What's on the agenda?
Stages
Strategy
Come and join our strategy track to learn more about building and implementing your marketing strategy, cost management, value proposition design, go-to-market, transformation, and the future of marketing.
Creativity & innovation
Our creativity and innovation track will help you to understand how to engage your audience through world-class content, events and creative, as well as how to optimise your marketing channels
Experience & engagement
Understand the importance of an excellent customer experience and the impact this can have on a client's engagement. Learn more about how to improve your customer experience, and deliver long-term success for your organisation.
Growth
Understand how to build long- lasting growth, the importance of protecting and growing existing clients as well as new business, how to finesse your ABM programmes, and why looking internally at your team is so important for company growth.
Marketing operations
Our marketing operations track will help you to ensure that as digital marketing evolves, you are equipped with the tools and intelligence you need to optimise your campaigns, drive value from your martech stack, and plan your next big step.
Sessions and schedule
Are you feeling like your marketing has become less effective? Like your digital, content, and email campaigns are not creating the same amount of pipeline as they have in the past?
The marketing playbooks we’ve used for years just aren’t working. Buyers are numb to our traditional tactics.
In this session, Jon Miller, former cofounder of Marketo, and CEO at Engagio, will share his new playbook based on what works at Demandbase. It's filled with account-based techniques that are working today, including focusing on the right accounts, conditioning the market to your solution, and engaging the right accounts at the right time with the right plays. And he'll make you groan with some bad dad jokes as well.
In this session you will hear from CMOs and marketing experts on how to sustain market share growth in the face of economic headwinds and overcome the threat of marketing budget cuts. Each day marketers, like you, are at risk of getting their budget cut if you don’t drive the metrics needed to build your business. This panel discussion led by Josh Okun from Gravity Global is designed to open the conversation of what is preventing marketing team from growing, or even worse, keeping the marketing budgets. B2B marketing tends to be drawn toward “building fame” - typically through campaigns focused on tangible differentiators - or ‘transactional conversion marketing’. Typically ignored in either choice is the need to build positive sentiment, admiration, and emotional competitive advantage across all touch points with prospects and customers. As the pandemic accentuated the pressure on marketing budgets, the focus on conversion and trackable performance marketing heightened, while long-term brand building, through distinctive emotive-led marketing and communication fell further by the wayside.
The discussion will briefly introduce F.A.B. as a means of highlighting problems and potential solutions in relevant categories of the panelists.
As artificial intelligence advances what’s possible with technology, a next generation of marketers is emerging. These professionals aren’t defined as next-gen because of age, but rather their approach to embracing change and applying smarter (i.e. AI-powered) technologies.
In this presentation, Paul Roetzer, Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO, lays out the vision and opportunity for next-gen marketers who use AI to deliver the personalization and experiences modern consumers expect; unlock previously unimaginable creative possibilities; and drive efficiency and growth that leadership demands.
We have entered the age of intelligent automation. AI is not going to replace you. Rather, it will replace specific tasks, and augment what you are capable of doing. Don’t wait for the marketing world to get smarter around you. Take the initiative now to understand, pilot, and scale AI. The opportunities are endless for marketers with the will and vision to transform their careers, and the industry.
You will learn:
- What AI is, and why it matters to marketers.
- Why generative AI is transforming creativity and communications.
- How to identify AI use cases and evaluate vendors.
- What business outcomes AI can help you achieve.
- How to prepare your team for piloting and scaling AI.
The future of business is human + machine, and the future is now.
Each year, marketing teams spend weeks building a demand funnel to forecast how they’ll reach their goals. Then those same teams are surprised when they meet their Lead and MQL goals, but the Opportunities just aren’t there. This problem occurs because the funnel forecast is typically a blend of all sources from high-intent hand-raisers (i.e. demo and contact us) to low-intent activity (guides, webinars, etc). Surprises result when the forecast doesn’t account for the massive differences in prospect intent or conversion rates.
The team at Workiva decided to hack the funnel. Knowing that high-intent MQLs convert to opportunities at roughly 6x the others, the team focused on increasing demo requests by 20% in 2022. The team took swift action, focusing on velocity, high-quality MQLs and a great user experience. In the end, they achieved their goal with a quarter to spare resulting in $22.5M in pipeline creation and $2.6M in closed/won bookings.
Learn how to hack your funnel in 5 steps:
● Identify your highest intent MQLs
● Establish a streamlined buyer’s journey
● Invest in the right channels
● Partner with Sales to leave no prospect behind
● Ensure your martech is setup for success
Marketing has always been on the forefront of the “new and shiny” be it technology, strategy or methodologies. Although exciting, too often the hype and vanity matrix take away from the core of marketing i.e., to create and drive awareness and ROI for the organization.
