8 Best Presentations from the Learn Inbound Conference

Autor Luděk Pulicar

Stacey MacNaught – Where to find great ideas for content marketing

Tecmark’s search director Stace MacNaught shared with us her presentation full of useful ideas not only for content marketing but mostly for the teamwork leading to great and unique ideas.

The first step should be the creation of a proper brief. What should it contain?

• Your goals
• Target group specification
• Examples of successful campaigns you would like to inspire with.
• Key limitations (budget, time frame, and other limitations specific for a project).

First call a brainstorming. The key to success is how you manage it. The facilitator should be educated and experienced in this field, because many people do not like the idea of coming up with new ideas right in front of others and without proper thinking. Wrong handling of a brainstorming is in most cases just a waste of time. Sometimes it works better to give people more time and let them anonymously write their ideas on a piece of paper and then discuss these ideas or just evaluate them on your own. Stacey recommends the web tool on speakup.com. You should also remember that it is not necessary to have all the people on a meeting, 3-4 of the most experienced and relevant colleagues is usually enough. Sure, you will miss some ideas, but is well worth it because of the effectivity and higher engagement. Just remember the almighty Pareto principle.

Now you hopefully have come up with some ideas. How to recognize the useful ones?

Do not count too much on your own opinion, first of all compare all the ideas to your pre-set benchmarks.

After you picked the right ideas or even turned them into reality, consult someone from outside, someone who hasn’t been around through the whole project, ideally ask the influencers or a couple of your customers.

Barry Adams – How to Mess Up Your Technical SEO

Barry Adams, a SEO consultant and the founder of Polemic Digital, has reminded us the very important role of technical SEO. With messed up on-page SEO you can easily burry your online campaigns to the ground. And what are the most common on-page mistakes that are often overseen?

1. Duplicate content on different URLs
2. Advanced filtration
3. Internal links redirection
4. Low loading speed of a website
5. Automatic redirection based on the presumed language of a visitor

Find specific examples of mentioned mistakes and how to get rid of them in the presentation.

Talia Wolf – How to Turn Smartphone Visitors into Customers

Talia Wolf, a converse rate specialist, showed us case studies about mobile friendly websites. She focused on the websites that are best at turning mobile visitors into customers thanks to their targeting based on emotions, decision making process and real time customer behaviour.

It is important to realize that our searching and shopping behaviour on a smartphone differs from the one on a regular PC in many significant ways. The other half is to understand what, how and when are your visitors trying to find on your website. I strongly recommend to go through the whole presentation. It is full of great examples of various micro moments of a mobile shopping process (want-to-know, want-to-go, want-to-do, want-to-buy). But first, let me highlight some of the major points.

1. On your landing pages, don’t talk about yourself, talk about your customers.
2. If a customer is just searching for information, make it easy for him to send for example the URL to his or her e-mail.
3. Rather than WHAT you sell try to stress WHY you sell it and WHY to make a purchase in your shop.
4. Make finding and contacting you easier. It’s not just about well optimized contact page, but also about the possibility to navigate customers to your shop, about an easy contact form, click-to-call button, etc.
5. Be benevolent to your customers, do not show them an error every time they leave an additional space at the end of the email address. And if you have to show them an error, don’t reset all the info they’ve already filled in, unless you want them to leave immediately and never come back again.
6. Don’t annoy visitors with too many / too frequent pop-ups
7. Don’t push the customers too many call-to-action buttons. If they are supposed to buy something, let them buy it and don’t bother them with your social media subscriptions.

The presentation is not available at the moment. We are trying our best to get the presentation back into our article.

Laura Crimmons – What Digital PR & Content Marketing Really Bring Us

Laura Crimmons from Branded3 tried to show us why PR is the best way to do linkbuilding. Assuming your goal is a natural backlink portfolio full of links from domains with high authority.

She also shares with us the questions she hates to receive from her clients:

• How many backlinks will it bring?
• What is the price for one backlink going to be?
• Can we ensure that all the backlinks will be placed on domains with authority rank higher than 40?

It is difficult to explain them, why backlinks are not so important anymore and why (not only her) clients should care more about other things.

The right metrics for Content and PR marketing are according to Laura the following: citations and increased brand awareness. People must believe you. And people believe more the things someone else says about you.

Mackanzie Fogelson – How to Build a Durable Brand in the Digital Age

Mackenzie Fogelson expressed his opinion that marketing strategy in the digital age requires a whole new attitude. In order to become successful and grow in the long term it is crucial to specify the purpose of your company. You have to analyse the customer journey related to your company and do work clearly showing that you are worth your customers’ time and attention.

Joanna Wiebe – Go Long

Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers is trying to persuade us to write uncomfortably long and stunningly high-converting copy. She focused on couple of case studies concerning e-commerce and e-mailing. Conclusion? Make your texts two times or even three times longer. A website has on average 10 seconds to persuade its visitor to spend there more time. Don’t worry, it is enough time. So how to extend your text and not ruin it?

• Add specific examples.
• Answer your own questions in the text (or use answerthepublic.com to get more ideas on what people might be interested in).
• Break all summarizations down into detail.
• Show on the website a particular customer. Personalize the content for your typical reader/customer so that they see themselves in it.
• Use your reader’s visualization. Words in texts can create pictures. Don’t insert too many pictures and videos – just describe it.
• Use your own words.
• The text write as if you were about to convert one specific person.

It’ not truth that people don’t want to read long texts. They just need reason to do that. Get more tips from the presentation.

Hannah Smith – How to Build a Time Machine

The presentation by Hannah from Verve Search was about content that are people likely to identify with. This is the kind of content that will be shared. The readers must feel that the content is very close to them, close to their hearts.

And what techniques do work? Well how about travelling in time? Just remember how many times you already saw the list of the TOP 33 songs from your youth, the TOP 10 series, you were so eager to watch every week. These are the things that make you come back in time, these articles bring you back the memories of good old times. Why do we share the nostalgic content? It’s because at that time the songs and series were shaping us as people and it helps us now to define ourselves in front of others.

Another great example of touching content is so called polarizing content. It divides us into just two groups – lovers and haters. By sharing this content, we let others know who we are.

Don’t care too much about the form of the content. It doesn’t really matter whether it is a video, an infographic, or a text column. People share ideas, not formats.

Phil Nottingham – How the Best Strategies Start with the Right Metrics

Marketing strategist Phil Nottingham from Wistia was explaining, how the right metrics help you to create a fully working strategy. He showed both how to do it right and how to mess up. Let’s look at the right ways to do it. First you have to ask yourself a couple of questions:

1. Goals – What are you trying to achieve?
2. Target group – Who are you trying to address?
3. Channel – Where can you reach them?
4. Content – What to lay in front of them?
5. Distribution – How do you get the content to the right people?
6. Metrics – What can you correctly measure?
7. KPI – What is the most suitable metric relatively to your goal?

And the answers to these questions have to make sense also the other way (from the bottom (no.7) to the top (no.1). You will have a strictly given KPI and you won’t be distracted by other metrics. The key is to measure the right data.

What to take from the presentation?

• Wrong data < no data.
• Measure everything but optimize for only one KPI.
• ROI use as a metric only for conversion-focused activities.
• Ensure that the channel is in harmony with the content and target group. For example, young people on LinkedIn with video marketing is obviously a bad choice.
• Everything do with your goal in your mind

Find great examples of great content in this great presentation.