Awards International at the B2B Marketing Expo

Over the last two days, the Awards International team had a fantastic experience at the B2B Marketing Expo in London.

It was inspiring to meet so many like-minded professionals in one place and find out more about what they do.

In the cavernous surroundings of the ExCel Centre, hundreds of exhibitors shared their expertise, pitched their products and outlined their services.

For Awards International, the expo was an opportunity to spread the word about Customer Experience Magazine, the fantastic platform we can offer for CX thought leadership, as well as discussing our various awards programmes with the companies in attendance.

Highlights

Beyond the networking side of the event, there was a range of interesting seminars and keynotes.

For a digital content creator such as myself, Tim Tucker’s insights on Wednesday were extremely useful – he explained complex concepts in a simple way, encouraging copywriters to use engaging, sensory language and frame our content within appealing narrative structures.

Daniel Ord’s keynote address demonstrated these same qualities. Telling stories about his experiences working in Singapore, he stressed the importance of calibre alongside compliance in customer service. Essentially, he argued that managers should not restrict guidelines to a range of ‘yes/no’ rules for employees to follow, but rules should be more relative and qualitative as well.

Elsewhere in the conference, it was impressive to see just how much Chatbot technology has improved in the last year and the extent of relevant data now available to digital marketing professionals.

But it wasn’t just Big Data. There was a lot of focus on behavioural psychology, and knowing yourself as well as your customers.

This led me to consider the main take-home from the event: great digital marketing means understanding your customers with every tool at your disposal, and connecting to them on a human level. 

New Experiences

Talking to some of the exhibitors, I asked them about their impressions of the event.

Brendan McKeon, founder of the new co-advertising site Adoppo, which allows companies to swap advertising space with similar websites at minimal cost, said the main appeal of the event was the novelty of the services on offer: ‘People are realising, Wow I’d never thought of that before. I’d never heard of that. But now they have.’

David McCallan, of Crazy Dave Promo Ltd, said the best outcome was ‘meeting some really high-end contacts. We’d never been to an expo before but this has really helped us get connected.’

Gamification

One of the biggest trends in Customer Experience, gamification was on full display at the expo. Companies came up with various innovative ways to attract attendees to their stalls, whether by offering barista coffee or VR gaming experiences. This was a great inspiration for our team, who are always looking for new techniques to make customer experience as easy and enjoyable as possible.

Overall

We met great people, exchanged ideas and got some inspiration to take back into the office. It was fantastic to let people know about the Customer Experience Awards, particularly if they hadn’t heard of them before. When people realised our awards were a perfect fit for their business, that made the whole two days worth it!