Every year, Digital Summit comes to Phoenix for two days to feature important topics and discussions from digital marketing’s finest thought leaders. To stay on top of our digital marketing game, we sent two of our digital marketing experts to learn about digital marketing best practices, latest industry trends, and new digital strategy tactics.
After attending 23 presentations over two days, these were our biggest insights to share:
Keep a Pulse on Emerging Technologies and Automation:
We interact with a variety of automation and artificial intelligence every day through apps and tools we use in our personal and professional lives, from Facebook’s facial recognition to chat bots to Gmail’s suggested email responses, and it’s only going to keep growing. Every industry, company, and customer can benefit from some form of automation, and new careers will emerge from this trend as the demand for technology experts will increase. The goal is to jump on the technology bandwagon now and start thinking of ways automation, API’s, robots, and machine learning can benefit your business. Once you realize your greatest needs and opportunities for efficiencies, you can start to build out a plan for resources you’ll need, realistic goals to reach, and timeline to roll out new technologies.
Retargeting is Important to Stay Relevant in Shopper’s Eyes:
Every day the average shopper has 28+ brand interactions, with 3 out of 4 people changing their minds while researching to make a purchase. What is even more concerning for marketers is that the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds today. To put that into perspective the average goldfish attention span is 9 seconds. As a marketer, you might be thinking “how do I make sure my brand stands out from the competition and it creates a lasting impression on shoppers?” The key is to use re-targeting to deliver ads to users who have already interacted with your website. This digital strategy will deliver your ads to the right shopper at the right time and help guide your customer back to your site while they are still in the researching stage of their buyer’s journey.
Create Strategic Content to Rank Higher on Google:
“If you’re focusing on users, if you’re creating content for your users, then you really shouldn’t have to worry too much about Google (ranking) penalties,” states John Muller from Google. Meaning that if you create content with your customer in mind by understanding what they want, fulfilling their informational needs, making that information easy to consume, and ensuring they are delighted, you’ve set your content up to be successful in Google’s eyes. The way we follow this best practice is to conduct persona research before we begin writing content. Doing a deep dive into what motivates your persona to make a purchase and how they communicate will set your content up to be aligned with your customer’s values. Once you know the customer’s behavior online, you can optimize your blogs so your ideal customer will find your website, engage with your brand online, and rank higher in Google.
Always be Testing Your Website:
Oftentimes, a simple change to your website and call to action can have huge benefits. This is where Google Optimize (free version released in 2016) comes into play. Google Optimize is a visual (no coding necessary) site editor to allow you to run A/B experiments to see what works for your website. This easy to use platform syncs up with your Google Analytics and Tag Manager account for seamless integration to track goals, bounce rate, pageviews, and session duration for each experiment. Multi-variant testing lets you test 2 or more variants at a time. You can test if changing your CTA to a different color or adding eye-catching keywords such as “free consultation” is worth the change and will increase your leads. The benefits of Google Optimize for your website are huge. This tool allows you to test a multitude of variants to see which experiment will drive the most leads for your business, and at low risk since this is an easy-to-use site editor with zero coding necessary. So why not give it a try?
So there you have it! Those are the main marketing strategies our team wanted to share from website strategy, Google rankings, and paid ads strategy from the Digital Summit 2018 Conference. Leave us a comment to share your takeaways or if you have questions for our team!
