Earlier this month our performance marketing team flew to the Big Apple to attend ClickZ Live 2015. Gathering qualified professionals from different horizons, this innovative conference positions itself as an event “designed by digital marketers, for digital marketers”. This was the perfect opportunity to swap insights with industry leaders and get a firsthand forecast of upcoming trends in SEO, media, business intelligence and email. Each of the event’s days covered specific learning tracks, here’s an overview of this year’s topics of interest:
Day 1
Data-Driven Marketing / Content Marketing Strategy / Next Generation Search / Advanced / Learn with Google
Day 2
Social Innovation / Mobile and Local Optimization / Email Marketing / Advanced / Yahoo Ad Labs
Many valuable lessons were taught and we come out from this experience sharper digital marketers. Read on to discover the five takeaways our team brought back to Montreal.
1. Organic social media is dead (Tim Goudie, Coca Cola)
- Organic social media isn’t an option anymore. Brands should be interested in talking to the right customers rather than anyone wanting to listen.
- According to Goudie, Coca Cola’s social success story is “both an art and a science”.
- Brands must develop engaging creatives, while leveraging data science to drive the right message to the right audiences.
- Successful social media is all about Double D’s: Data & Details.
2. Create copy that connects (Frank Palmieri, Yahoo!)
The key ingredients to developping engaging content are:
- Feeling first – Make sure your audience feels your message.
- Speaking the consumer’s language – Talk to your audience, not over their heads.
- Earning consumers’ trust – Always make believable claims. Testimonials can be very effective. Don’t be shy with your trademarks and copyrights: they build credibility.
- Leveraging your competitive advantage – Use phrases that show your audience how your products or services are better suited for their needs.
3. Get the people talking (Jim Boykin, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- Search engines place more trust in what others say about you, than what you say about yourself.
- To earn trust in the eyes of the engines, you have to get others to talk about you. This should come first, before anything else.
- Great design, programming, usability, conversion optimization, on-page optimization become worthless if others aren’t talking about you.
- The more people/websites spreading the good word, the higher your business will rank on search engines.
4. We Demystified a Few Link Building Myths
- There is no such thing as “Hundreds of Directories”
- There is no such thing as “Hundreds of Article Syndication Sites”
- There is no such thing as “Hundreds of Blog Reviews”
- There is no such thing as “Hundreds of Guest Posts”
- There is no such thing as “Hundreds of Forum Comments”
5. Go Mobile or Go Home
Throughout the presenters’ keynotes, one of the central threads was Google’s imminent algorithm update. Since mobile traffic is getting greater everyday, experts believe that it will have a bigger impact than any other previous updates. Luckily, there are some tools to help prepare for this change: