Our team of online marketers attended the Marketing Festival, held in Brno of Czech Republic between the 31st of October and the 2nd of November and is now ready to share with you its secrets…through the keyhole!

Warm welcome from Newton College

On Friday, we had the opportunity to attend four workshops where industry’s experts shared their knowledge and hands-on advice on a variety of topics. Just before 10:00 am we grabbed a coffee, our laptops and our smiles and headed to Newton College that briefly reminded us of our student life; we stayed there for the rest of the day.

‘Good morning’ from the big advocate of data Simo Ahava

Simo Ahava was the host of our first workshop ‘Google Tag Manager Masterclass’. The primary goal was, not only to inspire us, but also to show us in a practical way how to make the most of the new features of GTM. Firstly, we were asked to introduce ourselves and rate our level of experience from 1 (or ‘newbie’) to 5 (or ‘guru’). The agenda continued with an overview of the GTM v2.00 (recently released) followed by the migration process (from v1.00). With the remaining 100 slides on one window and upgraded GTM on the other, we learned about auto event tracking, custom listeners’ creation, event propagation, data model and multi tags.

Engaging debate for Link Building

The same morning, we listened to the professional link builders Julie Joyce & Jay Young from Link Fish Media who showed us how to minimize the risk of penalties by getting rid of low quality (dangerous) links. Following Julie’s and Jay’s practical illustration what was clear to everyone was that:

“While tools can greatly narrow down the links you need to manually review, nothing can substitute the human eye.”

A sunny break and brainstorming between sessions

It was already one o’ clock in the afternoon and despite the fact that we did appreciate the trays of ‘makový závin’ (a.k.a ‘poppy seed rolls’), we headed for a break. Contrary to our expectations, the weather allowed us to enjoy the break in the sun, in t-shirts and sunglasses. Leaving aside the wasps that interfered with our peace, it was truly a recharging hour that helped us absorb the previous session. That of AdWords Scripts!

Inspirations for AdWords

Russell Savage who was our next host, loves to save people’s time through automation. He is a renowned Google AdWords Scripts expert and the blogger behind FreeAdWordsScripts.com. His mission for the next few hours was to show us how to design, implement and optimize an AdWords script from A to Z. He started by walking us through the basics of JavaScript while inviting us ‘on stage’ to write a piece of code; we collaboratively succeeded in building our first script from scratch. We were enthused by the many things that can be (automatically and at scale) implemented, optimized, reviewed, analyzed and prevented using AdWords Scripts. As Russ had put it:

“If I have to do something twice, I want to automate it.”

Wine delights

Following 3 hours of coding, our soul and body were ready for our final workshop, the Wine tasting primer.Jean-Michel Deluc, a world-class expert on wine, was waiting for the thirsty marketers in Hotel Barceló where he took us on a tour, through a handpicked selection of wines from different regions of Burgundy, Loire Valley, Bordeaux and Champagne. French wine does rock and we were now educated on how to pick our own bottle and enjoy the rest of Halloween night in Brno’s festive spirit. In Jean- Michel’s words:

“An open bottle is an empty bottle.”

Friday was scheduled to be an all day workshop delight. But our Marketing Fiesta didn’t stop there… Stay tuned for the exclusive insights on the two following lecture days by Mozaik’s online marketing team!

References:
http://www.marketingfestival.cz/en