American Marketing Association (AMA) Virtual Event
I have belonged to the American Marketing Association since 2014. Today’s virtual conference, “Amp Up Your Content Marketing” was a perfect tie-in to what I have been learning in my General Assembly (GA) Digital Marketing Circuit. The conference featured speakers who gave tips and suggestions on various aspects of content marketing. While I could not attend all of the panels, I learned something from every panelist I heard.
SEO + Content = Perfect Recipe
Karrie Sundbom from Act-On Software gave a utility focused talk, in that she spoke about ways to utilize technologies to your advantage. Some of her tips were good reminders about the basics: search engines read top to bottom and left to right, do not stuff keywords into meta tags, and be consistent with the timing of your blog. She also had solid suggestions that I had not thought about: using the Google keyword planner and placing those keywords on a web page in five specific places; specific things to avoid when choosing keywords; where to use keywords in body copy on a web page, and more.
The Power of Creative in Content Marketing
Deborah Holstein from Hightail spoke about the creative process. I once worked in the art department of a company for about two months as a temp before I was hired full time by the marketing department. I knew enough Photoshop and Illustrator well enough to perform basic tasks, but most of my time was spent helping out the Director of the Art Department with a variety of tasks, and I also helped out the print buyer, copywriter, and the designers. I learned a lot about the creative process, and about how the art department interacted with other departments within the organization; this talk was a much-needed update. She spoke about how bad creative can hurt sales, how to work collaboratively with designers, and was armed with statistics, like the fact that a video on landing page boosts engagement by 86%.
Closing Keynote
Johan Berger, a marketing professor at Wharton, who wrote the book “Contagious Why Do Things Catch On” gave the closing talk. He spoke about social currency, triggers, stories, and the six STEPPS about why people share. One statistic that he mentioned was that 91% of new business comes from word of mouth by existing customers. This dovetails with what I have been learning from my GA digital marketing circuit, in that we were focusing on the referral stage in the conversion funnel, and what tactics to use to get customers to refer friends/colleagues. The six STEPPS provide a good tool for this.
michdcode 