StudioThink – Fall 2015 Digital Marketing Conference

Date: October 22, 2015

Name: StudioThink – Fall 2015 Digital Marketing Conference

Presenters: Todd Mumford, Rick Sloboda, Josh Loewen, Eric Reynolds, and Renee Neptune

There are many key elements in digital marketing that all entrepreneurs must understand. Moreover, all entrepreneurs must identify if they have the right ingredients to market their brand digitally. StudioThink invites the digital panelists to review the necessary components in digital marketing for all entrepreneurs. The panelist includes Todd Mumford, the Principle and Founder of Riverbed Marketing, Rick Sloboda, the Senior Web Copywriter and Content Strategist at Webcopyplus, Josh Loewen, the Co-Founder of The Status Bureau, Eric Reynolds, the Director of Marketing at Jelly Marketing, and Renee Neptune, the Director of Business Development at StudioThink. The panelists will cover the important digital marketing points for all entrepreneurs to prepare for the Fall of 2015. Nevertheless, all entrepreneurs will be able to take advantage of the digital market to promote their brand recognition.

How to set up and run in inbound marketing campaign

Todd Mumford believes any great marketing does not have to be difficult. Many entrepreneurs overthink about marketing and complicate the process. Instead, sometimes entrepreneurs must think simple. Entrepreneurs must know their goals. By understanding their growth goals, entrepreneurs will ensure they are approaching to the right direction.

Set the right targets is important for digital marketing. Entrepreneurs must specify their target audience and know their target audience intimately. This means entrepreneurs must recognize their situation, challenges and patterns. Mumford suggests entrepreneurs to document and interview their target audience at least twice a year. By knowing them is not enough, entrepreneurs must know where they can research their problems and solutions. Moreover, it is important to know where audience like to see their solutions.

The keyword usage by target audience is important. The keywords are categorized by awareness, consideration and decision. Mumford wants entrepreneurs to think about symptoms. Entrepreneurs must map their contents based on educate, inspire and inform. By building a content calendar, entrepreneurs can create group discussion with their teams to develop new ideas.

Entrepreneurs must build remarkable content for audience, not for themselves. They need to ensure they are sharing and promoting the content consistently, which will increase the scope, recycle the content, and increase the share content. Mumford recommends entrepreneurs to automate and connect the dots by measure, adjust and feedback.

“Stop thinking about getting started, and just get started”

Why you should get excited about emotional branding

Rick Sloboda believes the role of brands is changing. Instead of concentrating on production or needs, entrepreneurs must focus on consumption and wants. There are over 20,000 advertisements appear each day. In addition, entrepreneurs are competing with everyone, not just their industries.

People are emotional creatures. Consumers are buying based on how they feel about a company. Sloboda realizes emotions play a significant role in consumers. In average, it takes about 0.55 seconds to get first impression online. There is no right or wrong ways to market. In fact, each way is early valued. Therefore, the difference is the consumers feel good or feel right one over the other. Branding must aim for the heart with emotional story. Storytelling can help entrepreneurs to identify and understand the motivations behind consumers’ behaviours. They are the emotional triggers.

It is important to incorporate storytelling in branding because it helps entrepreneurs to connect information and emotions. Furthermore, they can get people to care, act and buy.

“Instead of saying what do you think, say how does it make you fail”

Listen to people, trust data

Loewen believes too many entrepreneurs are trying to do too many things at once, but most of them are forgetting the most important task, which is listening to people. Listening to people can capture trustful data. Entrepreneurs can retrieve these data from many digital tools, such as google analytics and webmaster tools.

It is important to set buzzwords for digital branding. Buzzwords can be created by the right optimization and ROI. However, people seems to set it and forget it. They never have the time to go back and review it. Marketing changes everyday and entrepreneurs must have the habit to go back and check it.

Success is not a straight line, yet it comes with obstacles. There is no template for success because it works for one but not others. Good news is that it is fail proof. Loewen wants entrepreneurs to continue working on it, receive feedbacks, and improve it the next time.

Loewen shares 6 simple steps for digital marketing. The first step is to set up tracking, which allows entrepreneurs to evaluate. The second step is to start on mobile when most consumers are on mobility. The third step is to throw a wide net, so entrepreneurs can try the possibilities and eliminate the unnecessary ones. The forth step is to reply more on start or stop channels by focusing on where the audience is. The fifth step is to optimize based on the data, not opinion. the last step is to rake in that dough.

MozCon 2015 event

Eric Reynolds had the opportunity to attend MozCon 2015 event. MozCon is one of the major digital conference where many major digital marketers united in one place to share their strategies. Reynolds will give some high level learning concepts will entrepreneurs.

• Promise more than marketing
• Content loyalty is more important then content virality
• Make customers better version of themselves
• Mirror the landing with advertisement
• Coding is more easier than before
• Interruption, accepting meetings, and emailing are critical pain for marketers
• The power of personalization is in how they wield it
• Capture list, drill down for personas, and get them to buy
• Keywords might not matter in 2020
• Many factors will affect mobile
• 90% of budget on people and 10% on software
• If entrepreneurs want to sell a CEO, think CEO
• If entrepreneurs are good at marketing, they are good at providing a service
• Do not take short cut, understand human nature
• Create global PR and the key to PR success is speed
• Sometimes entrepreneurs need to be inefficient, make mistakes and then evolve
• Rediscover who the audience is as often as possible
• Google trends
• Relationship on brands is created by values to give
• Graph search allows users to search for people based on everything

9 ways to get visitors to stick

Renee Neptune will share 9 ways entrepreneurs can implement to retain their visitors on their websites

1. The obvious
2. Usability
3. Funnel
4. Landing pages
5. Call to action
6. Fresh
7. Rescue
8. Sharable
9. Maintain

Entrepreneurs need to create a website that is polished and professional. The navigation and layout must be easy to find things for visitors. Entrepreneurs need to ensure they have a clear avenue of information that funnel traffic to site. The landing page should be created to demonstrate the needs. Entrepreneurs must have a call to action. Call to action should be straightforward and simple and not vague. The webpage should always have fresh content to establish their expertise and show they are care to stay current. Webpage can be a hub for sourcing valuable content. This helps entrepreneurs to become the trusted expert. It is important to expose themselves to others networks by making the content on website easy to share. Lastly, entrepreneurs must maintain their websites. Broken links, outdated design and old information will create the image for entrepreneurs that they do not care.

“Think your website as your car, you need to maintain it”