MozCon 2013 Roundup Day 2: More Actionable Marketing Tips

Day 2 of MozCon delivered a plethora of awesomeness for the inbound marketing world to enjoy. Below is our roundup of the highlights, valuable points of note and actionable tips from the second day of this outstanding conference. If you haven’t already done so catch up with Day 1 of MozCon 2013 so you don’t miss out!

Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy

by Phil Nottingham (@philnottingham); SlideShare: download

As the video ad market increased 46% in 2012, there is huge potential and opportunity to use video marketing to create some great content and feed this out through an increasingly popular channel
Only use video when the message would be lost by any other medium. For example the ‘Will It Blend?’ videos would make a bad blog post, but cracking videos
Convert viewers into customers: a user who watches a video on AppliancesOnline is twice as likely to convert!
Include transcriptions in the HTML: it’s valuable for users and provides unique/relevant text for product pages
Transcribe all videos: Speechpad is recommended as a great service for transcription
Use a secured paid hosting service such as Wistia to ensure the video snippet. Kurtz and Blum saw a 14% increase in organic traffic month/month just from a rich video snippet
Don’t use YouTube for conversion videos. If you do, you’ll drive traffic to YouTube as YouTube will rank for them, not your site. Use YouTube for brand awareness videos

“Did you know that the largest video ranking factor on YouTube is engagement, not views?”

Create stories, as brand awareness videos are all about stories. YouTube is also great for purely informational content. @REI is great at this
Make sure that all your YouTube videos are great quality, and then the rankings of all of them will be lifted
Did you know that the largest video ranking factor on YouTube is engagement, not views so use video as part of a creative page type, like interactive/mixed media pieces
Create video as link bait – create a video people will want to embed. That’s different from “viral content”
Use video for creating video infographics… a creative way of making data even sexier
Once you securely host and do some outreach for links, put it on YouTube
Interview customers to increase retention and provide good content
Interview authorities in your niche – they’ll probably link to the video
Use the YouTube API to curate a YouTube playlist just on your website
It’s hard to do something for conversions, brand awareness AND links/shares. Content will best support a goal when it’s created with that goal in mind. Re-cut and re-edit your existing video with each goal in mind – 3 for the price of 1!
Create video as video news releases: a powerful way to put great content under the radar of news and televisions outlets
If you have a bigger budget do link bait, do creative videos and advertise your content, not your products, on YouTube
If you have no budget available then use Vine, Instagram Video, or G+ Hangout On Air as these can provide a creative solution
Pitch to go slower to create better content

The Next Generation of Mozscape

by Phil Smith (@philhsmith); SlideShare: download

Get your geek on with this presentation about how Mozscape includes 9 billion links! However the need for a bigger, faster, data index remains. Moz’s work is never over
It’s currently a batch process that takes about 2 weeks to complete but Moz are shooting for a complete “update” every couple of days/week. No more releases – it’s just always there
The next stage is predictive modelling! With enough power and fresh data, you can not only report the present but predict the future

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

by Carin Overturf (@carin_overturf); SlideShare: download

Be aware of your tone in emails as sarcasm doesn’t translate well in the written form and it’s remarkably easy to cause unintentional offence. Keep your emails to one topic, it helps people prioritise tasks and if you use your subject line as your headline in emails people can quickly assess what they have to deal with
Develop a culture of transparency so you can remove the fear of blame and shift focus onto what needs to be done
Clear, concise email communication is important in an emergency. Have a clear actionable item format for readability and put your conclusion first in crisis communication. Keep it to 2-3 sentences then people can see it in email preview mode
Set realistic expectations, internally and externally! Your customers will handle bad news better if you’re honest
Avoid overly optimistic deadlines when communicating to your customers. Don’t give them false hope – it’s a bad experience. [Strategy tip: Under promising and over delivering is a good default approach]
Make sure you communicate all the time as communication is everything. It’s human to miss deadlines but if you don’t communicate, that makes you lame
Take the time to follow up on crises with a post-mortem. Don’t place blame – use it as a learning tool
Make sure your post-mortems are actionable and educational. Use “we” when talking about failure. Publicly praise team members for success

Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists

by Aaron Wheeler (@aaron_wheeler); SlideShare: download

There are 3 keys to customer service: 1.) make an emotional connection 2.) make everything public 3.) make everything easy
Make your customers feel valued, its important, and even more important is to share with them that they’re awesome. Customer service is establishing a connection and making people feel good. Add marketing by making it public!
Encourage customers to share their good vibes as this helps you build links, increase retention, build community and build your brand! Customers obtained through referrals are 18% more loyal and 16% more valuable. Customers who refer are valuable
Deliver great customer service. 70% of people will spend more because of a history of good customer service. They want to rely on your relationship
Listen to your customers and let them know they’ve been heard, this is one of *the* best ways to build community

“Listen to your customers and let them know they’ve been heard, this is one of *the* best ways to build community.”

