Last week, we hosted our fourth Digital Marketing Strategy Bootcamp in Toronto. We were fortunate to have another sold-out event, with a fantastic mix of marketers and strategists from agencies, brands, non-profits, and start-ups. The secret sauce of the Bootcamp really is the free exchange of questions, learnings, and ideas from conversations among the participants. This time, we had some rich dialogue around the role of social (engagement vs. reach) the value of measuring engagement (worthwhile vs. worthless), and the right budgeting mix (media vs. production). It was a super-smart group, and we learned a lot from each other. As always, post-event participant surveys are posted online and unfiltered here.
One area that we change for every Bootcamp is the group exercises. My goal is to ensure that participants find our training to be actionable and directly applicable to their day-to-day roles; the group exercises work to make this job-transfer possible. For this event, we focused the group exercises on using different strategic frames to explore various digital marketing opportunities:
- Needs: How to develop service-oriented solutions by addressing key customer needs, challenges, and annoyances.
- Moments: How to develop direct-targeted communication by identifying meaningful and impactful moments for customers.
- Intelligence: How to develop more creative and relevant messaging by using different facets of customer data.
It was powerful for participants to see how different frames can lead to different thinking and solutions, even when used for the same marketing brief. It was also rewarding to overhear a few mentions of “I’m totally stealing this for my next meeting!”
One area that I do not change for every Bootcamp is the Dragon Den’s-style client brief at the end of the day. It’s an effective way for participants to put the concepts and ideas discussed throughout the day into action, and it’s a fun way to end the event. For this event, we were lucky to have the awesome Jon Chiriboga from McDonald’s Canada in as our surprise guest client. He provided the participants with several different ‘McBriefs’, and helped guide the groups to new digital marketing strategy solutions. Jon then had the unenviable task of selecting a winning solution from among a number of creative and smart responses. Gift cards for the winning team, free Big Macs for everyone else (beat that Dragon’s Den!)
Thank you to everyone who attended the session, and to Jon for taking the time out of his busy schedule to help out. And thank you again to those who continue to support and spread the good word about our Bootcamp events and digital marketing training services. If you’re interested in attending a future Bootcamp or putting on in-house training event for your company, please reach out—we’d love to hear from you.