Web Summit 2019 feedback

Web Summit 2019 in a few figures:

• 70,000 participants
• 1,200 speakers
• 170 countries
• Very diverse themes: AI, Autotech, binate, musicnotes, planetech, talk robot, pub summit, Sports trade, Moneyconf, Healthconf…

This year again, Webmecanik was lucky enough to attend. Indeed, Sophie Panot had the opportunity to take part in this great wave of inspiration.

Aware of how fortunate we were, she wanted to share the unique experience she had during these 3 days.

Discover now the themes and challenges to remember from Web Summit 2019:

1 – The future is Open

During this 2019 edition, Sophie Panot (Sales Director at Webmecanik) realized that a new era was emerging regarding the use of Open Source. Indeed, open source has never attracted so much interest, and WebSummit even made it a recurring topic during these 3 days.

For those who are not comfortable with the concept of Open Source, it is a project whose source code is open. This means that anyone can read, modify, improve, or even reuse this code. Open source projects are becoming more and more numerous: if I tell you WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Prestashop, or even Wikipedia, all 5 are open source projects. Wikipedia is also a wonderful example of information sharing for common knowledge. Investing in an open source model represents many advantages, which is why more and more companies are being won over.

Indeed, today open source interests public administrations, which shows a desire for openness, transparency, but also collaborative work, not to mention that this model allows for reduced spending. This way of working appeals to SMEs, which take advantage of the strength of the community and enrich it, such as agencies specialized in Drupal or SugarCRM resellers, or like Webmecanik and Mautic. The giants also benefit from it: this year, IBM acquired Red Hat, Microsoft acquired GitHub, and Acquia acquired Mautic. In another sector, medicine, we can see that connected devices are being highlighted: 77% of the code for connected devices is developed in Open Source.

To conclude this section, here is a quote from Katharina Borchert, Director of Innovation at Mozilla: “The open web is a new world! It is a decentralization of work, unlimited access to creativity, and a new organization of work.”

2 – The customer journey in 2020

Customers have never been so central to brand strategies. With the revolutions in marketing analytics and our use of data, customer experience is now a personalized and transparent process. However, this creates a new problem for brands: similarity.

That is why we wanted to share the feedback from SAP’s Marketing Director, who explains which strategies she put in place so that her brand would stand out from the others. Overall, her advice is to stop talking about yourself, your brand, your advantages… and instead talk about your customers, their issues, and how your company can solve them in order to help them!

Providing a good customer experience has become essential for companies. You should know that 80% of customers who have just one bad experience will no longer be customers in the days or months that follow.

Here is her advice for a good customer experience:

1. Perception, feeling (emotional intelligence is making a major entrance into the world of sales and marketing. We are encouraged to listen to our instincts when making decisions and not focus only on the numbers.)
2. Focus on real-time personalization
3. Anticipate new trends
4. Strong storytelling (you need to have clearly identified your value, your personas, the tone of your communications, the places where your customers/prospects are, their buying habits… This may seem basic, yet only 30% of European companies have a global digital strategy). For example, we know that a prospect prefers email to all other channels; however, once they become a customer, 84% no longer want to communicate by email!

To conclude, we advise you to work on your database as well as on the behaviors of your target audience in order to personalize exchanges as much as possible in an omnichannel way.

3 – Retention is the new conversion

A few years ago, the SaaS model essentially consisted of signing up and converting. However, this has evolved: the SaaS model is now based on subscription revenue, which raises the following question: What is a conversion today?

Subscription has become an essential business model. Today, the subscription economy is defined just as much by dematerialized goods and services as by physical goods. Audiovisual, fashion, beauty, and food are among the sectors where subscriptions are making great strides.

The transition from a traditional business model to a subscription-based business model can be particularly complex. Indeed, it implies completely rethinking your business model, your conversion funnel, your way of communicating, and your relationship with your customers.

Instead of having a funnel oriented toward conversion, we must orient our funnel toward retention! Once you become aware of this, the way you establish your priorities in terms of customer onboarding will change completely.

But how can onboarding be improved to ensure retention, reduce churn, etc.?

• Interview customers who recently purchased your product/subscription
• Design an experience for customers that helps them achieve their goal
• Ensure that marketing and product work in parallel
• Have success measurement indicators.

For inspiration, think about the actions/activities your best customers are capable of doing, in order to establish the fundamental key steps for their (and your) success.

4 – Tips to boost your growth

During WebSummit, Marie had the opportunity to attend many conferences, which allowed her to put together a small compilation of the advice she heard most often during these conferences and that caught her attention:

1. Minimize and simplify the conversion funnel as much as possible: 1 value proposition → 1 target → 1 landing page! This will help you especially during the analysis phase.
2. Company culture is the fertile ground of a company, so it must never be forgotten.
3. Controlled growth, to ensure a fulfilled team.
4. Transparency in your communication. Do not hesitate to ask your customers directly for advice; they will be delighted to advise you.
5. Reward merit and motivation rather than seniority
6. Integrate conversational marketing into your overall marketing strategy! Indeed, the way customers communicate with companies is changing. Consumers today seek to communicate quickly and in the most transparent way possible with companies. It is up to you to choose which actions are relevant to encourage discussion with your prospects and customers: chatbots, social networks, etc., SMS, etc.
7. Automate everything you can. Choose interconnected tools.

