Leeds Business Week 2015- Day 4

15 October, 2015

After having such an amazing day yesterday at Leeds Business Week, I woke up this morning ready and excited for the day ahead.

I headed straight over to the Google Digital Garage at Clarence Dock in Leeds city centre to prepare for the second of Jonny’s seminars, ‘SEO, LinkedIn & Blogging – Digital Marketing Round Up – Part 2’. It was brilliant to see Adam Chandler from Reel Film already there and setting up his time lapse video ready for the event to begin. It was also great to see so many faces from yesterday’s seminar and fabulous to see some new faces too!

The event covered the final three key elements of digital marketing, SEO, LinkedIn and Blogging. With so much to cover across these three platforms, Jonny began with the world of SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, was best summarised by Jonny as merely common sense. It is all about creating great, original, engaging content and this is the best way to ensure your website is easily found on Google.

After a very swift tour of the world of SEO – it was straight into using LinkedIn to optimise your profile to ensure you are found on Google. It was brilliant to hear so many questions asked about the social media platform and one of the key messages that came across during the seminar was not to simply send an automated LinkedIn request to potential connections. Always personalise – and as David Israel quite rightly said – if you can’t explain why you want to connect with someone, then why would they want to connect with you?

Finally, the seminar ended with blogging. The key message here – blogging should form the core of every digital marketing campaign and in order to be able to create great, original, engaging content you need to have in place an editorial calendar!

Leeds Business Lunch – Hosted by The Yorkshire Mafia

Image courtesy of @JKTChallenge

The next and final event of the day was the brilliant ‘Leeds Business Lunch – hosted by The Yorkshire Mafia’. The lunch was held at Bibis in Leeds City Centre and provided over 200 delegates with the chance to network, mingle, enjoy a well deserved drink, listen to some fantastic speakers and enjoy a delicious two course meal.

The event began at 12pm and there was a fantastic opportunity to network with other like-minded businesses from all different walks of life and backgrounds. I was fortunate enough to speak to Helen Beachell from Simon On The Streets and hear all about the incredible work she has been doing across not only Leeds but Yorkshire too!

After a great half hour of mingling it was time to take our seats for the main event. Myself and Jonny were lucky enough to be joined by Sarah Gough and Tom Selby from We Are Boutique and Kyle Minnock and Alex Pawsey from Team JKT to make up a fabulous table. After brief introductions, the starters were served and after everyone had cleared their plates (which didn’t take long) it was time for a both funny and truly inspiring talk by Tony Watson from First Direct Arena. I particularly enjoyed the audience participation and it was brilliant to hear how Lady Gaga and Queen can play a key role in delivering important business messages.

The second half of the talk by Tony highlighted the importance of coming together as businesses to help raise money for amazing causes. Team JKT and their #PoppyStomp challenge is one of those such causes. A team of 4, Tony, Jacob, Kyle and Alex will be covering a staggering 5,000 miles and raising money for 4 amazing charities by visiting 10 Commonwealth War Graves and laying a wreath at each one. They will be carrying this out across 6 days, departing from Leeds on the 6th November and returning in time for Armistice Day on the 11th November. What they are aiming to achieve is none other than truly amazing and we wish them all the best of luck!

Image courtesy of @OpenComms_

Then it was time for the main course – which again didn’t last long – before the Leeds Business Week Lunch drew to a close. It was also great to see the jrc.agency Twitter Wall in action, in fact at one point, it seemed the #leedsbizweek hashtag was working too well and we momentarily broke Twitter!

All in all I had another truly momentous day at Leeds Business Week and with a mixture of networking, being inspired, motivated and coming together as one business community, all in a days work – I left feeling slightly disappointed that the amazing week was finally drawing to a close. However, I am joyful at the prospect of Leeds Business Week 2016 and already can’t wait to see what the year ahead brings in terms of business for Leeds and Yorkshire.

Finally, if you attended one or both (or even none!) of Jonny’s seminars but would like to get hold of a copy of the slides then you can download them here.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Make sure you check back in tomorrow for the final round up of Leeds Business Week 2015 – day 5!