Martijn Scheijbeler from The Next Web talks about video

Hey, my name is Luca and I run marketing in TwentyThree. I'm standing here with Martin from NextWeb. And what do you do there? I'm the marketing director at the NextWeb. So I run our marketing team. It currently consists of like 10 to 15 people. We run everything almost from like optimizing the website, from reporting to other teams and also optimizing our efforts there. And our biggest focus is of course in growing our traffic to the NextWeb to in the end use that for other purposes as well. As an example, one of our events or e-commerce website. So for people that don't really, maybe doesn't know what NextWeb probably people do, but what is the NextWeb in like five lines? Yeah, sure. The NextWeb is a technology focused media company. So we're most well known for our two biggest pillars, which is our events, the NextWeb conference. We just had our event last week in Amsterdam where we hosted the NextWeb conference. We hosted around 10,000 attendees. And in November, we're going to be back in New York. And besides that, we run the NextWeb.com, which is our tech blog where we see over 7 million unique users on a monthly basis interested in everything around technology, news, design, marketing and media. Okay. And you're speaking at this conference. So what are you going to talk about? I'm going to talk about the tech innovation. So at the NextWeb, we get so many pitches and we see so many companies. We see so many companies pass by on startups you don't want to know. I think we get 50K pitches on a yearly basis. So that brings in a lot of knowledge about the startup industry, what's trending, what's coming up. And I'm going to see if I can get the interest of the audience just to talk about more innovations that we see, 3D printing, VR, social media and everything that's happening right there and how marketers these days should really embrace that into new technologies to really use that to their advantage in doing marketing for their own companies. And for people that won't see the talk, what are your three points or three headlines or one headline? I think the biggest innovation currently for marketers are going to be in three areas, which is going to be, of course, content production. We see a huge trend, of course, in video, video production. VR is a big opportunity there as well. I think the second thing of social media, we're seeing a small shift there from like really bringing it from consumer side mostly to a brand side. brands also want to become a publisher because they don't have the reach at the moment. And the third biggest thing I'm going to talk about is really analytics. So you always wanted to know more, you didn't want to do more data-driven marketing. So how can you really set that up and how can you make that happen in your company without like destroying your own knowledge or doing it the wrong way? So that's maybe an interesting thing to talk a little bit about. If you could dream, what would be the analytics that you would like your team to have? Well, that's always a really good question actually. So we talk a lot about this in the company. We always want to become a more data -driven publisher as well ourselves. And what we really want to see is like what content would work better for our audience. So we push out quite a lot of content that I think 30 to 40 blog posts on a daily basis, which is quite a lot. So we want to get better at like understanding what our audiences needs really are. And I think we can do that better if we know more what they are looking for. And I think that's really important. I think that's one of the angles within analytics. So you can save everything around the engagement on your own platform, but this is really something that is off platform. And that's becoming more interesting and would make me really curious to see what we can do with the data and where to get the data from. So one of the other points you mentioned, and now we are of course on video, so let's talk a little bit about that. What direction do you see online video or video marketing move in 2016? I think one of the biggest things are of course, creating video based on virtual reality. So VR is becoming a bigger thing. Augmented reality already has been here for a couple of years. But also in the whole way of creating video. So we used to have like complete video setups, doing a lot of interviews and doing a lot of talks and making the content available. What we're seeing more often, of course, is because of the younger generations and more millennials or whatever your buzzwords you want to give them, is that they're doing way more with video blogging, vlogging, whatever. And I think that's a new form of content that we're because the technology was already there, but it wasn't really adopted yet to that audience. But also, it wasn't so far, it wasn't that interesting. And I think it's becoming more interesting. We see a lot of great people using it already. And there are, of course, a ton of examples already on how video is becoming more popular for bigger audiences. And what can companies learn from that? Because one thing is, of course, that people blog on YouTube or do their own blogs. But if you're sitting as a company somewhere, in the states, and you want to get started on doing video marketing or doing content marketing in general, where would you start? You're an expert, right? Well, I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I can at least give my personal opinion around it. And what we see in the next web, and how it's happening, I think it's becoming way more personal. So usually, it was like a big company or a big corporate that was like the CEO was always doing the talks and was like the public face of the company. And I think that's really changing. So, I'm standing here today. I'm not the I'm still responsible for everything we do on the marketing side, but it doesn't make me accountable for, for example, our events. So I wouldn't be the one to talk about that. So I think for companies, it's becoming more interesting to also see like the personal side of things. So I go to a ton of events and I make great people there. So that really also builds the brand into the people we meet. And I think that's relating to video is the great thing. Like show really what you're working on. Don't make a corporate video. So just interview people like you guys do, but also make sure that you make it interesting for, for a bigger audience to watch by making it more personal. So you can really connect to your audience instead of just saying it's more interesting.