Today is day 3 of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in cold Chicago, and it was another good day of brain-info-overload! Here is a brief synopsis of what I learned throughout the day.
KEYNOTE: Given by Dan Siroker who led the analytics team for the Obama campaign. He gave a list of the lessons he learned throughout the campaign and how we as SEOs can use it for our sites.
- Define quantifiable success metrics – make sure to measure what is successful and what isn’t.
- Question assumptions – don’t assume what you think will work is what actually does.
- Divide & conquer – segment different pieces of your site and find out which pieces work the best for conversions and use those!
- Take advantage of circumstances
- Turn your customers into evangelists – I thought this was one of the best points of his speech. Have gave an example of how in the Obama campaign they used videos of supporters and volunteers talking about Obama instead of having videos of Obama talking about Obama. It goes back to the whole point of how people like to see customer testimonials – use those to influence other people to purchase from you or in this case vote for you.
Dan then talked about a new type of marketing called Social Affiliate Marketing in which businesses can start supporting causes or charities and encouraging their customers to then ask their friends and families to support it as well. For instance, let’s say you bought something at a particular business’ website. After you clicked on the final button to finish the sale you would be directed to a “Thank you” page that had a listing of different charities that the business was wanting to support. It would also give a list of social media links (facebook, twitter, etc.) in which you could use to tell your friends and families to purchase from this business to support the charity as well. The company that Dan has started that is promoting this type of technology is http://www.spreadly.com/. This enables the business to get more visits as well as help the charity.
SESSION 1: Advanced B2B Marketing in which Patricia Hurst, Ryan DeShazer, Barbara Coll, and Tami Dalley all gave good information on how B2B marketing is different but somewhat similar to B2C marketing. With B2B you’ll find that you want to be at the forefront when businesses are starting to look for the services your business offers. At the beginning of the sale cycle businesses will be looking for information and normally are not ready to purchase something until 2 – 12 months down the road, so being at the forefront of their research will increase your chances of them looking to you when they are ready to purchase.
SESSION 2: Roundtable-type discussion on Facebook and what businesses can do with Facebook. A few of these tips may be obvious, but still worth mentioning.
- Make sure the branding on Facebook matches your website. This may seem like a “no-duh” but, how many businesses are just putting up a fan page on Facebook just to have one and it doesn’t match their brand?
- Have calls-to-action on your Facebook page. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter or download a product – put that on the Facebook page and direct them to your site. This helps you measure how the visits you are getting from Facebook are actually converting on your site.
- If you are using different social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) make sure that you gear your messages to each group differently. The fans you have on Facebook and the people following you on Twitter are going to be different, so don’t be tempted to use programs that allow you to post the same message on all venues. Customize your message for each venue so that it appeals to the right audience.
SESSION 3: Display Marketing. To be honest, I was a tad confused on some of the things that were mentioned only because I haven’t dealt with this as much as with other search type topics, but the one thing that really caught me off guard was what one of the panelists mentioned towards the end. He said that in July of 2011 the FTC is planning on making all cookies opt-in. What this means is that every type of analytical type data that we get from cookies will no longer be accessible, because those cookies that are needed for analytics are going to have to be opt-in by the user. Most users think of cookies as bad things, so they are going to opt-out for any type cookie; however, the only way marketers can know if what they are doing online is profitable is with cookies. No cookes = no data! I haven’t done a lot of research into this yet, but I plan on doing so to find out how we as marketers can avoid this from happening.
SESSION 4: Site analysis in which the panelists took websites from those in the audience and gave them suggestions on how to improve SEO for that site. Unfortunately, http://www.worthwhile.com was not chosen as one of the ones to be analyzed, but one of the panelists did agree to look over the site and we are going to be speaking to each other sometime next week, so I’ll have to get back with you on this as well.
Overall, these last 3 days have been great! I’ve learned a lot and have really enjoyed learning from the experts of SEO. I’ll be leaving cold Chicago to come back to South Carolina – here’s praying that no snow storms come in to disrupt any flight plans. Got to make it in time for the Worthwhile Christmas party!
