AdCon 2024 – My Biggest Takeaway
The first marketing event I went to was way back in 2005.
The best I’ve ever been to in terms of contacts made and overall value to my business was an event setup by Robert Puddy in Coventry in 2007. I have several business partners and best friends now that I first met at that event.
The best event I’ve ever been to in terms of the content delivered was AdCon 2024, a couple of weeks back (22nd to 24th May).
I’m actually later than I intended publishing this post largely because I’ve been so busy acting on ideas generated from listening to the speakers.
Jon Penberthy & the AdClients Team – Congratulations and Thank You to Jon and his team for putting on such a valuable three days of solid content!
I’m fairly sure it’s the first event I’ve ever been to that I have made sure I am in my seat for every single speaker, I ended up filling my notepad with notes, again, a first for me.
I’ll share both my biggest takeaway and what I think was missing further down the post
But first…
AdCon 2024 Speaker Highlights
Here’s a VERY quick break down of the 3 days of speakers and a few simple takeaways from them:
#1: Jon Penberthy – Positioning your offer
– Be Results Oriented + Use Displayed Understanding + Simplify Your Deliverables [so people can see the end of their journey] + Premium Pricing
#2: Alisha Conlin-Hurd
What do you do? Who do you do it for? What is your answer…
Knowing your client accurately lets you target them specifically, by calling them out in your content.
#3: Lewis Smith – Lifestyle Keys
Does your business allow you the life you want?
Whatever your business is, you MUST know your numbers!
#4: Jubril Agoro – StoryTelling
Imagine your ideal customer as one of your friends, then ask yourself would I send/show/say this to that friend?
If not, how would I re-work it to make it better, or more like a story…
#5: Cordelia Kate – Community
Need to build a better community for client AND leads
Stop building a following, you need to have that community element in order to X2.5 conversions.
#6: Adam Stott – Branding, the Halo Effect
Going from unknown to known
Branding starts with your Brand Origin Story = your challenges faced and overcome, this is where your demonstration of power comes from
#7: Ryan Pinnick – Access your Genius
Daily ritual of healing your unconscious mind
You need a strong ‘Why’, identify your purpose
#8: Sarah Gray – Get on a Stage [can be a podcast]
Speaking builds authority, and press, and credibility, and conversions, and gets you everywhere in Google, which makes it easier to sell and ultimately reduces your client acquisition costs.
#9: Nick Bradley – Scale & Exit
– Build a Co. that can run without you.
– 80% of businesses that hit $3mill sell
– The business needs recurring revenue, support processes, marketing setup as a Process.
Adcon 2024: Day 2
#10: Kirsty Carden – Social Media
Your Profile is a visual SNAPSHOT of your business, it MUST BE CLEAR WHAT YOU DO
Test – if someone looks at your page can they easily tell what you do?
#11: Marley Jaxx
Be consistently inconsistent – if your content is predictable you won’t get the Click
– if it raises a question in someone’s mind then you Get The Click
Use Disruptive Hooks – it’s not about the topic, it’s about raising a question
“it’s not a matter of if it will happen, it’s if you will keep at it until it happens”
#12: Kennedy – Email Marketing
DO NOT OVER NURTURE Subscribers, get on with selling
The only segmentation you need is Leads v Buyers
People who buy once are 50% more likely to buy again
Do not sell in your email, your emails only job is to get the click, let the sales page do it’s work.
#13: Ali Abdaal – Youtuber
Get people to submit their questions or problems as comments, then get people to upvote their favorites for topics for future videos
Podcast and interviews are great long form content to boost viewing length, then cut out the best bits from them to use as shorts and a summarized video with a better thumb/hook
#14: Rob Moore – Podcasts
Use Organic content to see what works, then use that to create your ads as it will reduce your ad costs.
Collaborations – Interviews are the ideal way of sharing audiences to grow yours with zero cost
#15: Jon Penberthy – 8 Figure Master Plan
Giving away awards for goalposts that clients achieve is a great way to build loyalty, social proof and brand champions
Jon’s 8 figure master plan was way to detailed to be watered down to a line or two, sorry! ?
#16: Tom Breeze – Ads Agency
If your clicks take people off Youtube you will end up being charged more for your ads, so do not take the click away from YT UNLESS they are a Qualified Prospect
You NEED to feed the AI the correct data, Don’t let AI focus on getting free leads as it will just concentrate on that, rather than sales/paying customers.
#17: Joe Hides – Meta Ads
– Don’t compete on price
– Don’t rely on 1 ad, run 10 with different message positions to test which works best, launch all the ads in one cbo (bucket) to let the AI find the winner
The more solution based ads you give the AI to work with, the easier it is for meta to match a target customer with a relevant solution.
