On Thursday, March 8th, delegates from three of Mad Fish’s teams attended EngagePDX to learn about SEO, Mobile, Paid, and Brand marketing. From search and social to creative new takes on email and local SEO, the conference was informative and inspiring. We were able to garner actionable takeaways and look forward to implementing new tactics in the future.
Didn’t get a chance to attend, or just got overwhelmed? Here are our 5 key takeaways from EngagePDX.
Focus on audience development, not unique users.
We often get wrapped up in traffic for traffics sake instead of being intentional about our audience building. Kane Jamison reminded us to think through tactical promotion and formatting, and gave us tips to turn out content marketing traffic into customer traffic instead of being the search result they click on every six months.
Another note — video is a minimum requirement, not the extra mile. Did you know conversion rate is 10% higher with a video? Get more content marketing tips here.
PR isn’t just for PR agencies anymore.
Amy Rosenberg dished on dealing with media contacts, lists, and finding the right ways to throw events that get coverage. She explained how to work on the earned media side can help with overall SEO and reputation management. Using your backlinks to build a media list, or using your competitor’s backlinks to do the same was just the tip of the iceberg. A foolproof way to get great press? Throw an event. Find out how to promote yours here.
Email is back… and better than ever.
Even though we think of e-mail as old school, it’s the secret weapon for your digital media mix. We loved learning from Jose Cebrian and Lynnette Fusilier about the best ways to build great emails and automate them without losing the humanity of the person to person interaction. If you’re still skeptical about the importance of email, remember this: 90% of your email subscribers see your campaigns vs. 2% of your Facebook fans. Yikes.
With visual elements, hamburger menus, and endless customization, your email campaigns can always be improved. Personally, we loved the notion of tying emails to weather like Starbucks does for signifying when it’s time to start drinking cold brew… though let’s be real, it’s never not cold brew season. If you’re local, check out our piece on the best coffee shops to work out of so you can drink cold brew while you work on those snazzy new email campaigns.
Strapped for time? That doesn’t mean you can’t nail your SEO.
Christian Bullock’s talk about conducting SEO in 33 minutes a day left an impression on us, not just because of his inspiring story of being a cancer survivor and finding balance with work, but because he gave us tips that we can all incorporate into our daily routines. While we’re all busy during our work days, a few minutes a day can make a big difference. Take time every day to focus on a different aspect of SEO and see what you can do… from measuring performance with custom alerts to technical infrastructure improvements, set some reminders and see what happens–we’ll definitely be trying it. Get tips to get started here.
Forget B2B and B2C… It’s M2C now.
While we’ve clung to business to business and business to consumer as segmentation methods, but Purna Virji dished on why it’s time for us to start thinking machine to consumer. With the ever-changing digital landscape, we’re dealing with less and less interaction between the consumer and the device. In fact, by 2020 50% of all search will be voice and image. By using machines to teach and interest our audience we can avoid obsolescence. Voice search optimized featured snippets or XML sitemaps, this shift in the way we think about optimization can help propel your business into the future.
Over to you! Did you attend EngagePDX? What did you think? Shoot us a message on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter and let us know what your experience was like.
