Improve your 2021 game plan with inspirational learnings from Digital Growth Live 2020

by Amy Rountree

Digital Growth Live 2020 was an inspiring and empowering event spearheaded by Digital Women. Polly Barnfield OBE Founder and CEO of Maybe* was delighted to share her vision and passion for social media, and for the digital upskilling of the millions of businesses across the UK striving to re-orientate themselves in this strange and turbulent world we are now all living in.

Digital Women is a community of persistent, positive and powerful digital leaders, all committed to sharing their skillset and can-do leadership in the hope of inspiring others and creating change.

With over 32 pages loaded with insights and expertise, the Digital Growth eBook summarises all the learnings from Digital Growth Live 2020. We urge you to download a copy and gift yourself a dose of possibility. In the meantime, we’ve created this summary guide of what to expect, not just from Polly, but from Lucy Hall, Digital Women founder, and from the other thought leaders who contributed their time and energy.

Lucy Hall Founder Digital Growth Live

Lucy set up Digital Growth Live in 2020 “to provide everyone with a place to access the skills and resources they need to thrive in this ever-changing digital landscape”. Lucy set about bringing together 40 experts to deliver actionable advice, in demand digital skills, and a virtual community in which attendees could feel connected.

Let’s take a look at those experts and what they had to say in more detail.

Polly Barnfield, OBE Founder and CEO Maybe*

The problem that keeps Polly awake at night is the same problem the entire Maybe* team is focused on solving. Only 28% of businesses in the UK are active on social media. Why is this? Polly’s mission is to encourage that remaining 72% to spread their digital wings and reap the benefits.

Polly shared the 10 Step Framework to Social Media Success that underpins the approach Maybe* takes to social media, putting social listening and customer engagement firmly at the heart of what businesses need to do, and showing them exactly how to do it.

Drawing inspiration from hugely successful offline and online brands such as Primark and Gymshark; the 10 Step Framework is something that CAN be replicated by any business of any size with just the right know-how. And by sharing a case study from independent retailer Keith Scarrott, Polly demonstrated how by using the 10 steps Keith Scarrott was able to deliver an 11,000% increase in sales over lockdown.

Amber Vellacott

Amber put fun and creativity firmly at the heart of her 5 steps to launching on to social media with a bang. Amber’s positive mindset and willingness to gently challenge attendees to make change and do things differently made for an empowering and exciting rallying cry to action.

Rosanna Kierney

Powerhouse Rosanna Kierney urges us it's time to ‘level up’. Perseverance, hard work and a growth mindset are all necessary ingredients to staying relevant and competitive in this new world. Be brave, be bold and stop fighting for a seat at the table when you can just build your own is the contagious energy Rosanna brings to the table - most likely the one she’s built for herself.

Ella Orr

Ella is a bona fide social media expert and all round social evangelist. Ella’s session made us all think about LinkedIn and our personal branding. Ella stepped away from the traditional stuffy perception of LinkedIn and championed authenticity, spark and connection.

Georgina White

Georgina is a Pinterest coach who partners with entrepreneurs to help them master the power of Pinterest. Georgina left us with 10 top tips and takeaways to become more pinfluential and pinspiring.

Karina Rock

Karina took us all off the social piste and into the world of emotional intelligence in leadership. Emotions speak louder than logic and emotional intelligence and awareness are non-negotiable skills in today’s world to get the best from your people and inspire them to want to drive results for your business.

Catherine Gladwyn

Email expert Catherine removed the jargon and mystery from email automation. Loaded with actionable tactics for successfully automating emails and your CRM programme, the session left us armed with the know-how to stay out of the junk folder.

Erin Thomas Wong

Break out of your box and become visible. Getting yourself and your business out there is essential for growth and for scale. But it's also terrifying when it's time to share the creation you’ve been lovingly building and nurturing. Erin inspires us to step out of our comfort zone, puff out our chests and be proud of everything we’ve built. Be seen, be heard.

Stuart Hall

Stuart is a thought leader on thought leadership and his know-how gifted us a plethora of ideas to bake thought leadership into our own content strategies, our own pitches and our plans for our personal growth.

Christine Gritmon

Your personal brand is who you are and why people should care. It’s what makes you unique and what you offer the world. The session left us invigorated with self belief, and ready to polish up and take pride in how we talk about ourselves.

