David Hooker, Lead Evangelist at Prezi

some of some really core things like going out, meeting people, making connections, coming to events like this one, meeting strangers. You know, you can't do marketing just sat in a room, hunched over a keyboard with a bunch of ninjas, you know, growth hacking LinkedIn. Yeah, that has its place, but it's not just that. There's other stuff that you have to do to go with it. And what I was trying to talk about yesterday is how you can balance those two things. And the art form today, and it might not be that next year but the art form today is knowing, let's say I've got $1,000 in marketing budget to spend on something, do I spend it on a flight to go meet person to make the one connection that I need? Or do I put it behind a piece of content marketing? And just from my own experience, knowing which situation to do which in, I mean, a lot of the answer is actually, you negotiate with the airline to get yourself a better price, or you run a test with your content. So later when you put the full money behind it, you know that it's gonna have an impact. Of course, I'm simplifying the situation a bit, but. Or you do a joint piece of content with the airline that gives you a free flight ticket and they see. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get creative is definitely an answer, but also that won't work every time. So my airline will turn around to you and go, no, thanks. So yeah, knowing when to use your gut, when to use analytics, when you get an opportunity that you've got out of that old school approach of meeting someone and making a connection with them, when you've got that, then using the tools of things like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Optimize, all of these different things that you have, using that to get yourself a monetary value, put real useful data behind the work that you're doing. So you can go into a meeting with your boss and say, hey boss, this was worth this much. This justifies the activity, justifies the salary that we spend on this person, and I wanna do more of it. And then your boss is really happy because he or she can then go, okay, fine, well, if you gotta do more. So that's what I was talking about yesterday. So you just told me before we started here that you also have, you came out of a background of content marketing. Now you're evangelizing, which you could also call content marketing to a certain extent, you're at least delivering value to people from stage. But looking at content marketing, what do you see as trends in that space? And of course that becomes more online and digital. So yeah, I mean, I came from a background of content full stop. I wouldn't like to say it was specifically content marketing, but in the job that I do now, I work very closely with our content marketing team. We have a fabulous content marketing team at Prezi and they've really taken that to a level that it wasn't at when I was doing it by myself or with limited help. The trends that I see, it's all about the moving of knowledge and the dispersion of knowledge from one person to the other. So, establishing yourself as an authority, but also you have to have good quality content because okay, you've got that knowledge, you've established that you've got that knowledge, but you then have to get it over to people in a way that's fun, engaging, quick, easy that they want to get back. So I think that's been the trend for a while and I think that still continues. It's, you have to establish that you know what you're talking about. You give yourself a reputation and there's a lot of ways to do that. And then you have to produce content on the back of that reputation and reinforced by that reputation that's fun and engaging and that people will come back to and you know, continue that positive cycle because if you've got great quality content, people will endorse you as someone who has a valid reputation. So we're also standing here and we are video marketing platform and we're standing here on video and the stage is being live streamed and so on. So what would you say that the power of video can do for brains? Video is huge. Like you said, I come from a content background so for a while when I first joined Prezi and we were a small company, I mean we're still relatively small but when we were even smaller, I was working with a small team on the videos that we produce for learning how to do a presentation. Those videos are invaluable. People digesting in videos. We had a speaker on stage yesterday who was talking about Snapchat marketing and also the guy from Facebook who was telling us that everything is far easily, more easily digestible in a video or a picture form. So as a video is essentially moving pictures, then it's also invaluable as a tool for getting notice, getting your message across, people learning. Every device that's on the market now and every software that you have is optimized for video and getting video to play. So yeah, I mean video is huge and if you don't have a video strategy and a videographer, then go out and get yourself one really. So I think that we're already down to some suggestions here. So the first suggestion was here to go out and get you a videographer or a video guy or video girl. Do you have any other good suggestions here as a last point for marketers out there, both offline and online? I would say, actually I had a long conversation with my boss about this last night. I would say get yourself in a position where you can stay on top of things, whether it be online and offline. Invest time in setting yourself up. So I mean, I always use the example of emails. Yeah, there's tools out there which help you do email better or look to reduce the amount of emails but you like it or not, you're gonna spend quite a lot of time in your inbox, at least for the moment. Next year that could change, but you're gonna spend a lot of time in your inbox. So take the time to make sure that your inbox is delivering you the messages you want it to deliver, the ones that you need to read are coming to the top. It's simple, right? You set yourself the right filters at the right time but it's also really important to have those things so that you can optimize the time you have because if you're working in the startup community or tech or online marketing, there's always more that you could be doing, always. I mean, that's the wonderful thing about the industry that we work in, there's always more projects to do than can be done. New tools to use. Yeah, new tools to use, new people to reach out to, new ideas to explore. So that means that you can't do everything so time becomes your most valuable resource. So invest some time upfront in making sure that the messages that reach you, and it doesn't have to be email, it can be text or whatever, making sure that video, whatever it is, making sure that the stuff that reaches you is the stuff that should be reaching you and is the most valuable to you and the stuff that perhaps you don't need to see, you can push to the back of your queue.