2017 digital summit dallas conference recap day 2

Day two of Digital Summit Dallas 2017 was even better than the first day! We started learning bright and early and kept on learning digital marketing insights throughout the day. We’ve put together another list of things we learned. Check out our takeaways from Day 1 too.

1) Everyone Needs to Buy In

I’m not talking about buying your product or service, though that would be nice. But your entire organization must buy in to the overall marketing process and strategy. It’s vital as marketers to avoid silos between departments which can impede your data collection and analysis. An action plan must be in place and everyone needs to know their role in order for plans to be successfully implemented. Meetings and governance models may sound boring, but that’s how to really make things happen within your organization.

Sara Brownback of Citi posed the question, “Why should a developer care about social media?” Coordinating social listening with strategic planning helped them fix a major problem with a recent site change. The site’s clicks had dramatically dropped on one particular page, but they couldn’t find the cause. Reading user’s posts on social media uncovered that even though the button was still on the page, people literally gave up and stated they couldn’t find it. In another sessions, Bill Leake warned marketers in his paid media presentation to “ Share Data, or Else!” If we don’t have the whole picture and all the context to go with our data, we end up settling for last-click attribution and learn nothing about our customer’s journey.

2) Determine Campaign Goals and Let Data Assist Your Evaluations

In several lectures throughout day two of Digital Summit Dallas I heard the consistent theme of defining goals then utilizing data to determine the success of those goals. Every good campaign that a marketer embarks on must have a specific set of goals that can be articulated to higher ups to approve of, and then for you to evaluate along the way. Without those in mind, you can run your campaign but you’ll be grasping at straws to find any wins.

3) Testing and Trying Things You’ve Never Done Before

“Please give me a strategy that is the same as everyone else’s.” – said no client ever.

Along with buying in to the processes and strategies, marketers have to constantly push past the fear of doing new things. A poster child for trying new things, Morgan Spurlock urged us to Stand Out—Be Helpful—Lead, Not Follow—and Rock the Boat. We must be ready and willing to take criticism, and value those people who believe in your vision.

Discussing the power of video in social media, Michelle Stinson Ross shared a great case study for facing your fears and doing something you haven’t tried before. A property management company falling 20% short of their investment goals braved a single Facebook live video to promote their project. The content was recycled from webinars, and the speaker/lighting/video quality wasn’t the best, but within 1 DAY, they were 101% funded. If you’re still not convinced, the final tip in Susan Wenograd’s PPC presentation was to “ Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test!” (yes, 8 of them).

4) Measure for Meaning

At Atomic, we have a lot of awesome tools at our disposal to make a powerful impact for our clients. That doesn’t always mean that we measure the same thing for every client. This is where our strategic thinking comes into play. For some clients that heavily target search engine optimization, we would deploy one set of tools for gathering data, and for an ecommerce client we would deploy another set of tools.

With data, we can understand visitor journeys throughout a website that allow us to bridge content gaps or optimize experiences. We don’t just want to brag about the metrics we collect, instead we want to help answer specific questions our clients might have about their website or provide input on the directions content development should go.

Measuring the Moment: Pro Tips for Monitoring User Bahavior | Thom Craver

5) Focus

Harnessing the power of focus can be as effective as 5 large cups of coffee.  OK that’s a #fake statistic, but if you want to get things done, avoiding the trappings of shiny objects and millions of options of how to spend your time makes a huge difference. Here’s what the conference speakers said we should be focusing on to super-power our marketing hours.

To get valuable customer insight, don’t stop at social listening. Create lists of specific pain point words and customer speak so you can be proactive in a way that’s meaningful to them. Find the top 20% of your best-performing content and focus your time and budget on amplifying and redistributing it. Focus and segment your metrics/benchmarks and keywords based on stages of the customer journey so you’re getting better quality data. Focus your ad budget on warm audiences so you don’t overpay for awareness or consideration.

6) Don’t Think Within Audience Boxes Anymore

Marketers now have tools at our disposal that allow us to target users rather than broadly generalized audiences. Before, we had to make assumptions about a user of a Sports website and a Gossip website and tailor ads to those types of users. We no longer have to use the “spray and pray” approach, but we can utilize an “I know what you want” approach. Our ads can now follow users through different website types and into any device experience. With smart approaches to ads, we don’t have to command high budgets for a CPM approach, but we can use a Cost Per Engagement Model that allows for actionable results and instant improvements.

An audience is still going to matter in terms of platforms. A Facebook audience is going to be different from a Snapchat audience. Your user might cross both, or just one. That just means you’ll need to tailor the content that you create to work within the platform they are engaging with. An image is going to be the right element to use in Instagram, where a short video might be the right approach for Facebook.

Wake Up Your Digital Marketing | Tiffany Starnes
Accelerating Return: Making Paid Ads Your Most Viable Channel Through AI | Jeremy Hudgens

Blog Categories

Interested in a specific topic? Review the categories below and get the info, news, and tips you need based on your interest!

Recent Posts