MozCon recap

- Hi, and welcome to another episode of Weekly Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and this week, I'd like to recap some key findings from the MozCon 2015 Conference. Just last week, I had the opportunity to attend MozCon in Seattle. Now, if you're not familiar with Moz, they're a big player in SEO tools and analytics, and each year, they host a large conference where thought leaders from around the world gather to discuss SEO and online marketing. It was a great conference but I'm doing all the hard work for you.

I went, I listened, I debated, I discussed, and now, I'm ready to share with you what I feel are the best findings from the event. My three biggest takeaways for you is that Customer experience is more important than ever for this next year of online marketing. Following that, Personalization is the next big thing, and finally, Your content has to be better. We're going to go into all three of these in just a moment, but I do want to point out that we could talk all day about Search Engine Optimization.

You might be looking at me like, "You went to an SEO conference, "and you're not gonna give me any SEO tips?" Well, to be honest, not a lot's changed, and you can tap into all the great SEO resources here at Lynda.com to go deeper on that. But these three components are really part of helping drive sales once the visitor arrives, retaining those visitors, and they're a great way to provide a new outlet to revive that organic traffic. Let's start by talking about your Brand Strategy. Customer experiences are a big deal.

If you say one thing in your marketing but then the experience doesn't match what you said, your customer is going to feel like your brand isn't truthful or real. Your Brand Strategy is How you execute the main message you want to convey. What should a customer feel when they encounter your brand? When they see your brand? When they read your messaging? Maybe you surprise them with a gift or advertise to them. What does that experience feel like? You need this Brand Strategy to not only convert customers but retain them.

Now, a good Brand Strategy is going to be As simple as possible. You don't need to get all complicated with your Brand Strategy. You can boil it down into something that is super, super simple and easy to describe. A good Brand Strategy is going to be Consistent across all channels. Whether they find you online, and then visit your store, whether they view a printed catalog, and then call you on the phone, however your customer interacts with you, your brand needs to be consistent across all channels. And finally, a good Brand Strategy is an actual, true expression of your company.

Who are you? What is your company? You want that to be conveyed, again, in as simple as possible way, consistently across all those channels, and honestly. So, how do you get there? Well, here's three quick steps for you. First step, you gotta Understand who is going to be leading the charge on this brand. There is one person at your company who is going to be the most vocal about the Brand Strategy. That might be you, that might be someone at the C-level, it might be somebody in a department way off in the outskirts of the building. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that there is someone at your brand that is going to be your brand champion, and they need to be the point person and put in charge of leading the brand and managing that experience. Next, you need to make a List, a List of What your brand is, and what your brand is not. Make this List visible, simple, and distribute it to everyone within the company. Here's who we are, here's who we're not. That way, when someone's making a decision that could put the brand in one bucket or another, they can look at the List and say, "You know what? That's not something our brand would do." And finally, you need to align your Tone and Voice.

You need to agree on this Voice and Tone and Decide how you're going use words and how you're going to say them. Come up with a guideline for your Voice and Tone, and distribute it. This might just be you for your own business, and that's fine, you should still make one for yourself, or you might make one with the help of other people within your department. If you'd like to go deeper into Brand Strategy, take a look at my course, Online Marketing Fundamentals. OK, so the next big topic was on the idea of Personalization. I genuinely believe we're going to see Personalization become the next big movement in online marketing.

We're slightly there, but not fully invested yet, but this right here, Personalization, is really the next big opportunity. People are not competitive in this space yet so you have some chance here to get ahead. Now, when I refer to Personalization, what I mean is Tailoring content for your audience based on what you know about them. You might have heard about this in regards to remarketing. That's something where, you come to my site, I know you might be interested in my site, so I'll show you a particular advertisement. That's great, that's one form of Personalization, but it's very one-sided.

It's strictly focused on buying ads. But what if you took things a step further and Personalize landing pages based on the keyword sending the traffic? You might Personalize a call to action on your website based on a particular user's behavior. Maybe they've purchased before so the calls to action can be a little different. Maybe they haven't purchased yet, so those calls to action might be a little more aggressive. Or maybe you'll include special offers, enticing popups, based on whether they're your returning visitor or not. There is so much data available on the consumer that businesses who begin to tap into Personalization are really going to see impressive wins.

It's a challenging area. It likely requires effort to manually determine your consumer buckets, track the cookies, and tailor the content accordingly, but it's really worth looking into and deciding to invest effort into researching. You can start by personalizing emails based on products that consumers looked at. From there, you might consider different hero images and landing experiences for current customers or former customers. You can take a look into optimize.ly as a resource for displaying differentiated content based on Personalization.

I also recommend taking a look at Cara Harshman's presentation which you can find on SlideShare by following the link here on your screen. So really, my big takeaway on Personalization, the one-size-fits-all web is dead. We need to start catering to the person. We expect it. We expect recommendations, tailored content, and custom emails. It's really not that creepy. It's just what we know. And finally, the last big takeaway from MozCon, Content on the web is boring. It's dull. There's thousands of articles and Consumers now have content fatigue.

There's just so much information out there. They're not really paying attention to it as much as they used to in the past. So how do you focus on Building Good Content? Well, you need to think outside the box. Start by Letting users control the experience. Are there ways to let your content become interactive? Can I click box to open things? Can I scroll sideways? Can I watch a video? How can I get invested in your experience? That's a leg up in content. Next, you need to Give them something they haven't seen or done before, and that might require investing more time and energy into creating your content.

It's one thing to post a blog article about something that everyone else is writing a blog article about. Or maybe you can do some research, find something novel, dig deep and really create that content that is so new and so impressive. Next, we just talked about it, but Personalization. Can you Personalize the content? Can you change the article based on their location? Can you show them data specific to where they're living or allow them again to interact in a way that allows them to personalize it. Maybe they can answer some questions prior to immersing themselves in your content that will help you tailor it to their specific needs.

And really, when you think about all of this and how to do it, consider Breaking outside of the standard article template. There have been great examples of people using animated GIFs, side-scrolling websites, websites that change format and color as you scroll, anything that really stands out and breaks the standard template is going to go viral and gets shared. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So let me know what you thought about our recap this week. You can reach me on Twitter @bradbatesole or via email, brad@lynda.com.

I'll see you next week.