Market My Market attended Pubcon Fort Lauderdale in February, and we learned quite a lot! The conference gathers digital marketing experts from across the country to speak about what they are doing to innovate in the industry. Attendees come from around the country to learn about new trends, tactics, and strategies in the field and share their digital marketing experiences with one another. Topics covered this year included optimizing your social media campaigns, improving a LinkedIn profile, good storytelling practices to augment your content strategy, taking advantage of seasonality in SEO, and much more. These are our four big takeaways:
Everything Should Be S.O.S.
Make everything you write short, organized, and skimmable. Debra Jasper, the main keynote speaker, stressed the importance of structuring one’s marketing copy to account for the fact that consumers today face a content overload. We spend all day getting text messages on our phones, emails in our inboxes, popups as we browse the internet, ads on pages we visit, and headlines or news stories everywhere we look. In today’s world, the average person gets more information handed to them in a week than someone a century ago did in a year. It’s death by notifications!
As a marketer, the question one must ask oneself is, “How do we cut through the information overload and deliver a clear, concise message to customers?” Debra’s answer is SOS. The point of SOS is to make sure your copy is easily understandable. Visitors to a web page should know what the page is about right away. Keep the copy short so it does not take too much of one’s time to read and keep it well-organized using headings, subheadings, and bullet lists. All these strategies have been shown to make it more likely for customers to engage with your content. Check out Readable.io for help making your content more accessible and engaging.
Make Mobile Versions First
We’ve discussed the importance of responsive web design on our site in the past. However, the fact is that web designers still create websites on a desktop. The result is, sites are created as a desktop version first and then made to work on mobile. As of late, web designers are reversing that model. Several of the speakers pointed to the benefits of designing a mobile site first and then building it up to a full desktop site.
One benefit is that mobile websites must be more constrained and straight forward (people are only going to see it on a screen that’s a few inches across after all). Consequently, the design team is forced to identify what’s most important to the website and work up from there. The result will likely be a site that is better on both mobile and desktop.
Find New Ways of Developing a Content Strategy
Any time anyone is talking about SEO, they are bound to start talking about a content strategy. If SEO is a boat and the ocean is your website, then the content strategy is the anchor. It’s important, but not all content is created equal. Content that is more timely and relevant is content for which people will be searching. One great way of finding timely content is by following Twitter trends.
Websites like RiteTag allow you to see what’s popular and identify Twitter hashtags which are likely to get seen more often. Find trending topics in your industry and use them to write timely relevant content for your customers. Don’t be afraid to include the hashtag in the content itself either – people search for hashtags often.
Keep Seasonality in Mind When You Pick Keywords
When it comes to SEO, it’s no secret that you should prepare for the holidays. Most business owners already know that people start doing searches for Christmas-related things around October. As a result, you should start making content for holiday-oriented keywords and optimizing your site in the months ahead. You would be surprised what other keywords show seasonal trends. Searches for “CrossFit,” for example, tend to spike around February and again in July. Take your most important keywords and run them through Google Trends for seasonal patterns. If you do find seasonality, then adjust your SEO and content strategies accordingly.
In speaking with other industry experts and sharing ideas, there was much more we learned about at Pubcon than we could cover in a single blog post. SEO and digital marketing are ever-evolving fields which is why we make it a point to attend these events and keep up with all the latest developments. If you are looking to apply the latest strategies to your digital marketing efforts, give us a call.