Today marks the last of our two jam-packed days at SMX Sydney, Australia’s top Search Marketing expo. We hope your minds are ready for a search marketing info overload: for those of you who couldn’t make it this year, we’ll be live blogging the final half of the event right here on the Kwasi Studios blog.
Day 2 begins bright and early with a keynote address from SEOMOZ CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin, who’ll be enlightening us on the ways in which an understanding of social psychology can help online marketers accomplish their goals.
We’ll spend the rest of the day learning how to use Facebook more effectively to further our online marketing efforts, adding more tools to our link building tool belt, and picking up new conversion-boosting tips.
Last but not least, we’ll wind up our time at the expo with The SEO Site Clinic, where six of our fellow conference attendees will be lucky enough to have their websites taken to the next level by some of the best brains in the business.
We’ll be keeping you posted throughout the day, so keep an eye on the blog; it’s a front-row seat to the search marketing event of the year!
Live Blog
9 am Behavioural Psychology Meets Web Marketing with Rand Fishkin
Rand explores some of the mysteries of decision-making and how great marketers can leverage this knowledge to improve SEO and social media.
9:05 am Rand Fishkin is on stage
Interesting example on Tax dodging problem in the US: “most people avoiding tax got caught” was changed to “93% of people pay tax online” in marketing campaigns. This is a popular example mentioned in a number of Harvard Business Review articles.
Another example shows how changing “garbage” to “landfill” improves recycling behaviour.
Marketing in the Future: Nudge (not buy, beg, bludgeon)
12 tips for marketing through nudges:
- Use social proofs to drive traffic to your website
- Play the name game: naming is important. Experiment with different names and labels to see which one produces the best results. For example, labeling different “levels” of software packages “Start – grow – CONNECT – Enterprise” instead of “bronze, silver, gold…”
- Anchor your audience: reverse price display from large to small (199-100 – 60 – 12) => people read left to right, will see $12 last.
- Limit choice. Most successful social share button= Facebook like.
- Serve up behavioural data: more specific/relevant => more conversion rate. (“26 people you follow use the app”)
- Don’t make them think. Interesting example provided from Obama donation form: reducing the size and amount of detail on the form boosted the number of donations made.
- Tap the power of reciprocation (give stuff away)
- Familiarity biases our behaviour
- Quality + consistency + repetition = Good branding
- Use ego & competition to drive participation (“because you shared this, 25 people have taken this quiz”)
- Leverage the power of defaults (default options) , for example: default embed code on Slideshare
- