Last week, Team Convertus attended Unbounce’s 2018 Call To Action Conference in Vancouver.
This year was the 5th annual CTA Conference, which has grown immensely in its five-year span, evolving into a spectacular affair for global marketers. The three-day event was jam-packed with expert keynote speakers, fantastic attendee experiences, not to mention food trucks, after parties, and of course, swag.
Members of our Paid Search, Organic Search, Design, and Marketing teams along with our founding partners embarked on a journey to level up with the latest trends and innovations within the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
With an overwhelming amount of insights and actionable advice from some of North America’s leading marketing experts, we left the two-day conference feeling energized, inspired, and ready to integrate what we gained into our practice.
We also discovered schnitzelkoma, a German term shared by André Morys of KonversionsKraft to describe the effects of overeating at the conference’s food trucks (We were all guilty. The Mac ‘N’ Cheese was undeniable).
This year, speakers focused heavily on the importance of empathy in digital marketing and design strategies, creating campaigns and content for people rather than keywords or analytics. Other common threads included the discussion of where marketers fit in with machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as the value and intricacy of crafting impactful copywriting.
We’ve briefly summarized some of the lessons learned and key points from just a few of CTA Conference’s extraordinary speakers.
“Going Beyond the Basics of Facebook Advertising”
Veronica Romney
Founder, LoSoMo
Social media ads can be placed at every single stage of the customer journey. Unlike text ads in Google Ad campaigns, social ads create visual stimuli, convey emotions and tell stories. They’re not just a trend, either. Social ads are not going anywhere.
The power of remarketing – Remarketing is the key to Facebook advertising and should be first and foremost. Leverage lookalike audiences and continuously grow your audience lists. Are the lead captures on your website visible? Is your email list growing? If the answer is no, you need to change something!
Get targeting right – Prioritize demographic targeting over interest targeting. Focus on behavior targeting over persona targeting. Behavior dictates marketing!
Capture attention and continuously test – Facebook is a highly visual platform. Try experimenting with image variants, videos and boomerangs. Write creative headlines and body copy that include enticing offers or urgency. Support your ads with social proof. And of course, test relentlessly!
With social media advertising, influence is greater than conversions.
One of our biggest takeaway from Romney’s talk: Use social media to target people, not keywords.
“SEO plus social media ads equals online marketing marital bliss”
– Veronica Romney, LoSoMo
“SEO Success: The One Engagement Metric To Rule Them All”
Cyrus Shepard
Partner, Zyppy
SEO metrics are dynamic and adjust to how users engage with your website. Do your visitors find what they need when they land on your page? Do they find it quickly? In his talk, Shepard points out three main measurable proxies for SEO success: CTR, bounce rate and dwell time.
Click-through-rate (CTR) – The percentage of people who click through to your website (the number of impressions divided by the number of clicks). According to Cyrus, there are six controllable influences that improve your CTR:
- Featured snippet
- Images/video
- Rich snippets
- Meta description
- URL
- Title (the most important!)
Want to optimize your website title that appears in the search engine results page? Shepard recommends that you include the following: keywords, numbers, dates, a promise, symbols (?!$) and keep it concise!
Bounce Rate – the percentage of visits in which a user leaves the website from the entrance page, without taking any action or browsing further (they bounced!). The #1 way to reduce bounce rate is to reduce page speed! (Learn more about page speed and how you can reduce it in our recent post)
Dwell Time – the time between when a user lands on your page and when they return to the search engine results page. Why is this important, you ask? Because it indicates whether the content of your website answers a user’s questions. A longer dwell time likely means that a user found your content useful. Short dwell times mean you should probably revisit your website’s content to determine what information is missing.
And one more takeaway from Shepard’s talk is his recommendation to:
Go Deep with your content rather than broad. Specializing deeply instead of broadly will help your website to avoid being impacted by Google’s algorithm updates (which recently impacted sites with very broad, general content.)
So what’s Shepard’s ONE metric to rule them all? There isn’t one. SEO metrics are dynamic to user interaction. Sorry, Shepard’s title was merely a trick!
“Content Strategy & SEO for B2B Lead Generation”
Andy Crestodina
Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder, Orbit Media Studios
In his talk, Crestodina combines search with psychology to offer valuable insight into how businesses can effectively create content that generates demand and leads to conversions. Here are a few of his key points:
Blogs don’t create leads (but they’re still important!) – Blog readers don’t have commercial intent or intent to become a lead. They have information intent, and that’s okay! Blogs increase your website’s authority, allowing it to rank higher, so although their conversion rate is very low, they’re still improving your SEO.
Gaps still exist in Google’s knowledge – Find the missing statistics! If you can discover and fill those gaps with new research and written content, you have the opportunity to rank super high! Don’t be afraid to share bold opinions and original research.
“What do people in our industry frequently say, but rarely research?”
– Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media
Answer the question “Why am I here?” – Make your mission statement on your website clear, visible and enticing. Perhaps turn it into an awesome call-to-action on your website! (See Unbounce’s fantastic example.) Leverage your social media bio spaces, too. Use this valuable real estate for a value proposition or mission statement and give people a reason to follow along.
Build a content strategy network – Ask for contributor quotes from influential people. They’ll feel invested, and be inclined to share the post when it’s published. All good content strategies have a healthy combination of off-page linking.
“An ally in creating content is an ally in promoting it!”
– Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media
Crestodina’s tips for generating content ideas:
- Use Google Keyword Planner or keywordtool.io to find related search queries to your product, then use them as content ideas that work well for your audience.
- Take high-level list posts like “Top Ten Reasons to Work at a Dealership” and zoom in to each reason for opportunities to create more detailed posts.
- Topics often flow from sales to marketing – ask your sales team what some of the clients’ FAQ’s are!
- Evil twin posts are an easy way to generate content ideas – write a “how-to” post, then write the “how not to” article, as well.
- Remember that visuals are far more powerful than text! Turn your top blog posts into videos or infographics.
That’s a lot of insightful information! Can you believe that it’s only three out of nearly 25 speakers? Imagine how our brains felt after leaving that conference. Very full, that’s for sure. Our team loved every moment of Unbounce’s CTA Conference, and we can’t wait to return next year. You can check out the rest of the incredible speakers here.
Do you want to discover more ways your dealership can action on some of these insights to level up your digital marketing strategy? Get in touch with our team of Customer Success superheroes and let’s get the conversation started.