Create great “Help!” content. It’s effective as your help content will rank well for help-related queries about your products – that adds a ton of value. Build a Help content strategy alongside your regular content strategy. Use internal search to see where people have problems and ask your customer service team what questions they get asked regularly
Save time by letting your Customer Service team get a hand in to create Help content – create a simple text editor for them to do it
Let customers help create Help content: enable commenting on product pages to let users answer each others’ questions. If you can’t enable commenting, you could try forum tools likeGetSatisfaction
Evaluate your performance: look at internal AND external searches. Are people finding the help they need? Ask why do users interact with brands? To say thank you, to be part of a club or to share our expertise
In your customer service emails, include a link to encourage people to share their positive experiences

Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play

by Miranda Rensch (@mrensch); SlideShare: download

Understand that Agile is: focusing on individuals, interactions, customers and responding to change quickly
Commit to things in small increments and adapt along the way to small, regular goals
Use sprints. Agile is a series of sprints and sprints are the increment of time in which you’re going to commit to a set number of tasks
Define the mission and visioning in Week 0 of your sprint, i.e. what do you want to do? Why? How should people feel when you’re done? For example: if your personal goal is to lose weight try to define the specific feelings you will get when you achieve your goal
Find what you’re focusing on for the next sprint then define specific metrics and timelines with deadlines
Do the stuff you’ve set out to do through tactics and tasks, i.e. “the fun stuff”. Brainstorm, ask everyone for their input and really take the time necessary to do all the research
Pick out your goals and put them in your mission board. Include “measure impact” as a task.
Then lather, rinse and repeat!
Check out this Google Doc on Agile and work smarter

Let’s Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty

by Joanna Lord (@JoannaLord); SlideShare: download

This is all about finding ways to say ‘thank you’ to your customers as that builds customer loyalty.
Aim for the highest level of loyalty: at the bottom end is ‘no Loyalty’ which is self describing, the next level is ‘inertia’ which is low level brand attachment, next is ‘latent loyalty’ which is a group who spend more but buy less often and the third and best kind is ‘premium’ which is high brand attachment with a high repeat purchase pattern. Customers are proud purchasing from you (eg. pretty much all Apple customers)
Make your super loyal customers happy and continue to do so: they are the ones that will build your community
Start by telling your story, all about the why of your existence as a business, Coca Cola do this brilliantly
Ask your customers what they want, they will always tell you if you survey them. A good example of this is Seattle’s Cupcake Royale
Take the online relationship offline. Send “thank you” goods to your most loyal customers
Curate great content that your customers would appreciate. It saves time, adds value and builds community. Check out Glamour Magazine on G+
Deliver on promises and do what you said you were going to do, check out Lowe’s vine strategy.
Be consistent and stay front of mind with frequent touch points. Check outstandardhotels.tumblr.com
Think about how you can make your brand loyal to the customer and create ‘reciprocal loyalty’ by focusing on the customer. The customer is loyal to a brand/product and the brand is loyal to the customer
Create and measure KPIs for brand loyalty so you know you are doing it right. Get started with KPIs such as: lifetime value, % of customer retention and % of customer attrition

eCommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale

by Adam Audette (@audette)

Don’t chase the algorithms, chase people. Now successful SEO is about creating experiences worth sharing. Links are not the purpose, they are the consequence
Create buying personas, create content for them, use terms and words that would be compelling for them and build on this. It’s not as simple as selecting keywords and where to place them
Stay technical. Technical SEO is more important now than ever as its very dependable
Mobile accounts for 25% of organic traffic. Tablets drive more traffic than smartphones to eCommerce sites so the experience you create must be everywhere, across all devices
Pay attention to duplications and indexing loops as every site has finite crawl resources
You shouldn’t fix every server error ever but make sure that when they spike that you’re on it. Speed matters
Use value and brand loyalty to build your community and raise follower count. Remember numbers aren’t everything

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

by Brittan Bright (@BrittanBright); SlideShare: download

“Learn how to translate complex concepts into plain English, it’s an essential business skill.”

