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Roger the robot giving digital marketing tips at Mozcon 2013 day 2

133 Digital Marketing Ideas from MozCon 2013 Day 2

July 9, 2013

Listening to all of the digital marketing ideas on Day 2 of MozCon 2013 I came to the realization that I love my job. Now, this isn’t a new revelation, I frequently think about that. But, it’s still nice to be in an environment that reminds me of just how cool it is.

The crowd at MozCon is different than many conferences largely because of the speakers. The level of quality of the speakers and information they are sharing is the highest there is. But the best part is that people in the audience are awesome too because they all really care about digital marketing, SEO, link building and all other things covered here today.

The Passion of MozCon 2013 Day 2

Every conversation I’ve had so far has been with people who are really into what they do. Some are ninjas and rulers over all they survey and others are thrown into their roles as SEO or digital marketer because they were the least unqualified at their company.

But the constant among everyone is that they’re at MozCon because they want to make a difference. That’s awesome.

Just like Day 1, today was a veritable deluge of excellent, actionable digital marketing ideas. To make it easy for those of you who weren’t able to attend MozCon 2013 day 2, I’ve put together this list of the best digital marketing ideas the day had to offer. Enjoy.

Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy

Phil Nottingham

Distilled

1. Do video, even if you only have a limited budget
2. You can start your video production with:

  • $500 camcorder
  • $50 tripod
  • $500 lighting rig
  • $100 lapel mic

3. Don’t forget the strategy when planning a video
4. In general, users will convert 40% more often when they view a video
5. Include transcript in the HTML – this is valuable for users and search engines
6. Ensure you get Rich Snippets
7. Use Wistia, it’s the best video hosting platform
8. Create video site map
9. DO NOT use YouTube for conversion videos – YouTube does not refer traffic back to your site
10. DO use YouTube for brand awareness, purely informational content
11. Optimize for YouTube if using and measure for engagement
12. Make sure every video is optimized on your YouTube channel
13. Ensure the video is only initially visible on your domain, or you’ll lose links to hosting platform
14. Reach out to sites that have linked to current videos, then offer them more and/or HD versions of existing videos
15. Use YouTube API to create a playlist, then embed that on your site
16. You can’t go after conversion and rich snippets, brand awareness, and links and social shares all at once – you much choose one goal for proper optimization
17. Segment your content by goal
18. Do video news releases to support your PR
19. Don’t try to do everything at once – focus on what you’re best at and focus on that

How to Moz Lingo: Cross-Team Communication When Crisis Hits

Carin Overtuft

Moz

20. When a crisis hits don’t forget etiquette
21. Make sure emails stay on topic and only have a single topic that is also in the subject line
22. Be mindful of the tone of your emails
6 methods to recover from a crisis as quickly and painlessly as possible:
23. Accept that everyone makes mistakes
24. Have a dedicated email distribution
25. Clearly define what constitutes an emergency and make sure everyone on the crisis team is aware of it
26. Clear and concise email is crucial – put your 2-3 sentence conclusion first
27. Set realistic expectations internally and externally
28. Take the time to follow up with a post-mortem – let everybody know what happens and what you’re going to do to prevent it from happening again

Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists

Aaron Wheeler

Moz

29. Make an emotional connection with users
30. Make everything public and shareable – 70% of users will spend more because of a history of good customer service
31. Make finding answers easy
32. Steps to making that connection:
33. Make great help content
34. Build a help content strategy
35. Evaluate performance regularly – internally and externally
37. Add a link to your customer service emails that makes it easy to tweet

Let’s Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty

Joanna Lord

Moz

38. You must build loyalty with your customers to succeed
39. Take advantage of the under-appreciated opportunity to connect with your users
40. Make customer loyalty your business, even if you don’t think it is
41. Know the 4 types of loyalty:

  1. No loyalty – customers that never/rarely develop loyalty to products or brands
  2. Inertia loyalty – low level of brand attachment, buy out of habit
  3. Latent loyalty – high brand attachment, buys less often, more attitude based
  4. Premium loyalty – high brand attachment, high repeat purchase pattern, pride in purchasing

42. Be transparent with your customers
43. Ask for your customer’s feedback, listen to it, take action based on it
44. Take the online relationship offline
45. Anticipate customer’s needs and add before they ask
46. Explore customer’s Pinterest accounts to get new product ideas, new content areas, etc.
47. Curate content your customers love, even if it’s not your content – this will show you care about more than just your own products
48. Deliver on your promises – do what you say you’re going to do
49. Stay front of mind with frequent touch points
50. Multi-device, integrated experiences work best
51. Get personal with the people keeping you in business

Ecommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale

Adam Audette

Rimm-Kaufman Group

52. Don’t chase the algorithms, chase people
53. Don’t focus only on rankings, look at bottom-line metrics
54. Stand behind your work
55. User personas to understand who the target demographic is
56. Realize that technical SEO is dependable, but lower impact
57. Off-page SEO is higher impact, but less dependable
58. Tablets are used more than smartphones to visit ecommerce sites
59. Use responsive design to improve page load times
60. Use parameter handling for Google and Bing
61. Be proactive in fixing 404s so search engines can spend more time crawling the good pages of your site
62. Use canonicals for mostly duplicate product pages, such as for each color of a product
63. Don’t keep old reviews for products that are no longer carried – use a 301 to related product or 404 the page
64. Get on Google+ recommended site list – this will blow up your number of followers
65. Understand your data trends

Building Your Business: Relationship and Other Critical “Soft” Skills

Brittan Bright

iAcquire
66. Develop the ability to translate complex conceptes into plain english
67. Understand that we are all different and use that as a guide to communicate with others
68. Experiment with different forms of communication – don’t always rely on email
69. Remember that electronic communication will never replace face to face interaction
70. Know that intelligence comes in many colors, not just your favorites
71. Believe in yourself, Get out of your own way

Win Through Optimization and Testing

Kyle Rush

Kyle Rush Consulting

72. Test constantly
Steps for Experimentation:
73. Identify goals
74. Develop Hypotheses
75. Create many experiments to test hypotheses
76. Prioritize w/ROI
77. Test your ideas
78. Record results
79. Run copy-based experiments because they provide the highest ROI – they are easy to implement
80. Use image-based experiments – they are only marginally more difficult than copy-based
81. Reduce your page load times with performance-based experiments
82. Don’t waste time testing minor design elements like button color or rounded vs. square corners
83. Start your tests simply
84. Don’t be afraid to fail – you have to find what doesn’t work to know what does
85. Gather every type of data you can think of – there’s never too much data
86. Conduct user testing

How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect the Customer Experience

Nathalie Nahai

The Web Psychologist

87. Know who you are targeting
88. Communicate with them persuasively
89. Sell with integrity
90. Identify culture-specific user habits and arrange your website to cater to them

Breaking Up With Your Keyword-Based KPIs

Annie Cushing

Annielytics
91. Recognize that excluding (not provided) keyword data is excluding the most tech savvy users, who are the ones using Chrome and Firefox
92. Look at the landing page report to see which landing pages are getting traffic from the same keyword, then optimize your site to minimize the number of pages for each
93. Use SEMRush or Keyword Spy to see what keywords are driving traffic to your site
94. Learn how to use pivot tables

End-to-End Local Optimization

David Mihm

Moz

95. Create a unique page for every store location so Google can recognize them
96. Scale compelling content by tapping into managers/store owners and customers
97. Scale your citation tactics in competitive markets by pulling sources from services like Whitespark
98. Scale your review tactics by streamlining the review process as much as possible – remove extra steps like email confirmation
99. Identify and reach out to prolific reviewers in your niche – use Yelp Elite status and Followerwonk!
100. Start by focusing on the fundamentals – store locator, on-page experience, KML file, major data feeds
101. Analyze the competition to see where they are getting local exposure
102. Create local-focused quality content in volume
103. Build 1:1 relationships

Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out

Dana DiTomaso

Kick Point Inc

104. Don’t end a conversation talking about rankings – rankings don’t change a company’s bottom line
105. Attend your local advertising group to glean ideas and see what others are struggling with
106. Listen to people around you to see opportunities for your clients
107. Make your brand interesting, make people love you
108. Don’t limit yourself to only talking to your fans, talk to everyone
109. Create a perpetual referral machine by creating an environment for unexpected social interactions
110. Connect with people emotionally – decisions are based on feelings
111. Run ad extensions on all local PPC ads
112. Become a part of your customer’s life – they’ll stick with you like family
113. Use remarketing to stay front of mind through the entire customer lifecycle

Cater to Your Audience via UX

Allison Urban

MailChimp

114. Make people feel safe, connected to and like they have a sense of purpose through great UX
115. Make things as easy to understand and use as possible – this is much harder than it seems, but can be done with thought and planning
116. Humanize your site
117. Make next steps in the conversion funnel obvious
118. Make your product pleasurable by:
119. Aim to delight a target audience
120. Show some personality
121. Add little surprises
122. Build super loyalty by thinking long term and giving without thinking of reciprocation
123. Make your product meaningful by:
124. Celebrate milestones
125. Reward achievements
126. Say thank you

Living in the Future of User Behavior

Will Critchlow

Distilled

127. Market to people who are in control of what they consume
128. Stop thinking of mobile as different
129. Realize that robots are starting to understand, not just index
130. Stop focusing on penalty, focus on searchability
131. Make sure content is machine-readable
132. Citations, authorship, authoritative links are going to be around for a long time
133. Get more attention and you’ll get links

Have you checked out the 101 SEO tips from MozCon day 1? See tips from Avinash Kaushik, Ross Hudgens, Dharmesh Shah and more.

David McCormick
About the Author

David is a Digital Marketing Strategist at Blast Analytics & Marketing. David spends his days immersed in the world of SEO, link building and digital marketing and loves when his mind gets blown by a new way of seeing something.

David McCormick has written on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.

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