This week, we attended our first “in person” WSI Regional event in Paris – a great opportunity to meet WSI compatriots from across Europe to discuss the latest digital marketing landscape. The event was hosted in the impressive La Défense district of Paris, by Mike Monaghan, the WSI Central Business Development Director, and Gilles Dandel from WSI France.
What did WSI discuss?
The meeting kicked off with an update from Mike on all of the initiatives being run at WSI Central, including how they are partnering with Hubspot to improve sales funnel management and reporting.
We then moved into a session on Social Selling, hosted by Balazs and Balint Erenyi from WSI Hungary, during which we talked about the latest insights and best practises for building productive online networks by using LinkedIn. There was a strong take-out about being specific and intentional about who you have in your network, and making the effort to personalise the contacts made.
WSI has recently made a strategic alliance with BNI, so it was great to have Virginie Sananikone from BNI Europe talk to us about what both good and bad networking look like. She gave some great insights, most importantly about the power of networking when you surround yourself with people who you give the time to get to know you really well. Her top tip was also around preparation and intentionality – going to every networking event knowing what you want to say and who you want to meet.
At the end of the first day, we spent some time developing some WSI “secret sauce” – round tables on hot topics during which we shared recent experiences, insights and suggestions. The take-outs from this section remain with those in the room!
In our evening together, we took a river dinner trip down the Seine – a fantastic way to see some of Paris whilst relaxing and getting to know each other a little better.
Day 2 was opened by the WSI Digital Marketing king of Ireland, Cormac Farrelly, who talked to us about helping clients to develop their Digital Strategy. We are certified WSI Digital Strategy providers, so it was great to re-enforce what we do, and to hear about Cormac’s learnings over the pandemic, and how he has updated his service to better meet the needs of his clients in a hybrid working world. There were 2 key take-outs from this session – firstly, the importance of building robust customer personas, and secondly about being intentional about the way you build your copy, messaging and user journey for those personas to exceed consumer expectations.
Next, we had a session hosted by John Leech from Ireland (dialling in remotely from his covid sick-bed) and Gilles Dandel from France, who talked about how we can help our clients grow their business through accessing Government grants. Of course, many of the examples shared were European (we won’t mention the B word ), so we have some research on our “to do list” to find some of the UK equivalents – watch this space!
To round up the conference, JP Laborderie from France hosted a session on SEO in 2022. There are such a variety of tools in the SEO armoury these days, JP has broken them down into groups so that his customers can relate them much more easily to the problems and opportunities that they are experiencing – stopping SEO sounding like a “dark art”, which it can do when marketing providers get too techy. The key take-outs are that Content remains King, and that being intentional about what you want to achieve from that content is the key to getting it right.
Summary
The underlying message from the 2 days was about being intentional about what you do. No-one ever built a great business by simply drifting along. This starts with planning and goes full circle through to reporting to really understand what works and what doesn’t.
- Plan what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it
- Be laser focused on building relationships with people who fit your buyer persona
- Stay up to date with what’s going on in your marketplace – things change
- Deliver a great product, consistently and brilliantly
- Measure performance and respond
If any of the topics covered resonate with you, and you’d like to discuss them with us, please contact us for a no commitment chat.