*Joe even provided a Prompt for Claude to help with some of this, if you’d been there you’d have that! 🙂
#18: Pete Earle [AdClients In House Video Ads Expert]
Simple ads have a shorter shelf life
Higher production value ads have better branding and last longer, but bigger cost, .: bigger risk
An UNUSUAL Angle LASTS & STICKS in minds
Qualify the audience – entertaining the wrong people DOES NOT = Profit!
Test, Learn, Repeat, Improve: start with 5 ads, then test & tweak the 2 best to find a winner, then scale
Day 3 – AdClients Success Stories from AdCon 2023
#19: Success Panel: Andy Smith
#20: Success Panel: Neil & Jackie Dobson
#21: Success Panel: Chris Hale
#22: Success Panel: Joanne Avison
#23: Jet Van Wijk – High Ticket Freelancer
Hybrid Advertising using Instagram
Use manychat for engagement
Always negotiate a 30% discount for test post
#24: David JP Phillips – Communication Skills
It’s impossible to give a meaningful short description for David’s talk, as he gave some exercises that you’d need to actually watch.
Check his Ted Talks, especially The Science of Storytelling
I’ve also just downloaded his book, High On Life, on audible, looking forward to that one.
#25: Jason Graystone – Trading
Check Googles “Zero Moment of TRUTH” decision making moment
Spread your customer LTV out -> this reduces the barrier to entry
Ask yourself what would your business look like if the money didn’t matter?
#26: Steven Bartlett – apparently he’s on Dragons Den (I don’t watch much TV)
Jon spent quite a while chatting with Steven, so there was a LOT of good stuff, including questions suggested/submitted by the audience over the previous 2 days.
Hiring = more success is driven by building the team than building your own skills, the team creates the product, not you. Reframe yourself as a specialized recruitment company hunting the best team members to build the business you want. You MUST find the right people.
Your 1st team Members –
- 1st – Videographer
- 2nd – Performance Marketer
- 3rd – Graphic Designer
*this applies to all ‘media’ companies, and coaches count as media companies
And my favorite – You MUST test things
Ask yourself, is it petty, or will it get you that extra 1% increase?
Those small, incremental increases ADD UP.
They also give you a real sense of progress and forward momentum, this feeling of getting somewhere helps create and reinforce better culture.
Split Testing is your marketing edge, Tests get you ahead of your competition.
And on that note, if you’d like to make it easy to start split testing all sorts of things web related, then check out my Split Testing SaaS – https://splittestmonkey.com
#27: JoJo Graham – Coaching
Increase the Lifetime Value of Clients by thinking further ahead on your clients long term journey, e.g. 5, 10, 20 years
Customers are interested in getting to their destination, if you can demonstrate that you are moving them forwards on that path/journey they will be loyal.
MRR – reduce financial stress from feast&famine by building Monthly Recurring Revenue
financial stress leads to bad financial decisions, MRR leads to better/healthier decisions
#28: Rhonda Swann – Branding PR Agency
The higher your online visibility is, the cheaper your ad spend, because when people google you there is authority and credibility easily found
*this comes back to the Google ‘Zero Moment of Truth’ decision point and ‘7 11 4’ rule
i.e. they spend 7 hours researching you, & need to see 11 touch points across 4 different locations
It is perceived as REAL authority if the content about you is from someone else…
#29: Dan Henry – Marketing
Do what the 1% does, Read books on what you want in life to get knowledge AND program your unconscious
Decide to take risk – your mind wants to be safe, to get rewards requires risk, which means your mind actually fights your success – remember customers say no because they get scared, remove that fear.
So, with all that said, what was my biggest takeaway?
Whilst there was a LOT of good stuff, as you can tell from the quick summary above, the biggest for me was the idea to use Hybrid ads, where you start with your organic content, then use that to define your ad creatives.
Especially using Youtube as your “Incubator”, where you can start building your audience organically, but then use that audience as the starting place for your ads. Whilst I had come across the idea previously, it hadn’t really sunk home for me as to how powerful this could be, probably because I’ve not been doing enough paid ads on YT or elsewhere.
Add to this the ‘long form’ video content that several speakers have had success with and I now have a far clearer plan on where to start with YT Ads.
What was missing?
I have to admit I was surprised there wasn’t more AI related content…
So much so that I’ve been working on an extra something with my Prompt Master and business partner, Simon Hodgkinson, and we’re creating a prompt pack to send to Jon to see if he wants to share it with the AdCon 2024 attendees. If not we may well end up re/de-branding it and offering it ourselves…
AdCon 2025?
Yes, there’s going to be another one in May next year, although tickets aren’t publicly available just yet, they were for attendees at the end of the event, and I’ve already secured mine, which is the best indication that I think it’s well worth the time and money invested!
Maybe I’ll see you there?
