Only a couple of months into my placement, and the Marketing team and I have already attended one of the biggest and best attended marketing events in the UK – Technology for Marketing (aka the TFM). With it being the UK’s only event dedicated to martech, and the one place to gather inspiration from marketing professionals, not paying it a visit wasn’t an option! Not forgetting the best advantage – the event was completely free to attend!

The TFM is designed to help attendees and their businesses find new technologies to take their marketing to the next level, and the seminars showed how you can practically apply new techniques and technologies. There were several talks from top brands about how their innovative ideas have turned into a success, such as Just Eat, Thomas Cook and Zizzi’s. There were also plenty of strategic conference talks delivered by well-known industry leaders including Amazon, Google and LinkedIn!

To ensure we got the most out of the day, we created an agenda of talks we’d like to go and see (I’d definitely recommend you do this if you’re attending something similar, and make sure you get to the talk early enough to get a seat as they can become quite limited!). After finalising our plan for the day and booking our train tickets, it was finally time to travel to London (feeling like a fully-fledged business woman now!).

With an early start, we got the train to London Paddington. I was so excited to represent a real marketing team in a successful business! I’ve never actually been on a tube before, so it was a pretty nerve-racking experience for me! Luckily, I was with another placement – my marketing colleague, Jess.

We arrived at Kensington Olympia, and shortly after joined our Marketing Team Leader – luckily, she was at the front of the queue with hundreds of people behind her, so we got there just in time!

Once we arrived inside, you could already feel the buzz at the event (even though it’d only just begun!). There were thousands of marketers and business leaders sharing their knowledge and expertise, and you could tell that everyone was eager to learn new things, take inspiration, and find ways to improve their business and marketing efforts. Before we went along to any talks, we had some time to take it all in and walk past the exhibition stands. This made me realise how much I’d already learnt from my placement in just the two months I’ve been at ProspectSoft, as I started to pick up on all the intricate details at the event. Whether it was analysing the different strategies that businesses were using to encourage people over to their stand, or the designs of the leaflets and handouts they produced for the attendees, I was learning new things and thinking about how it could apply to ProspectSoft and my degree. It’s safe to say that I picked up lots of inspiration that I know I can have a go at implementing myself, and opened my eyes to all the marketing possibilities out there!

The first talk we went to was dotmailer’s “20 things to stop, start, or do better with your email”, which we all found very useful for future reference (I jotted down plenty of notes from this!). We attended 2 more talks in the morning, covering topics like “how to make an eCommerce site successful” and “how technology is changing marketing”.

We had to make a trip to the Pizza Express linked to the Olympia – we’d definitely worked up an appetite from the morning. Our Marketing Team Leader said it’s a tradition, so we all tucked into our garlic dough balls and pizzas! Once we refuelled, we looked around a few more stands that took our interest such as CommuniGator’s (a partner of ours) as well as a few others to get an insight into what they do and offer. Some companies implemented some really creative ideas to engage their audience, including photo booths, golf, and a racing car game…all with a marketing twist! We finished off the day with another talk on artificial intelligence and predictions for the future of marketing.

To top off the afternoon, we indulged in a bit of retail therapy (after all, you must take full advantage of being in London and go shopping, right?!). Despite how tired out we were from the day, when we spotted the Zara as tall as the Eiffel tower, we just couldn’t resist!

I feel so lucky to have had the chance to attend the TFM event so early into my placement year. It’s given me a real insight into the marketing world and how businesses can become more efficient using a wide range of marketing technologies out there.

Next stop – The Business Show in November!