As you may already know, we’ve been compiling the summaries and links to all 40 speaking sessions from FC Connect 2020 into a weekly blog series: one list per week for four weeks.
Welcome to Week 2! Simply scan the list and click to download the session recordings that jump out at you.
What Brands Need to Know about Social Media to Be Heard Above the Noise
Speaker: Priscilla McKinney, CEO at Little Bird Marketing
Social media has fundamentally changed the way we live and do business. Research shows that buyers are 57% of the way through the buying process before they contact a salesperson or show up on any corporate lead list. Add a global pandemic with no face-to-face meetings and conference cancellations and the need for online skills is at an all-time high, and in fact a requisite for business survival.
Gone are the days when you can post corporate messages and expect engagement and it’s not just the sales department that needs social media. Brands must activate their entire team to effectively pull their key messages across platforms. As many others have turned back to social media at the same time, the space is noisy, and skill is required to be heard above the noise. Find out what the pros know about activating employees and amplifying your brand’s voice giving your business the competitive edge.
Learning Objectives:
- Effective ways to connect outside of LinkedIn mail
- Advancing thought leadership through social posting
- Shortcuts to expanding your digital reach
Taking Action Through Empathy and Agility
Speakers: Jerilyn Boykin, Senior Director of Brand Insights & Danielle Pickett, Research Analyst at BET
As Coronavirus quickly spread and settled into the United States, the BET Consumer Insights set out to connect with our community to understand how the pandemic was impacting their lives. By using simple research techniques, we were able to tell not one, but two, stories of how the social and political climate was impacting our community. Simple and agile research would eventually lead to two of BET Network’s most meaningful initiatives.
Learning Objectives:
- Using collective resources to conduct agile research
- How to ‘level-up’ research to move with influence
- How empathy in research translates to action for our business
B2B? or Not 2B? Pleasing All the Stakeholders
Speaker: Nicole Granville, Market Research Analyst at Vanguard
This session will present a case study of how to launch and maintain a successful B2B community. We will discuss the 3 major sets of stakeholders we encountered and how we made it work for each of them.
Learning Objectives:
- The importance of non-Financial incentives
- The value of navigating internal processes–even the dumb ones
- The Other audience–making the Sales team happy
Putting the Voice of the Customer at the Heart of the Innovation Cycle
Speaker: William Gibson, Manager of Customer & Client Insights at Cadillac Fairview
As one of North America’s largest real estate companies, Cadillac Fairview (CF) is constantly identifying new ways to drive an enhanced in-property experience for its office, retail, and mixed-use properties. As the manager of CF’s proprietary research panel, William Gibson will show how innovation ideas are stress-tested by CF’s loyal & potential customers, and how customer research is the fuel for priority-making.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand how CF’s research panel was successfully positioned as an invaluable asset within the company
- Learn about how the research was fitted into CF’s innovation cycle
- Get a snapshot into the decision points for CF’s innovation priorities, and how consumer research was put at the center of those moments (with a preview of some of the innovation-led products!)
From the Political War Room to the Corporate Board Room: A New Method to Power Precision Insights
Speakers: Mitch Markel, Partner & Natalie Lupiani, VP at the Benenson Strategy Group
With the 2020 Presidential election around the corner, this session will take you into the political war room and reveal some of the best-kept secrets for corporate marketers and researchers. Mitch Markel and Natalie Lupiani of the Benenson Strategy Group, a political and corporate strategic research firm, will share the insight and communication strategies that have powered the campaigns of President Obama, Senator Tim Kain, and Governor Phil Murphy, as well as brands such as Sonic, Toyota and McDonald’s. Specifically, they will discuss the importance of a hyper-targeted and localized research plan and introduce a new methodology to help power this strategy. Attendees will then go from the war to board room, where Mitch and Natalie will share how this new approach has enabled brands to understand consumer value and attitudes on a micro level, and how their resulting, tailored communication efforts have paid dividends.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn about lesser-known insight strategies used effectively in the political and corporate worlds
- Discover how to conduct more targeted research and the benefits of doing so
- Come away with examples of how this new methodology has helped companies make their brand marketing more effective
Driving Action with Data
Speaker: David Roberts, CEO at SurveyGizmo
Market feedback is only as valuable as the action it drives. See how to collect great data and put it to work to grow your business.
Learning Objectives:
- Collecting the right feedback
- Getting feedback to the right people
- Using that feedback to drive real change
Unlock the AI-Superpowers of Your Research
Speaker: Michael Beebe, CEO at Dstillery
Your panels and communities provide you with rich insights into your customers’ preferences, but you can learn more than they can tell you by enriching your profiles with Dstillery’s behavioral data. You can understand your subjects’ off-brand behaviors as described through Dstillery’s taxonomy of behavioral audiences, which are built using web visitation, content preferences, app usage and real-world location visits. That enriched understanding of your subjects provides a highly dimensional seed set for not just human-scale insights, but also AI-based applications such as advanced segmentation, marketing automation and predictive targeting.
Learning Objectives:
- With behavioral data enrichment, you can know more than your panel or community is telling you
- You can turn persona-development on its head with unsupervised segmentation, uses AI to cluster those behaviors into organic, often surprising, subpopulations
- Activate those behaviors and subpopulations across your research, marketing automation and media workflows
Mastering Extreme Audience Agility for Optimal Advertising Performance
Speaker: Katie Casavant, President at 0ptimus
It’s axiomatic today that market research must go far beyond just reporting what the data says to understanding the data and how to activate on those insights. According to the 2020 GRIT Report on Business & Innovation, buyers and suppliers alike agree the primary driver of market research project success is delivering actionable recommendations that “result in a sales opportunity” and “prevent us [the client] from doing something stupid.” Join Katie Casavant, President of 0ptimus Analytics, to learn how to transform custom market research into an immediately actionable, growth-driving insight: a bespoke precision audience of consumers with the highest probability of conversion for use in targeted advertising activation at scale (and conversely a list of the non-target population, those consumers unlikely to ever buy your brand) – in less than a day.
Learning Objectives:
- How to integrate agile audience creation and audience intelligence into your customer insight, advertising performance and brand health solutions
- How to transform research and insight from thousands of community members, online panelists and focus group participants into activation-ready, bespoke, people-based audiences of millions of potential new growth-driving customers in less than a day
- How to identify and target which specific individuals among the US adult population of 243 million are your best prospects with the highest probability of conversion and who are your non-target individuals, people with a low likelihood of conversion despite campaign optimization
- How an industry-leading, direct-to-consumer fitness brand leveraged extreme audience agility to increase both campaign conversion and brand subscription sales while simultaneously decreasing customer acquisition costs
Removing the Walls of Siloed Insights
Speaker: Kevin Row, Associate VP of Research & Insights at Fuel Cycle
The session will review current approaches to gathering insights and propose additional methods of layering data and information, previous research, and longitudinal results and refine business intelligence.
Learning Objectives:
- Longitudinal reviews of previous research (benchmarking)
- Real-world results/outcomes layered on audiences
- Improving the audience profile data to reduce noise and improve results
Making Your International Community a Success
Speaker: Dorte Torpe-Hansen, Chief Commercial Officer and Caroline Bastide, VP of Digital & Services at Strategir
An international community program allows huge synergies and harmonization but can be challenging. Through a case study, we will show how local knowledge can enhance your insights, and how you can create a bridge to local teams and local consumers in several languages.
Learning Objectives:
- Local connection and context give you deeper insights
- Effective partnerships give you the edge
- Hybrid solutions give central control and local opportunities
Stay tuned for next week’s Top 10 list!