Content is King but more often than not content is created without clear purpose or a plan for consumption or distribution. And when it comes to distribution the buzz words take over, terms like ABM and Intent are thrown around without understanding how to truly leverage them and build programs that keep the CMO, the CRO and the CFO happy at the same time.
This session will cut through the jargon and help create a clearer understanding of content strategy from creation to syndication and help create clear roadmaps to higher RoI and a robust funnel- leveraging account and intent based marketing tools and strategies, ensuring they deliver consistent and dependable value.
With a tough business outlook ahead, marketing and marketing ops are struggling to prove their ROIs. One of the best ways to show an instant impact of your teams and efforts is to directly tie to the sales team and/or sales activities. There are many ways that you can support or enable sales. Pam Didner, author of Effective Sales Enablement and Global Content Marketing, will share with you the creative and actionable ideas that you can implement after attending this workshop.
You will learn:
- Understand salespeople's mindset and their challenges
- Identify gaps and opportunities that you can enable your sales
- Craft a workflow to build a process if you need to integrate martech and sales tech
- Learn how to quantify and communicate your contribution to sales
*Be sure to book on to this workshop as spaces are limited*
In a court of law, we’re required to provide evidence for our claims, but in business, we don’t always share adequate proof that validates the claims we make. Content can be the perfect antidote to the “because I said so” claim-making that rarely creates the customer trust we want to achieve. This session will share how to corroborate your claims, demonstrate your value and educate your audience on all of the differentiators that are most important to your business and brand.
You will learn:
- Why trust is a KPI we should be focusing on more
- How content can help you build audience trust
- The five types of claims that need the most evidence
- What three types of content works best as evidence
This session will present marketing organization structure options, the critical marketing skill sets that should be included in all organizations, how to collaborate with key constituencies (especially sales), and real life examples from a range of industries.
Key takeaways:
- Consider a range of organizational structures and select the one that makes the most sense for your business
- Determine the skill sets you need / accountabilities
- Hire/train the right people for the right seats
- Collaborate and communicate early and often with sales
Marketing is getting ever-more digital and measurable, and yet most marketers still struggle to get beyond high level metrics like traffic and engagement to understand the impact of their marketing on the quality and quantity of leads. In this session, get the checklist that every team must implement to power marketing decision-making through more relevant measurement and smarter analysis.
Takeaways:
What are the processes and systems that are needed to help your team connect the data dots
How to build a holistic measurement program that’s proactive, not reactive
How to surface the kinds of data that can serve as the backbone of a powerful thought leadership program
DEI and authenticity are the buzzwords of the day, but not everyone knows how to achieve it. This lack of confidence results in an uncertain dance between appreciation, appropriation, performative action, cancel culture, and allyship. So, how can marketers use their strategic prowess to build an inclusive brand that strikes the right chord and speaks to the hearts and minds of their community?
You will learn:
- Why CMOs play a critical role in driving DEI
- How to partner with Chief Diversity Officers and Procurement teams to drive change
- Key takeaways and insights from your peers on their everyday successes and challenges
- A framework for progress
- A copy of the 2023 inclusive marketing report
More information coming soon...
More information coming soon
The keynote panel of Propolis experts and ambassadors will explore the new frontiers of B2B marketing.
More information coming soon...
Hear more about Anna Johannes story from winning a Bronze medal at the 2012 London Paralympic Games, to her pursuit for an inclusive design experience, in this inspirational closing keynote.
The Elevation Awards celebrate the very best in B2B from across the US, those who display the greatest talent.
We’re told as humans, we naturally find reasons for why things can’t be done. Especially done differently. But our panel of ‘challengers’ knows that's a load of nonsense.
B2B Marketers have the opportunity to dispel the ordinary, stand out and stand for something. Regardless of size or whether they’re a challenger brand or not. How? By championing the challenger within.
What do we mean by ‘championing the challenger within’? To better ourselves, our teams and our marketing. To never settle for a standard, to be unafraid to try and fail. To challenge ourselves and the established state of play.
Becoming a challenger marketer means you don’t just do what is easy, you do what’s right. You crave new ideas and opportunities, driven by a sense of purpose and guided by strong beliefs.
In our live panel of leading B2B Challengers; we will explore:
• How all B2B marketers can find the challenger within
• Real-world examples of the transformational impact of a ‘challenger’ approach in your marketing team
• Creating unforgettable B2B experiences to drive results
• Using creativity to define complex tech propositions
• Leveraging the Metaverse for ABM programmes
The singularity, a term coined by mathematician John von Neumann and popularized by Ray Kurzweil, is when artificial intelligence growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in dramatic changes to human civilization. For marketers, with the advent of large language models and generative AI, the singularity is here. Models like GPT-3 and GPT-Neo-X have trivialized some tasks, allowed others to scale rapidly, and are changing the very foundations of digital marketing, particularly around SEO. Marketers are profoundly unprepared for what's happening right now and what's just around the corner.
