I was at SMX Sydney last week and had a great time (again) meeting fellow marketers, sharing knowledge and learning a few things along the way. Last year I compiled my experience from SMX Sydney 2012 and outlined 77 Tips & Tricks. I was originally going to go down the same line this year, but thought I’d keep it a bit more concise and instead share some of the tips that would be more consumable/relatable with marketers at all levels (well mostly). In addition, we’re running our second Adelaide Meetup event tonight and figured it would give us some nice discussion points!
So this year we focus on 7 insights & here they are:
1 – Keyword Research Tip
Which page on the internet would be the most optimised for a particular keyword? If you said Wikipedia.org, you’d be close! The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) themselves, actually. In the example below we’ll use “used cars”.
- Go to Bing, enter “used cars” & click the search icon.
- Copy the Bing URL (http://www.bing.com/search?q=used+cars&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt=all&pq=used+cars&sc=8-9&sp=-1&sk=) and go to Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Enter the URL in the “Website” field in Google KW Tool & hit “Search” > Voila!
Credit: Marty Weintraub, @aimclear
2 – Mine Facebook Walls
Mine your own or competitors’ Facebook brand pages for key data:
- Find brand advocates – those who are already having conversations on your wall
- Make friends with them by being friendly
- Connect with these people for all kinds of further marketing analysis (e.g. content promotion/distribution)
Credit: Marty Weintraub, @aimclear
3 – Mine Social Media Sites for Content Ideas
Use Google to find content that people are already sharing and are popular on social media to generate opportunities for new content. Then target to these people after you’ve created the content.
Run the query > site:socialmediasite.com “keyword” e.g.
- site:facebook.com/video cat comments
- site:plus.google.com “how to fix a car”
Credit: Marty Weintraub, @aimclear
4 – Open Graph Tags
Nothing new really but always good as a reminder to include these!
If you are sharing content from your blog on Facebook, make sure your blog is optimised for the Open Graph:
To get things looking like this:
Also use Twitter Cards to optimise sharing on Twitter.
5 – Use Subtle Marketing Cues
Don’t bludgeon people with aggressive marketing. Instead, be subtle and guide people to convert. Also, make subtle changes to test the waters and advocate better conversions that lead to higher ROI. Rand provided a couple of examples where this was used effectively:
- There was a problem (somewhere in the US) in the men’s urinals whereby janitors were spending a great deal of time to cleaning up after their bathroom patrons’ failed / poorly-aimed attempts. A simple visual cue of a spider on the the toilet bowl was introduced, and reduced the cleaning time significantly.
- Another problem (in Alaska maybe?) whereby people were placing rubbish incorrectly into a bin with 2 chutes marked “Rubbish” and “Recycling” respectively. A simple change of label from “Rubbish” to “Landfill” saw a massive correctional shift!
You can see some more of the tips and his presentation in our liveblog coverage of Day 2.
Credit: Rand Fishkin, @randfish
6 – Does My Site Need a Redesign?
A good way to test if your website needs a redesign is to ask a select group of people (your friends would be a good starting point) to rate your site. Rating your site would involve selecting a quality score based on a scale from zero to ten: ten being sites that you find (that you like) after Googling: “web design gallery” and zero being the spammiest of the spammy sites out there. If the average number returned is less than seven…. it’s time to redesign!
Credit: Rand Fishkin, @randfish
7 – Bing Ads to Launch in Australia
- Steve Sirich from Microsoft, Brad Geddes from Certified Knowledge and Marty Weintraub from aimClear Online Marketing Agency spoke about Bing Ads’ impending launch.
- It was announced that Bing Ads will be launching in AU/NZ in July 2013.
- There was mention of a possible search alliance with Yahoo7
- Verticals that will work well with Bing Ads will be Finance, Travel and Auto.
Extra Resources
Thanks to Jon Quinton:
- Use birdsongdtt.com to examine social pages and find out how many likes each content type generates.
- WISH.CO.UK is a good example of content done well.
Thanks to Bastian Grimm:
- Automate CSS Sprite creation:
- spriteme.org
- spritecow.com
- Make images even smaller
- Site Speed Tools
- Blitz.io – Heavy Load Testing
- Pingdom – site uptime & performance – we also use Uptime Robot
- icinga – Application & service monitoring
- GTmetrix – Automated Testing for Website Speed & Performance
Bonus Tip – Invest in Something You Can’t Measure
This one resonated with me, especially after having had experienced it first hand. Rand covered it quite well and posted about it in his “11 Tips I Gave To Marketers This Morning” post (see Tip #3). In a nutshell, don’t just rely on ROI you can measure, but also actively invest in pursuits that will no doubt lead to ROI in the long term. So things like attending conferences such as this one are a great thing to do.
Thanks for reading and would love to see your SMX round ups and comments! Don’t forget to check out our liveblog from Day 2 too. Unfortunately we missed out on Day 1 as Will missed his flight due to a “hit and run” incident but that’s a different story.. Ask me about it sometime!
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