Our Recap of Digital Summit in Philadelphia
Recently, part of the Digital Team at Gavin was able to take some time away from the office and attend Digital Summit in Philadelphia. Digital Summit is a touring series of Digital Marketing conferences that touches on topics including content strategy, search advertising and SEO, email marketing, social media marketing and more. While there was tons of information that we get to take back to influence our digital strategy, here are a few key takeaways and insights we loved during our two days in Philly.
Be Human
As a consumer, we are saturated with marketing in every way shape and form all day, every day. How do marketers not only compete but stand out from the rest of the noise? While there are many ways to answer this question, one theme from Digital Summit seemed to wrap it all up. Be human. Even though it is a marketers job to find how they are specifically targeting and craft campaigns according to that audience, sometimes humanizing the audience gets thrown to the wayside.
There are a few different ways advertisers can always come back to their audiences and make sure that their content and strategy is focused on this theme. One way to do so is to create personas based on the audience you are targeting, giving that audience a name, demographics, psychographics and more. Make that person human.
Carlos Gil, Entrepreneur and Founder of Gil Media Co., said something in his session entitled, “What Marketers Can Learn About Social Media from DJ Khaled and Drake”, that went right along with the theme of making content human. Instead of the usual “Content is King”, Gil went a different way with “Community is King”.
Consider A Private Messaging Strategy
Along with the focus on keeping content more human, different mediums are gaining popularity that focus on the individual. More and more people are worried about their privacy when using social media. Apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are generating more and more usage. Studies have shown individuals are 53% more likely to engage with a business they know they are able to message privately.
There is so much untapped potential in using apps like these to engage with consumers for a variety of different industries. Chatbots via Facebook Messenger and other platforms can be set up to interact with users automatically or at least qualify leads by asking questions and continuing them through the sales funnel.
Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey and founder of WordStream provided insight about Facebook Messenger strategy at Digital Summit showed some returns on that form of marketing. When comparing Facebook Messenger chatbots and email marketing campaigns, Kim saw 3-10 time increase in open/read rate and 10-20 time increase in click rates. This focus on the individual is something marketers should continue to keep an eye on.
Don’t Ignore The Power of Voice Search
There’s no argument that smart speakers are on the rise. Over 52 million Americans are owners of smart speakers. Sarah Tustin, Emerging Channels Strategy Lead at Google, referenced this stat among others in her presentation at Digital Summit. In her session, “Preparing Marketing Efforts for Tomorrow’s Mobile Consumers”, Tustin reinforced the importance of thinking about the future of voice search.
Throughout the session, Tustin invited attendees to brainstorm and really think about how their brand sounds. This is an interesting concept as it has been applied to many other aspects of traditional advertising with television and radio but takes a whole new meaning when considering voice search. While this medium is newer to the advertising scene, it is definitely one to watch and start to prepare to use.
Build Your Customer List with Strategically Positioned Email Sign Up Forms
Growing the number of customer emails you have is an important task for any marketer or marketing team.
Why it’s important:
- Email lists provide a fairly undistracted audience (those opening their emails) to market to.
- Further, email lists are used in PPC advertising on Google and Facebook, where emails can be used to generate audiences that look like your existing customers. Saving you money and increasing your marketing effectiveness.
How, When, and Where to do it:
- Online
- Newsletter Archive Page
- Targeted Posts on FB/IG
- Subscribe Page
- Preferences Page
- Site Navigation
- Offline
- Main Counter or Point of Interaction
- Tradeshow Booths
- Special Events
Understand the Contributing Touchpoints in Your Customers Path to Purchase
The customer journey is self-directed today. Whether you continue to use AIDA models or perhaps another approach you still can benefit greatly in understanding how your marketing efforts work together.
Attribution modeling is a fancy term for this phenomenon. You can use tools like Google Analytics, when setup expertly, to see if your Facebook Ad triggered a web search that resulted in your Google Ad being clicked on ultimately leading to an email sign-up conversion on your website.
Each touchpoint played a role in creating the customer success story, but often only the last click gets the acknowledgment. This can wreak havoc on your understanding of what truly is motivating action on your website. To do this, you’ll need to get to grips with attribution modeling.
Type of attribution include:
- Last interaction is most common attribution model. That is, we attribute the conversion to the last point of clarity. (i.e. how did someone enter your webpage?)
- First interaction is more appropriate for leads-focused organizations with a short sales cycle. (i.e. what first inspired someone to look into your offer?)
- Linear is an even weight for each contributing touchpoint. (i.e. each step was equally important).
- Position-based gives special weight to the first and last touchpoints.
- Time decay shifts the weight of value increasingly toward the last touchpoint. (i.e. what finally tipped the scale to get the customer to convert?)
Elevate Your Website Link Profile by Removing Negative Site Associations
One of the tasks that Google has given and is rewarding website owners for doing is disavowing toxic links.
That is, a website owner can review inbound links and evaluate the spammy-ness of the inbound links. If there are spammy websites linking into your website you can disassociate with those websites by using Google Search Console to assert disassociation.
In that manner, Google is more or less partnering with site owners in policing and maintaining a cultivated web. They are doing this through a process called disavowing.
When 20 or 200 even 2000 webmasters disavow a link within GSC it’s an affirming and powerful signal that the offending website is an offense. This work helps tell Google that you are taking an active role in maintaining your website, and that you’re paying attention.
Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? We can help.
