Key Takouts:
- Be patient with your content
- Use PPC to test and learn for SEO
- Personalise the user’s digital experience
- Use Moz Content – a new tool released by Moz, to audit content
Right now, I’m very fortunate to be one of just 1,500 people from around the globe to attend one of digital marketing’s most important conferences – MozCon.
Not only have I so far managed to check a Seattle bucket list item off by getting a photo with Moz founder Rand Fishkin, but I’ve also provided an inside scoop of the four most important take outs every marketing manager needs to know from MozCon – Day 1.
These daily recaps will be provided across each of the three days and will give you with the most important, need-to-know changes that will affect how you’ll be doing digital marketing in the near future.
So without further ado, read on to find out the four things every marketing manager needs to know from MozCon Day 1.
1. Content definitely pays dividends (but not as quickly as you might think)
Content is undeniably invaluable, but takes time to show positive ROI.
How long?
According to Matthew Brown of Moz approximately 12-17 months is the average that’s now being seen.
So how do you make sure it does pay dividends?
More and more it’s about shaping the content to the user, and making it about them. Delivering it via the mix of social channels your audience consumes, and in a format your audience engages with is also key in link acquisition.
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Furthermore, they also discovered that much of the social sharing occurred via a multi-channel social media approach. For example, a Pinterest share might have spawned from Facebook post that had first been shared from the Mashable website via Twitter. This emphasises the importance of knowing where your audience lives online and where they are consuming your content.
So as a marketing manager, what works in managing the expectations of those who challenge that investment?
“The number one to get buy in from content strategy is to talk about pain points” notes Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic. Most content fails to flourish in the long term without having in place these three essential elements:
- A business goal,
- A strategy; and
- Tactics.
The below analogy was used to eloquently describe this:
The bear’s goal is to eat.
The strategy is to go down to the river.
The tactic is to stand in the river with your mouth open to catch a fish.
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You can learn more about Kristina’s approach to content strategy at her exclusive MozCon download here.
2. Bypass SEO’s long term challenges with PPC
As we all know, one key challenge of SEO is that it truly is a long term process. Often this means making strategic short term changes, waiting to see the results and adjusting again.
There is a way to sure up this process however.
As Stephanie Wallace points out, using PPC there’s a raft of measures we can implement as test and learns, and better integrate these tactics with certainty into an SEO campaign.
A great example of this is the meta data and title tags used in SEO. Simply creating a few AdWords campaigns with various ad copy allows us to split test potential title tags and meta descriptions for performance and gather instant, statistically significant confirmation.
Additionally, using PPC to find those keywords that have a high ROI and that are performing well through paid search (but not ranking well organically) can be a great means of understanding where SEO efforts should be directed.
3. Personalise your digital (but don’t be creepy!)
Cara Hasman hits the nail on the head here with the true value of personalised digital marketing. Breaking down the concept into elements of the who to target, what to show them and how to prioritise based on business impact, she provides some great examples of where this strategy has worked a treat.
One of the best examples of this comes from a holiday booking agency called “Secret Escapes”. As a high yielding category, all imagery on landing pages for any users coming from AdWords ads that mentioned the keyword “Spa” were dynamically changed in the background to provide better context.
This simple technique resulted in a powerful 32% increase in conversions.
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Just remember though, not everyone understands that magic of how personalised digital marketing works (think remarketing and how it’s often referred to as ‘stalking’).
Always make sure your marketing efforts don’t become too creepy!
4. The beta release of “Moz Content” happened today.
And last but definitely not least, the beta release of “Moz Content” happened today.
This powerful new tool will allow marketers to effortlessly conduct content audits of their site, gain insight into what content performs well and find out what kinds of content certain audiences consume best. With this information in hand, predicting future content needs will become easier and will help to ensure that your content strategy delivers a positive return on investment more often.
This handy tool has only been released to MozCon attendees at this stage however (lucky us). So if you’d like to see this in action on your site, get in touch with your friendly Reload Media digital marketing consultant and we’ll be more than happy to provide you the tour.
Well that wraps up day one. Make sure you subscribe to our blog and check back tomorrow to receive your next hand picked need-to-know information from day two of MozCon.