Dominique Elsey, Hootsuite

Dominique heads up marketing strategy for Hootsuite and took us through their social media trends for 2021. Insight-led and customer-centric with data derived from thousands of Hootsuite’s customers, Dominique's session impressed upon everyone the importance social media has to play in delivering tangible business growth and increased customer satisfaction.

Holly Whittles and Lucy Hall

Holly gave us all the opportunity to indulge our inner geek with an enlightening introduction into the world of AI and its use cases for business. From email automation to customer sentiment analysis, chatbots and hiring practices, our minds were well and truly blown into the future.

Next up it was the turn again of the event founder Lucy, who loaned her own passion and ideas to improve business efficiency through AI, robotics and big data.

Molly ‘Moodle’ Wright

Molly’s campaign for creativity is a breath of fresh air. Molly reminded us that although we ‘can’ use software to speed up creative production, there still must be a place for creative process, ideation and individuality.

Inviting creative collaborators into your process, human led design and fresh, outside in thinking might just be the ticket you need to make your brand and business stand out more. Embrace it.

Sarah Jane Vincent

Mastering SEO and the inner workings of Google's search algorithm needn’t be a dark art. Sarah showed us simple methods to optimise your business online using tools such as Google My Business, link building, and guest blogging partnerships. Jargon-free and practical advice lifted the veil on what is quite often a complex and intimidating marketing channel to wrap your heads around.

Ruth Douglas

2020 was the year that businesses needed to get online quick. Ruth’s eCommerce expertise went a long way to alleviate and disprove misconceptions that launching eCommerce is a lengthy, expensive and skill-set dependent undertaking. There are solutions out there for all businesses, Go get ‘em.

Mitchell Platt

In short, Mitchell helped us grow. With a user case from the world of politics, Mitchell demonstrated how to win, simplified growth hacking for us and urged us to experiment and test our way to growth.

Vee Roberts

Vee showed us that monetising your brand need not be a costly exercise, or one only attainable by big brands with teams of agencies behind them. Loaded with tips and tricks to help your business stand out, we’re now confident we can sweat a tiny budget a bit harder and achieve our goals.

Abi Hough

Ever heard of CRO? That’s conversion rate optimisation for those of you as overwhelmed by acronyms as we get.. Well Abi broke it down. CRO is all about driving more people to take a desired action to drive revenue for your business, or customer delight. Using customer insight from any touch point from surveys or website data, you then define a hypothesis, test it, report on it, and if it's a successful exercise, you scale it.

Jennifer Watson

There’s an art to creating video interviews, and Jennifer Watson is, luckily for us, an artiste. Showing us exactly how to embrace our inner Oprah, Jennifer took us on a tour of the tips and tricks to open up an interview, how to ask questions, and how to research your subject.

Helen Ward

Helen got us ready for our close-up with her block-busting tactics for excelling at video. Armed with no specialist equipment, we’re now camera-ready.

Piperis Filippaios

Time to advance our e-Commerce skillset. Designed for store owners already online, but now ready to brand out even further into the digital frontier, Piperis tooled us up with lessons in GA, Facebook pixel tracking and dynamic advertising to help everyone sell more, and later on showed us how to G-M-B, that’s Google My Business!

Emma Jones, MBE

Emma is an entrepreneur, businesswoman and Founder of Enterprise Nation, the UK’s leading small business marketplace helping thousands of people start and grow their businesses. Emma’s inspiring story showed us all you don't have to be a tech expert, or need permission to have an opinion or an idea, mentors exist and want to help you get it off the ground.

Lucy Hall

Back over to Lucy for an exercise in mastering content planning. If you’ve ever wondered how and what to share on social media, how to save time on content creation, and how to optimise it for engagement, then Lucy’s your girl.

Debbie Clarke

Yellow. The colour of positivity and empowerment. For those of you remotely spiritually minded - it also happened to be the colour of the third chakra, associated with willpower and self belief. And we all need a dose of Debbie’s yellow-mindset. Debbie’s personal and honest story of overcoming her own challenges began with looking inside herself, and in the process reminded us the work always begins within, however uncomfortable that feels.