To conclude this section, here are the 4 concepts to remember from WebSummit according to Marie:

• Ethics : We are in an era where the notion of ethics is becoming increasingly important in the eyes of consumers. Brands are aware that this is a criterion that matters more than others. Tech is now serving the environment; finding a business model that supports ecological and social projects has become a priority. On this subject, Google announced the launch of an accelerator for social and environmental start-ups by giving them access to Google’s resources and technological tools.
• Diversity : Thanks to diversity, we can improve and succeed collectively. To illustrate this, Marie gave us the example of Singapore and Malaysia, which put their political differences aside in order to solve the issue of drinking water supply. Moreover, during WebSummit, many speakers advised agencies to come closer together and move forward together around common challenges.
• Transparency : Transparency between a brand and its consumers, between managers and their teams, and in customer / partner relationships is essential today. Consumers need to have confidence; we are in an era of distrust toward brands, and only transparency will be able to reassure consumers and make them want to trust you.
• Honesty : Focusing on your product and its advantages is no longer enough; indeed, consumers expect generous, sincere content that brings them real value. Talk about your purpose, your goal, your vision, your concrete actions, their impact. In addition, one piece of advice heard several times: to reflect the personality of your brand, it is necessary to recruit employees who are aligned with its values and character traits.

5 – The App market

Here are a few figures:

• Apps convert 3 times more than mobile websites.
• Traffic coming from apps keeps growing
• A consumer spends on average 76% of their time on their 3 favorite apps and 96% of their time on their 10 favorite apps.

Speaking of apps, there is one that is booming: can you guess which one it is?

TikTok! Indeed, this social network is hugely successful among young people aged 12 to 18. TikTok now has 625 million active users per month. This Chinese application allows teenagers to post videos a few seconds long in which they lip-sync, dance to music tracks, or take on various challenges.

TikTok in France:

• 4 million active users
• 57% women and 43% men
• 40 minutes per day: this is the average time spent by French users on TikTok
• 8 times: this is the average number of times a user opens the application per day
• 5 billion videos are viewed each month.

TikTok is now the new interaction channel with teenagers for brands. Indeed, more and more advertisers are taking advantage of the emerging fame of the platform’s celebrities to promote content through paid videos. Today, TikTok is monetizing and providing advertisers with an increasingly solid and powerful platform. For now, through in-feed advertising formats, but this is only the beginning.

6 – Information overload vs Data Driven

We live in a world of information overload. Indeed, every day we face a tornado of information, which pushes us to create ever more sophisticated strategies in order to capture attention.

As you will have understood, this has an impact on the way we work, on our organization, and also on our teams. Indeed, we are constantly more solicited, we face a multitude of information, and we are pushed to analyze everything. You should also know that today we make 20 times more decisions per day than 50 years ago. This notably explains the appearance of new illnesses such as burnout.

The problem in all of this? We make poor use of this immense amount of data, so it is time to evolve in the way we use data, especially in management.

Indeed, management must not remain on the sidelines of this major digital transformation. A new generation of leaders now relies on advanced data analysis and AI to make decisions and steer their business. This is what is called DATA DRIVEN MANAGEMENT!

“Data-driven” management marks a break not only in the way of designing and executing a strategy, but also in the culture and methods of management.

But be careful not to fall into the traps of this digital revolution either. Indeed, it is essential to preserve an agile organization and an environment conducive to creativity.

7 – Future developments of our society

Our “future”, particularly at the behavioral level in our new living contexts.

• The evolution of our homes:

Véranne was lucky enough during WebSummit to be able to see what our homes will look like in 2025 during a conference held by Samsung. While the connected home is beginning to emerge, the percentage of equipped households is still low. However, the number of connected objects for the home is skyrocketing, and in ten years, it is easy to imagine that the vast majority of homes will be packed with these installations. Brightness, temperature, door locking… Everything will be automated. To go even further, by 2025 our vital signs, our general health condition (cholesterol, diabetes…) and our diet could well be analyzed via sensors placed in our beds, jewelry, clothes… The interest of these new technologies is to provide a new experience to consumers who are increasingly seeking sensory emotions and memories… that is why in 2025 walls could become connected and dynamic devices in their own right, and allow the management of many functions within the home (security, atmosphere…).

• The evolution of our mobility:

You have surely heard of the self-driving car, which has been at the heart of automotive innovation in recent years. It is now obvious for the major automotive players: in the coming years, the self-driving car will become a reality, and some models are almost ready. In addition to our cars that will drive us around on their own, our packages will be delivered by air; Amazon has also unveiled its latest version of a hybrid drone dedicated to delivery and wants to test it in the coming months. To go even further, the Munich start-up Lilium has just successfully passed the test phase of its flying taxi.

Beyond these new futuristic means, scooters, skateboards, folding bicycles, or hoverboards, which allow you to travel short distances, represent the future of urban mobility according to experts. This phenomenon is called “urban micromobility”. These new clean, practical, and economical means of transport respond to current concerns related to sustainable development, while also being, in many cases, the fastest solution for getting from point A to point B in an urban environment. For the city of Paris, there was indeed a before and after electric scooters. We cannot talk about scooters without mentioning the brand “Lime”, which is now worth 2.4 billion dollars and is omnipresent in our European capitals.

To conclude, our world is undergoing major change and we are only at the beginning. Inevitably, this evolution is going to change us, and we will have to adapt as we have done up to now. Even so, we are the actors of this change, so it is essential to preserve our critical thinking and our capacity for discernment in order to remain active participants and not simply undergo all these innovations. We must accept moving forward, and not run away because we are afraid.

We hope we have made you want to join us next year; do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to join us for Web Summit 2020!