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I've just returned from a great time in Romania. No, I wasn't on holiday, although I do recommend Bucharest if you're seeking a holiday venue. I've been speaking and running workshops at the 2019 Digital Marketing Forum.
As digital marketing is such a fast-moving industry, it's important for people in the field to gather at least once a year to compare notes, pool resources, and share expertise with budding industry stars. The 2019 event took place in the Grand Hotel Bucharest.
I opened the forum as the keynote speaker, which was an amazing honour. Following my keynote, the first day of the forum was devoted to conferences. The second was divided into three intensive workshops on Digital Strategy, Instagram Marketing, and LinkedIn Marketing. Guess which of these workshops I was running.
If you've been following this blog for any amount of time, you'll know how passionate I am about strategy. So I absolutely love hosting strategy workshops and helping the next generation of marketers to get their strategic processes right. The Romanian workshop was a great experience. There were more than 50 attendees, which is a lot, but I feel that my particular style lets me deliver a personalised workshop to large groups of people. There were plenty of great questions, and the tasks I set brought out amazingly creative ideas.
What the workshop covered
- What is strategy? A broad overview of the concept and how it can be applied to digital marketing.
- Setting objectives. You can't build a strategy if you don't know what it's for.
- Situational analysis. An essential first step when establishing any kind of strategy.
- Strategy and tactics. If you know me, you'll know how much it bugs me when people get strategy and tactics mixed up.
- Actions and control. Executing, controlling, and evaluating your strategy.
When I'm running a workshop, I don't just deliver a presentation and take questions. I feel that people learn more by doing than by just hearing, so I set a number of group tasks throughout. This not only makes it a personalised learning experience for large numbers of people, it also really helps me to get to know the participants. By watching the ideas people come up with in the group tasks, I can gauge their context and calibrate the workshop for their skillset in real time.
Hosting workshops is something I thoroughly enjoy. It's a fantastic way to connect with marketers from any industry. Attendees have the opportunity to share their experiences and context with me, and I provide individual or group consultancy during the day.
