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Turing Fest 2023: Niche positioning, winning words and our other takeaways

Here's what the Base Creative team learned about positioning, copy and more at tech conference Turing Fest this year, and who they learned it from.

The Base Creative team has had a presence at Turing Fest, Europe’s most talked about tech event, since 2016. 

It’s not just time to soak up great content from highly experienced and qualified speakers but also an opportunity to be fully immersed in conversations around business strategy, technology, growth – and where we come in. We’re always on, always discussing, analysing our business in the context of the talks we hear and the conversations we have with others.

This year’s attendees – Abby Webb, Anna Corbett, Greg Mileham and Iain Scott – sat down to discuss their experience at Turing Fest 2023 and the lessons they took away. 

Niche positioning with April Dunford

April Dunford’s keynote was about Positioning – how you target the space you want your brand to occupy in the market. It reconfirmed my belief that niche-ing is by far the most effective way to market your services. Gain success in a small market, and use that success to expand. Target one specific key problem that you can clearly solve, then prove that you’re a safe pair of hands.

Greg

I loved the opportunity to see April speak again this year. She was my favourite speaker last year, and it was particularly interesting thinking about her ideas in relation to our clients.

Abby

Winning words with Joanna Wiebe

As a Copyhackers and Tutorial Tuesday fan, I was really excited to see Joanna Wiebe‘s talk on the concept of money-making and money-losing words – reinforcing just how important and influential your website copy is in the user journey.

Abby

The talk dived into the psychology of words, which in itself is truly fascinating. Again, it shows the importance and value of great copy (and micro-copy) on websites, to motivate certain actions.

Iain

Actionable talks

Georgie Smallwood‘s ‘The Change Wave’ was a very actionable talk about enabling teams to embrace change, be ready for it and approach it with curiosity. I will  be rewatching the talk to make more detailed notes on how we can apply this at Base Creative.

ANNA

Gia Laudi spoke about operationalising customer value by finding out what matters to long-term happy, healthy customers, and then reverse engineering success using the JTBD (jobs to be done) framework. Anna Shipman spoke about executing effective strategy, and reminded me that we need to communicate strategy and vision all the time in different ways for different people: verbally, visually, textually.”

greg

Challenging behaviours and processes

Overall, Turing Fest has always been a great opportunity to question our processes as a company and ensure we don’t get stuck in the everyday grind of running a business.

Anna

The topics at Turing Fest are broader and less ‘practical’ than other conferences. This isn’t a bad thing. Instead, they help you challenge your behaviours, your habits and the way you think and approach your work.

abby

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