Still groggy and trying to figure out what day it is, I’ll attempt to offer a few quick impressions of Pubcon ‘09. Once my brain reboots and my body forgives me from four nights in Vegas, I’ll take a more in-depth look at some interesting take-aways from Pubcon. Here’s the basics.
Pubcon attracts some of the brightest minds in search marketing. These are the folks that are thought leaders in the search marketing industry. They are the type of people who can clearly articulate strategies, concepts and theories, and then show you the math or research to prove they’re correct (usually because it’s their math or research). I had the pleasure of meeting and learning from many of these people over the past week.
The challenge I always face when attending conferences like Pubcon is how to apply what’s being presented in sessions to Metter Advertising’s business-to-business and industrial clients. Most of the speakers are drawing on experience serving B2C or larger companies and brands, which I consider very different from B2B and industrial.
At the end of the day though, search is search, trends are trends, tools are tools, and engineers/B2B buyers are still people. It’s all relevant. Here’s a quick recap of themes that I found to be prominent at Pubcon ‘09.
Twitter and Social Media Marketing
Okay, for anyone who attended Pubcon, you know this is cheating. It’s no surprise that Twitter would be a hot topic at a conference that has a tract called “Twitter: Social Media”, but it is worth mentioning. I lost count of laptops with TweetDeck fired up and fingers tapping. If you don’t know what TweetDeck is, you’re probably in business-to-business or an engineer. And, who knew there were so many people out there with job titles like “Social Media Analyst”? Pubcon offered no less than five sessions with Twitter in the title.
I’ll take a deeper look at strategies for working social media into a B2B search marketing campaign and offer some good bits of social media info from Pubcon sessions shortly. Bottom line for B2B marketers? Pay attention to social media!
Link Building Strategies
Incoming links are still critically important for SEO. No surprise. However, it was refreshing to hear link acquisition discussed as a bi-product of good overall strategy rather than the answer to all of your problems. Build content worth linking to, use available tools to find link opportunities, and go get them.
Another recurring theme regarding link building focused on leveraging content through multiple channels. Your content should be getting distributed through online newswire services, social media sites, blogs, industry verticals, feeds, etc. Metter Advertising subscribes to these methods, so it’s always positive to see the approach working for other businesses in different industries.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The most controllable piece of the search marketing puzzle is your website. It’s generally cheaper to make your website “work” better than it is to drive more traffic to it. The process of conversion rate optimization was touched on in multiple sessions I attended and for good reason. Increasing your ROI by converting more of the users your site already receives seems like a no-brainer, but there’s really a science behind this.
In my experience, there tends to be a “set it and forget” mentality with B2B and industrial websites. This is especially true for larger sites with loads and loads of SKUs and product data. Some major eye-opening statistics on increased conversion rates and ROI through multi-variate and A/B testing were presented in a few sessions that should have B2B marketers taking notice. I’ll definitely revisit this topic and share some of the data once I review all of the presentations.
Just because the information a buyer needs is on your site, it doesn’t mean they’ll buy! When we’re designing a website, I always try to get our designers to ask a simple question for every page. “What do I want a user to do on this page?” CRO allows that question to be asked and answered with more frequency.
Favorite Tee Shirts
Lots of funny stuff floating around, but two shirts stood out:
“Your mom links to me”
“I’m a social tool”
I’ll recover, review my notes and pick out some additional take-aways from Pubcon to review. You could literally write a book with all of the great information…In fact, many presenters there already have!