Learn about communication, these are essential skills that we need to master because people are unavoidable. We forget that people are “emotions” and emotions play a lot in life. If nobody understands/cares what you’re talking about, you won’t succeed. Communication skills involve empathy, emotional and social intelligence, self-awareness and confidence. Use them
Learn how to translate complex concepts into plain English, it’s an essential business skill
Understand the typical barriers to success which are: miscommunication, fear, avoidance, resentment, lack of understanding, insecurity and lack of empathy, so you can remove them
Experiment with different kinds of communication to get the desired effect. This can be applied to your content strategy too

Win Through Optimization and Testing

by Kyle Rush (@kylerush); SlideShare: download

Do usability testing on your site. You need to observe your users using your product or you don’t really know how it’s used. You’re not the user
Identify your goals. Not just conversions but micro goals like error rate, email signup, etc. Create experiments to test your hypotheses and run the same experiment several times
Prioritize with ROI. Experiment with big ROI-changers and don’t make complicated changes for small gains. Record your results! Don’t repeat work because you didn’t properly record that you did and what happened…
Experiment with your copy, one copy change got @kylerush a 21% lift in conversions, copy is by far the simplest experiment. Images are also quite simple to test. One image test gave @kylerush a 19% lift in conversion rate
Test for performance: even a 100ms reduction in page load time can improve conversions. Throwing out legacy code and writing their own got @kylerush a 63% reduction in page weight and a 52% reduction in HTTP requests
Simplify your forms and reduce barriers to entry can increase conversions on an already optimized page
Always have a test running! If you have traffic and you’re not testing it, that’s wasted learning potential but don’t be afraid to fail, only about 20% of @kylerush’s experiments raised the conversion rate
Try testing tools such as Optimizely or Visual Website Optimiser

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

by Nathalie Nahai (@TheWebPsych); SlideShare: download

Understand the 3 secrets to online success: know who you’re targeting, communicate persuasively and sell with integrity
Understand that culture is the collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is important to online marketing because different cultural groups employ different usage strategies using the same interface. But culture is more than language. It impacts body language, social contexts, symbols and aesthetics
Offer either 3 options or 5 options to people, these are their preferences. Any more than 7 options is overwhelming
Understand Individualism vs Collectivism. Do you define your self-image in terms of “I” or “we”? For example for collectivist cultures: “we” not “me”. You need to respect traditions, be careful with images, respect wisdom and privacy. Individualistic cultures like the US express bigger gender differences than highly collectivist ones
Consider gender issues: generally, men really like review sites. Starting at age 7! Men also like videos and games. Men are less concerned with privacy online and are happy to part with their personal information. Women are highly social, interested in communicating. Women respond more to colour, and to clean, uncluttered sites
Apply scientific rigour to your design. Start from a foundation of psychographic research for the best results. Be culture and gender sensitive. Research your audience, test your hypotheses and analyse the results
If you’re going for a global audience, you have to be culture and gender-sensitive. Research every culture, including your own

Breaking Up with Your Keyword-Based KPIs

by Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing)

‘Not provided’ covers about 52% of web users worldwide. This is made up of the 17% of users who use Firefox (where all searches are encrypted) and 35% who use Chrome
Now there’s a NEW thief of keyword data! Google Local Carousel searches also strip out keywords. Clicking a Carousel result for a business takes you to a new SERP for that business’ name. That’s the keyword being passed through
Mark 18th June 2013 in your Google Analytics annotations – that’s the day Carousel launched
We’re going to lose keyword trending data from Analytics and separating out branded and non-branded traffic is also going. Unfortunately the data you’re left with after (not provided) is not a representative sample
Use GA custom reports to extract as much information as you can to work with
Look at WMT keyword data its good for comparative analysis, less so for exact numbers

End-to-End Local Optimization

by David Mihm (@davidmihm)

