ClickZ Live 2016 Conference Takeaways

It’s easy to attend a conference, feel inspired and then forget to go back and implement strategies and learnings shared from speakers and other attendees. In an effort to overcome that practice, we’ve broken out our favorite sessions from 2016 ClickZ Live San Francisco with actionable takeaways to improve your digital marketing strategy.

This article is intended for:

1. Attendees of ClickZ Live Conference in San Francisco who want a refresher of the sessions
2. Marketing strategists or producers who were unable to attend but would like the benefit of some of the main learnings

Click on a session to jump to that section:

• Boost your bottom line with social
• Credit where credit is due: Advancement of attribution
• Keynote: The art of digital engagement
• Excelling in organic search
• Innovate with paid search
• Making data analytics work: Overcoming the challenges

Boost your bottom line with social

Speakers: Leslie Drate (@lesliedrate), Stacey Jaffe (@staceyjaffe), and Jasmine Sandler (@Jasmine_Sandler)

• Use LinkedIn functions for social selling.
  1. Invest in a personal brand
  2. Build and nurture your first network of referrals
  3. Participate in targeted groups
  4. Commit to weekly long posts and daily short posts of value
• Develop a hypothesis before you do anything. Test the hypothesis and measure the results. The finish line is how you iterate your hypothesis after testing. Then, take those learnings and apply them to other channels.
• To target or not to target? Most people still advocate targeting specific consumers with Facebook ads, but Procter & Gamble Co. is moving away from that practice, concluding it has limited effectiveness.

Credit where credit is due: Advancement of attribution

Speakers: Thom Craver (@ThomCraver), Lauren Ishimaru (@laurenIshimaru), and Kara Burney (@wkndatburneys)

• Develop a model for attribution. Many visitors need multiple visits before purchasing, but which channel/visit should get credit for the win? It’s important to understand your sales cycle and build an attribution model for understanding what channels are working the hardest.
• There are different types of multi-channel attribution models, including:
  1. Last-Touch Attribution: Last channel gets 100 percent of the credit
  2. First-Touch Attribution: First channel gets 100 percent of the credit
  3. Linear Attribution: Divide credit evenly amongst each channel
  4. Combination Model: The first and last channel get a majority of the credit, with other channels getting the remaining credit
• Marketers have an escalation of commitment problem. We can’t just create more content and assume that it will equal more engagement. Consumers have a limited amount of time, and they are constantly exposed to more and more content. The content you create needs to raise the bar on creativity in order to break through the noise.

Keynote: The Art of Digital Engagement

Speaker: Kevin Krone, Former VP & CMO, Southwest

• “Everyday users are telling you what matters to them. Pay attention.”
• Users regularly find, load, use and delete apps. How can you combat that deletion?
  • Space is a huge factor. Make the app as small as possible so it doesn’t take up a large quantity of a user’s device capacity
  • Reduce the amount of advertising or intrusive advertising
  • Prepare for functionality issues, so the app doesn’t freeze
  • Keep user privacy concerns front-of-mind, and make efforts to protect their data
  • Make it simple (UX/UI is key) to use and register
  • Make it fast (people expect apps to take two seconds to load)
• Easily implemented wins for improving and building an app:
  1. Gather informal customer feedback
  2. Have employees test and provide feedback, especially employees who weren’t a part of the building of the app
  3. Use the app personally to get firsthand experience
  4. Dissect usage statistics and start asking ‘why’
  5. Look at app reviews for pain points, questions and needs

Excelling in organic search

Speakers: Shari Thurow (@sharithurow), Jim Boykin (@JimBoykin), and Adam Singer (@AdamSinger)

• Find out what your site looks like in Google search results. Perform a Google search for your company name and for the key function it provides. Don’t like what you see? Meta description, URL, site and navigation structures and quality of content all affect what pulls into search results. Use the search result snippet to inform your optimization tactics.
  • Pro tip: Make sure to spell out your full brand or company name the first time it shows up on a page. Users unfamiliar with your company might not know its nicknames or abbreviations.
• Build good backlinks by identifying sites (e.g. blogs or resource pages) that could benefit from linking to your site or are currently linking to a broken link. Contact the site editor or administrator to recommend they update the page with a link to your site.
• Search queries usually aim to achieve three different goals. Identify which goal your web pages meet, and optimize pages to include phrases that reflect that type of search.
  1. Navigational: searchers want to locate  a product/location/service. Searches often include portions of URLs and domain suffixes.
  2. Informational: searchers want to know something. Searches often use long-tail keywords and question phrases.
  3. Transactional: searchers want to make a purchase, download, fill out a form, etc. Searches often include interaction words: apply, buy, etc.

Innovate with Paid Search

Speakers: Jai Singh (@jaisingh2mail), and Courtney Demko (@courtdemko)

• Get comfortable with Extended Text Ads. This ad format consists of two title fields (30 characters max), a description field (80 characters max), and display URL customization. It’s available right now but will replace standard text ads entirely in January 2017. The update responds to the increase in mobile searches, arming the user with information directly on the search page before they decide whether or not to click through. Keep your ad on message, though; the ability to create a longer ad doesn’t mean you should create a longer one. Read more from Google.
• Use a Mind Mapping exercise to identify keywords to bid on. Take a piece of scratch paper and write down the single core solution your business provides. From there, write down four to eight related—but more specific—categories. For each of these categories, identify two to six related phrases. The effect is a web of terms you can use to populate your keyword list.
• Consider Pinterest Promoted Pins. Pinterest users are searchers; seeking inspiration that gives shape to the lifestyle they aspire to. While searchers often use Google when they already know what they want, Pinterest is an idea gathering tool. Users haven’t settled yet, which puts them in a great position to receive information about your brand. Promoted pins place your brand’s pins in relevant and trending keyword search results. The program also offers the option to layer on interest affinity—targeting users with identified interest in specific topics.

Making Data Analytics Work

Speakers: Frank Gosch, Mike Harkey (@mharkey), and Rohini Jatkar

• Establish KPIs before you start a campaign. Don’t let post-campaign discussions be derailed by trying to define “success.” Backfilling data you didn’t know you needed can be difficult to do and it reduces the impact of the campaign. Before the campaign starts, make sure all stakeholders agree on metrics to measure, verify that they are measurable, and set up a process for recording data.
• Focus on the “So What?” and “Now What?”. Whoever receives your report should know exactly what happened and what insights you want them to take away. Mystery and intrigue have no place in an analytics report. Here are two key ways to bring context and clarity to the data:
  • Use visuals. Tableau and Google Data Studio (in beta) are two data visualization tools that offer free versions.
  • Add a cover page to the report that encapsulates the most relevant data points and delivers actionable recommendations. While providing detailed, trending numbers on the following pages for reference is important, the cover page should focus on key findings and next steps.
• Don’t use Google Tag Manager unless you’re a developer. Google Tag Manager eliminates the necessity of updating java script when you want to add event tracking to the website, but this means that changes made within GTM automatically change the script. You don’t want anyone wielding that power unless they understand the implications of the changes they’re making.

Read next: Content Marketing vs. Advertising: What’s the Difference, Again?