This week sees the return of BrightonSEO, which has fast become one of the most popular and respected natural search conferences in the UK. Their next event on Friday is expecting over 2,000 attendees and draws some of the best speakers in the world of search.

Whilst we always attend the conference and have spoken before, this year we’re getting further involved by hosting a Retail and Luxury roundtable on the Thursday before the conference. The roundtable sessions are hosted by key companies in the sector who facilitate intimate discussion, and learning between key members of unique industry sectors.

Rosie, Lucy, and Tony will be facilitating the session and encouraging luxury retail professionals to share experiences and learn from each other as the luxury retail sector continues to grow and adapt to ever-changing conditions. Areas of discussion will cover:

1)   Market Watch – which brands are trail blazing across multiple channels and how do you keep up with them and assess the success of your competitors online? We will also look at the effect of the strong summer on online sales and the importance of having a thorough understanding of you customers and how they experience your brand at every stage of the buying journey.

2)   Industry best practice – how do you keep on top of best practice in the ever-changing retail industry? How have you been affected by the changes in Google’s Best Practice Guidelines and when does best practice go against your brand guidelines?

3)   Insight and measurement – here we will look at Google Analytics vs. 3rd party measurement tools, how well do you know your customers and how important is this data, and lastly, what KPIs should you be using to measure success and how do you report on success up the business?

4)   Financial planning – we will discuss the UK economy and how budgeting methods have changed in the last few years and also the biggest challenges to budgeting for seasonality across Christmas and sale periods.

5)   Key resources and allocation – this last section will focus on whether digital marketing is best managed in-house or outsourced. How do you ensure in-house teams are as skilled as possible as the market changes and also when working with agencies, is it best to work project by project or for a long term partnership?

As you can see, we have plenty to talk about! There are already some great brands signed up for the session so we’re really looking forward to some lively discussion on the subject of luxury retail. We’ll be writing up the key discussion points of the session so do keep an eye on the Frogblogg for updates and also the Leapfrogg Twitter feed.