Shân Millie

Shân found herself an accidental techie when she discovered her purpose. Do you know your purpose? Are you moving in the direction of it? Do you know how to begin moving in the direction of it? No small questions here, but the answers were anything but daunting. Move fearlessly and tirelessly in the pursuit of your purpose. Inspiring stuff.

Lynn Parker

Buh-bye perfectionism. After a year spent on Zoom calls, Facetime, and Instagram stories, it's no wonder we might all be feeling a little bit tired of maintaining an illusion of visual perfection and sick to the back teeth of how nasty self talk causes us to sell ourselves short. Lynn throws self -despraction, over apologising and a scarcity mindset in the bin and replaces it with positivity, confidence, and abundance.

Diane Mensah

Enterprise Nation has helped to build a support network for small businesses and if there’s one thing they know for sure it’s that start-ups can achieve greatness during the most difficult of circumstances. Diane talked us through Enterprise Nation’s small business accelerator scheme, which provides digital training to help bring brands online and support businesses already online but looking for growth, expansion, and new strategies.

Ann Read

Time to get organised with a little help from Trello. Maybe* is a big fan of Trello which enables us to manage everyone’s projects and time, and maintain visibility on what everyone is working on. Ann’s session showed us how to create boards, how to use Trello for project management, and how we can get the whole team involved. Our minds felt decluttered instantly.

Kate Hamer

Kate’s empathetic session focused on a very real problem for women. How to return to work and get up to speed from maternity leave. Staying up to date with the fast moving world of digital is challenging enough as it is. But imagine doing that with the added responsibility of being a mum. For some of us, it was a reassuring affirmation you can do this, for others it served as a reminder to lift up and empower those around us.

Jade Foster-Jerrett

Jade lit us up with the magic of blogging and how to wave a wand over the content we create. Jade’s essential blogging ingredients, article ideas and the best platforms to use concocted a blogging potion we can’t wait to take.

Samantha Kelly

Raising your profile via the Twittersphere was on Samantha’s agenda. Covering the basics as well as some perhaps lesser known features of the micro-blogging platform, gave us all a fresh perspective.

Emma York

Sadly we can’t conjure time from thin air. But Emma York, shows us how to make the most of it with her arsenal of time-turning digital tools to optimise your resources.

Andy Lambert

Content Cal Co-Founder Andy Lambert is passionate about content marketing. Andy reminded us that people are looking for inspiration and entertainment from social media content, and highlighted some of the consumer trends that are emerging and shaping the way we do business. Andy reminded us it's all about putting the customer first.

Fab Giovanetti

Fab by name, fab by nature. It’s time to get creative and super-charge your Instagram video activity. Put purpose at the heart of what you do, and bring it to life with colour and creativity was the order of the day.

Jemma Fairclough-Haynes

Staff should be your company's biggest asset, and their voices on social media matter. Encouraging them to advocate for you shows trust between you and them. But it's also a duty of care to both your brand, and your staff to provide guidelines. Jemma showed us what a successful employee engagement and advocacy plan should look like.

Sarah Scarfe

Looking to dip your toes into the world of data? Sarah’s crash course into getting started using Google Data Studio was a perfect beginners’ guide. With detailed demonstrations on how to connect your data, set up your reports, a walkthrough of the chart types, and how you can share your reports with clients, we were left feeling confident, refreshed, and ready to give Google Data Studio a go!

Carla Watkins

Multipoddery might just be our new favourite work. It's defined as the art of thriving on multiple things. While specialisms and expertise are important, Carla showed us it's ok to be multi skilled, multi interested, and energized and excited across a spectrum. Variety is the spice of life after all. Crucially she also showed us how to turn that to our advantage to create diverse income streams. What a way to end Digital Growth Live!

The whole Maybe* team is proud to join these experts, and were delighted to have had the opportunity to learn more from others in the industry.

We hope Digital Growth Live gives you some food for thought and a sense of possibility, and that if you are venturing into brave new territory, that your courage to follow your curiosity is rewarded.

Download your 32 page Digital Growth Guide now to learn more

Get your report

With the Maybe* platform, you don’t have to be a social media pro to increase traffic and sales.

-----

? Grab yourself a Maybe* account and join the conversation. It's a powerful but easy to use social media management platform that helps you increase traffic and sales.

Get started for free