1 in 3 searches has local intent on desktop. This is higher on mobile, which is exploding
Local search has evolved from from the 7pack to Carousel to Glass (future). Mobile and Entity, that’s now
Pay attention to your quality and authority signals as they pay a really big role in local rankings
You need to establish a 3 way connection between your website, your location and your brand
Have a unique page for every physical store location, it’s HUGE for local search
Offer a great experience in the store location page. And make it unique about the location
Build local content at scale: start with your managers, leverage customers and technology. Every store/location manager should be able to write his/her own 200-character description for their store. Prompt store managers by having them answer the 10 most commonly asked questions they get at the store
Pull in an Open Graph photo feed from Facebook in your CMS – it injects personality and unique content
Ask locals to come in for interviews and publish it on location pages
Host events at your business and acquire citations from the people organising your event

Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out

by Dana DiTomaso (@danaditomaso); SlideShare: download

Understand the local conversation to give your small business a bigger voice. You need to stand for something so understand what people want in order to build a brand they want. Eavesdrop, get out of the office and listen to people
Listen to the phone calls. Read the emails. Talk to people. Find out what they’re all about. It’s all about people
You are preaching to the choir if you are only talking to your fans on social and no one else. People always know when you’re faking it. Make social interactions authentic
Learn how to tell stories in the length of 70 characters (that’s the length of an AdWords ad – or half a tweet). Take the stories and turn them into AdWords. That shows personality and increases click-through
Be forward-thinking: if you’re marketing about pregnancy, re-target for new mums later

Cater to Your Audience via UX

by Allison Urban (@allisonurban); SlideShare: download

Think of customers as people; when we do this we want to delight, it’s not just about making sales, everything changes. Great UX creates happy customers. UX is a key difference in digital marketing success. That’s why small businesses can beat big brands
Humans need purpose, connection and safety. They spend so much time on technology. It needs to be usable, pleasurable and meaningful. Your product/service should make people feel like they’re not going to be hit on the head and killed
How can make our site usable. UX is the way… seems obvious but it’s not. A good example of great useful UX is Simple. Their entire brand experience is about trust. That’s a great UX
Making small changes can make a huge difference on user experience. Remember that when people are trying to accomplish something they don’t read your site; they scan it
Create a beautiful experience: research has shown that when you perceive something as beautiful it builds more trust and conveys a stronger message. What seems strong to one person may seem pushy to others. Think of different scenarios and designs for them where you can
Don’t be the same as your competitors. What makes your brand the better choice?
Emotionally charged events last longer in our memories. People remember being happy but also remember the information better
Success pages are a great place to do something fun because they don’t interrupt the task
Think long term when we want to create customers who are brand evangelists. People want to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves
Make your product meaningful: celebrate milestones, reward achievements and say thank you

Living in the Future of User Behavior

by Will Critchlow (@willcritchlow); SlideShare: download

Market to users who are in control of what they consume. Be wanted – or they’ll go elsewhere. Owning your audience is increasingly valuable. Audiences are more fragmented because they’re not following us, they’re following curators
Stop thinking about mobile devices! Start asking if you’re ready for always-connected customers, the experience needs to be everywhere. We don’t use mobile just because we have to – 77% of mobile searches are done in locations with a PC available
We choose to be signed in everywhere – in part because it’s easier and easier (plus harder NOT to be). Chrome sync is just the beginning – @willcritchlow predicts we’ll soon see cookie sync. The physical device is becoming irrelevant – there’s no connection to the actual device any more
Unified alerts are going to be important. Our devices will work for us more because they’re designed for humans. People are using mobile to help themselves. You need to play nice with that tech for them

“Google is trying to make meaning out of the mess of the web.”

Google is so good that the query “that movie where the two guys drink wine” returns a result for Sideways
We expect robots to not just index the web, but understand it. Context is being added to our queries. Google’s trying to understand the implicit query. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve with your query?
Be machine-readable, not only on our own sites, but on trust factors as well. The future is less about penalty; it’s about visibility. Not ranking loss, but findability loss
Concepts that look like they’re enhancing link data (like citations, author, trusted links) makes meaning out of the web. Google is trying to make meaning out of the mess of the web. The way our industry builds dominant businesses is helping our clients earn attention and build real audiences

Many thanks and appreciation for live tweeters especially @mackfogelson, @gfiorelli1 @ruthburr and@Mike_Arnesen. Images courtesy of Thos Ballantyne and Mike Arnesen.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint… something that we believe during all of our work. The same is true for the roundups of each day of MozCon! Catch up with Day 3 of MozCon.

MozCon 2013 Roundup of Day 2: More Awesome Actionable Inbound Marketing Tips