Our marketing team recently spent the day at SAScon Beta in Manchester, where they were able to learn about the latest developments within search, analytics and social from industry experts.
To kick off the day, Jeff Coghlan of Matmi opened with his keynote and an interesting statistic:
“You are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.”
Posing the question, is there really any point in banner ads anymore? Can you even remember the last one you clicked on? We think it’s time for marketers to steer away from the standardised banner ad and look towards more engaging ways of enticing the audience.
On a similar note, gone are the days of measuring social success by the amount of likes. What is the benefit of more likes? The true measure is engagement with your customers. It’s all well and good offering a free iPad to people that like your page, but how many of those are interested in purchasing from you at the end of the competition?
The next talk came from Richard Falconer Head of SEO at DigitasLBi, discussing the importance of optimising for the future and not just for today.
Here are his 5 top tips for your link strategy:
- Your links must be earned to be future proof and have a reason to be linked back to
- Metrics such as DA and page rank aren’t as valuable as we think. It’s better to focus on the influence of the publisher.
- We should only outreach to people we want to contact more than once
- Every relationship created should be mutually beneficial
- Find what your company’s strengths are. E.g. big brands can attract, small brands can move quickly, react and create quick copy
He also discussed the importance of content. Of course, we all know that SEO is heavily influenced by content, but we need to start thinking like a search engine, not how to trick one. Content should be written for users, not for search engines as nobody wants to read something written for a machine. Use the words that matter most to your customers in titles, they should help readers understand the topic of the page quickly.
Our Highlight
A highlight of the day was an engaging talk by Laura Thomas, with some interesting insights for social media managers. The fact that there is more and more content produced and made available online every single day, poses the question: how do you ensure yours cuts through the noise? Moreover, how will you measure how successful it was?
Here are some key steps to creating and measuring the success of your social media campaigns!
Writing Posts
- Think about what your customers want to see
- Think about what you want them to do after they have read it
- Keep them short
- Keep them clickable
Measuring Posts
- Decide what you will measure before you post
- Check the engagement levels – how did users engage with the post?
- Free on page insights are available on social media sites – use them!
Laura concluded her talk by pointing out that social is continually changing and therefore there is a need to evolve and adapt. If something doesn’t work, learn from it and do it differently next time!
Find out more about our marketing team and the services we offer here.