In this keynote talk from TrustInsights.ai Chief Data Scientist Christopher Penn, you'll learn:
- What large language models can and cannot do
- How large language models are built
- How your organization should be thinking about their usage
- What other applications of the underlying technologies apply to marketing
- How various marketing jobs will be impacted
As marketers, we are used to trying new things, but the global pandemic and economic uncertainty has thrown even the best of us into a whirlwind of competing demands. The physical events we carefully selected haven’t fully returned, direct mail programs we designed often had nowhere to go, and the messaging we crafted had to be delivered in an entirely new context. At the same time, buying processes were disrupted, and the sales team was desperate for some help. What is a marketer to do?
In this workshop, we will explore the fundamental shifts in marketing that sustained even as we move beyond the pandemic. Get ready to develop an agile go to market strategy that will help you recover, and thrive with what’s to come next.
*Be sure to book on to this workshop as spaces are limited*
Click! You have a new visitor. What happens next? Do they barf and bounce or smile and stay?
The answer depends on a lot of little things, some obvious, some not.
This session is a breakdown of the best practices for B2B lead generation websites, based on hundreds of website projects. You will learn:
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What are the key elements of high-performing service pages?
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What features are common to blog templates but probably shouldn’t be?
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What three elements determine if visitors sign up for emails?
From social proof to CTAs, videos to contact forms, we will break down the options for UX elements and how they work with (or against) the psychology of your visitors.
Join us for a conversation around how HqO was able to improve sales and marketing productivity and conversion with action-based insights, how HqO drives sales and marketing alignment with scalable automation and processes, and how they enabled martech platform ROI faster than they expected.
You will learn:
1. How to align sales and marketing to facilitate clean and reportable handoffs
2. How to reconfigure sales structure, alignment, and lead routing to support pod development
3. How to transition from an MQL only model to one that can handle any go-to-market motion
Sales and marketing misalignment is a persistent problem that costs organizations an average of 10% in annual revenue (IDC). According to Forrester, B2B organizations with aligned revenue engines grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. So what’s the problem?
In this interactive talk, Dan Swift taps his 20 years of sales experience to provide marketing professionals with a clear understanding of how to align with Sales Leadership to drive execution in the field.
The results? A connected and empowered enterprise that breaks through noisy industry chatter and transforms the organization into one that buyers want to do business with.
You will learn:
- How to bridge the alignment gap between marketing and sales
- Strategies for engaging and activating sales leaders and their teams, including incentives, training, and leadership
- How your sales team is the key to realizing ROI on your content and event investments
- The real role of technology and data in driving a successful go-to-market strategy
- How to extend brand reach in a measurable and meaningful way—and how not to
Key Takeaway:
Everything you need for internal alignment and explosive external growth is already within your grasp—no new expensive technologies or painful process rip-and-replaces necessary.
Companies have become over-reliant on technology and use it as a silver bullet for everything from how campaigns are managed to the core pieces of content and the channels they are disseminated through. But marketers would be wise to revisit history and find out why things that are old are new again.
More information coming soon...
B2B marketers today are well aware of the importance of retention and reactivation in optimizing the value of the customer base. The facts are clear: It costs far less to reactivate a dormant customer than to acquire an entirely new one; recent activity is a powerful indicator of customer lifetime value; and investments in retention marketing deliver the highest ROI of any strategy.
But some marketers may still be missing out of some of today’s best practices in reactivation marketing. Let’s review the strategies that are most effective in stimulating a renewed relationship with your dormant customers, to reduce customer defection and churn.
You will learn:
- The best way to define inactivity in your particular business
- How to surface the reasons for dormancy, and develop strategies to renew customer activity
- The importance of determining whether a customer is worth reactivating
- A ten-step process for B2B customer reactivation
- The best metrics for proving the value of your reactivation program
The session explores marketing strategy – and how companies take the big swing for the fences when repositioning a company while still delivering on activities like lead generation. The session explores marketing’s value along the lines of two primary vectors – a firm’s evaluation multiple and EPS. In the conversation Phil plans to demonstrate - through case studies and past experiences - how marketer’s actions translate into both metrics and the importance of purpose and passion in that business mix. Marketing stories from experiences sponsoring global football with Manchester United to his current mission around sustainability and saving the planet.