimate a couple things regarding this first Marketers’ Summit.

  1. We needed a bigger room. We apologize to all those who wanted to participate and couldn’t due to space. We’ll do better next year.
  2. We should probably not be next door to anyone. Marketers like to talk and sometimes get loud. Apologies if you were in the room next door. Creativity can shake walls!

Thanks to our friends from Pivot for helping us with this event. 

To find out if there are other things you don’t know that you don’t know, join us next week to take advantage of our next opportunity to learn: Above and Beyond Advanced Managed Wi-Fi: Accelerate the ROI of your subscriber experience investments. Register now!