Jason Romain, Chief Marketing Officer, attended WBR’s eTail Asia 2015 in Singapore last week – this is what he learnt!

I just spent an interesting couple of days at WBR’s eTail Asia in Singapore. They created a great mix of retailers and a good balance of online marketing and ecommerce, which also featured lots of insight for any marketer. Congrats to the whole team – Awesome event as always!

Here’s my top 7 take aways:

1) Think globally but act ‘hyper local’. Culture affects channels as much as it can message.

2) It only takes one person to start building a content marketing machine!

• Start small and build over time
• Engage users and influencers
• Have an editorial calendar
• Share it with partners
• 92% of customer trust earned media – It will pay for itself!

3) The war of attribution – Search (or email in our case) gets a lot of credit but what made you search in the first place? So count people not clicks. I think this is the next big challenge for all marketers. We have so many things to measure, and with devices proliferating, it’s getting harder and harder to get to the bottom of what drove behavior. Finding a way to measure and depict the overall customer journey will help marketers make smarter decisions. Then building a system that (automatically) markets to people based on individual behavior is the Holy Grail! Banner Blindness – 90% of people who view banners don’t click, but 77% more people are reached via banners, and 22% are more likely to click when they get emails and banners ad’s! Got a headache yet?

4) Turn big data into smart data – Chose one simple metric to really focus on and use other metrics as levers. For Grab Taxi, it was number of rides. We need to invest in intelligent technology that helps us turn data into decisions.

5) Channels are proliferating – Don’t pass the fragmentation onto the customer! The customer journey is very much cross device so we must build a consistent experience.

6) Mobile Mobile Mobile

7) TALENT – The more things change the more they stay the same! Data driven marketers will be the future rock stars of marketing (I just hired a maths tutor for my kids!).