Recently, I had the fortunate experience of attending the 2016 Digital Summit in Philadelphia, PA. The conference is self-described as “two days of leading-edge digital media and marketing content mixed alongside top-flight networking with internet execs, online marketers, entrepreneurs and digital strategists.” At any given moment during the conference, attendees could choose from two or three active stages featuring experienced speakers sharing knowledge on their digital area of expertise.
The presentations, each accompanied by a Slideshare deck, offered at least one actionable item that marketers could apply to their clients’ marketing programs – and because all of the speakers were privy to Google’s intricate search rules, the presentations offered themes such as mobile, site speed and brand building. To avoid fading into online obscurity, aka the second page of Google, the presentations also covered tactics including content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
Here are my top five key conference takeaways:
- Mobile Optimization
If I had a nickel for every presenter that stressed, “It’s 2016 – you better have a mobile friendly website”—I’d have about 50 cents; everyone said it. From the “Storytelling with Analytics” talk to the “Future of Mobile Roundtable,” presentation, everyone emphasized the importance of your website providing a great user experience (UX). It was made obvious that if your website isn’t really easy to use on a smartphone, it’s unlikely that your website will succeed on search. A responsive web design is the foundation of any mobile strategy. The UX and user interface (UI) needs to be intuitive and the story of the site needs to be clearly conveyed on a mobile device, without the user having to scroll for infinity and beyond (in my best Buzz Lightyear voice). Can your brand follow the user wherever they travel via their phone? That’s the challenge marketers’ face today.
- Site Speed
While your brand must display really well on an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or whichever device you choose to play Pokémon Go on, did I mention that is also has to be really fast? This means that your site must load in four seconds or less to capture the attention span of audiences including Millennials. To achieve an optimally fast and mobile friendly website, the presentations covered video and image compression tools such as Kracken.io, hosting companies much better than GoDaddy and the importance of having clean code that won’t take Googlebot too long to crawl.
- Brand Building
Brand building was a big takeaway gleaned from the Digital Summit, recognizing that the end goal of day-to-day digital marketing tactics is to build a strong brand. The first page of the search engine results page (SERP) is being dominated by big brands. So what can we do to compete in this digital landscape? Many of the talks attempted to answer this question, suggesting that storytelling through website copy is essential. Presenters indicated that the best way to convey that your brand is ultimately the brand your customers should choose is through informative and optimized web copy.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing was the subject matter of other talks – and this strategy spans beyond words to include corresponding video and imagery. The presentations stressed that video and imagery “better be as strong as the words on your page or it won’t win in such a competitive digital world.” No longer is “good, unique content” the standard for getting your content picked up by other websites. It has to be the best content that is ranking for that search query and nothing less.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Last but certainly not least, SEO was mentioned in practically every talk. Achieving fruitful SEO takes great design, great content and great links (see the previous 2 points in this post). Easy, right? Guess again. Thankfully the presenters at the Digital Summit gave every attendee excellent tips for expanding their toolkit to reach the goal of building a successful brand.
Did you find these tips helpful? Here are other resources you might enjoy!
- Top 10 Features Every B2B Homepage Must Have
- How Newscred’s #ThinkContent Summit Changed How I Think About Content
Are you interested in digital marketing or other B2B marketing services? Contact Sagefrog Marketing Group, today.
