State of Digital have set up a partnership with Marketing Festival which takes place November 26th – November 28th in Czech Republic. I wanted to find out more about the event and interviewed the team on State of Digital.
Why should people attend the Marketing Festival?
New knowledge and new connections – these are the two main benefits we offer. We spend the whole year attending other conferences trying to find the smartest digital marketers from all over the world, and then we spend several months cooperating with them on their speeches to make them as practical, advanced, and unique as possible. We invest 100,000 euro into the educational content of our conference alone, but we don’t stop there. The second reason to come to the Marketing Festival is the people. Four packed days of networking and fun! Imagine 1,200 top marketers and an awesome party every night! A gaming night, a true marketing ball, and then a rock party with concerts from top performers. After a demanding day of lectures, it’s an amazing feeling to let loose with your fellow marketers!
What kind of people attend the Marketing Festival?
We focus exclusively on professionals and advanced online marketers. On people who have actually been dealing in SEO, PPC, social media, Affil, and other forms of digital content for several years. Every year our conference is sold out several months beforehand, and 1,200 people from 29 countries arrive, out of which over 50% are in-house experts, while the rest are freelancers and agencies. In general, both the conference and its content are intended mainly for specialists rather than sales people, management etc.
Tell us a bit about the speakers at the Marketing Festival
We work with big stars like Larry Kim (PPC Expert), Marty Neumeier (Branding Guru) and Oli Gardner (star in UX), but we also see a huge value in spending several months discovering and identifying the smartest marketing brains who fly under the radar, as they spend the bulk of their time working rather than tweeting or attending conferences. These types of people actually ask to be paid for the time they spend preparing their presentations, because making their brand more popular at the conference just isn’t their motivation. Also, they are the ones who we can rely on to deliver the most relevant and cutting-edge know-how to the audience and our line-up is full of them. Let me mention, for example, Bjoern Sjut, a top expert on e-mailing and working with CRM databases from Berlin, Daniel Weisberg, a Google Analytics guru from Google’s London branch or the Czech Republic’s own SEO expert, Martin Šimko.
What sets the Marketing Festival apart from other conferences?
- Top-quality speeches, customized to the needs of the Festival
- Festival atmosphere, concerts, a ball
- Single-track conference with 1,200 attendees taking place in the famous venue of the Brno’s Janá?ek Theater
- Amazing complimentary food and coffee throughout the whole conference
- A mobile application you can use to find, contact, and get to know attendees from around the world
Tell us a little bit about Digital Marketing in the Czech Republic
People keep saying that the Czech Republic’s online marketing and/or related disciplines leave a lot to be desired. However, the exact opposite is true, and there’s no doubt that in terms of the standard level of e-commerce and the level of services our country ranks among the top in Europe. The same is true for online marketing, as PPC advertising or SEO are very advanced disciplines here. On the other hand, there are certain specifics here. Because it is a small country with a smaller economy and a very unique language, a lot of services/tools get to the Czech Republic later or sometimes not at all, e.g. various new features in Google Adwords or advertising platforms such as Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads. SEO tools like MOZ and others usually provide no support for or don’t work well in Czech, and the main reason is that there’s a local Internet search engine with a decent market share called Seznam.cz. This is absolutely unique and SEO usually has to be modified individually for Google and Seznam. Similarly, there are two big platforms for Search PPC advertising – Google Adwords and Seznam Sklik.
If you want to get a taste of the atmosphere at the Marketing Festival, watch our official video from last year:
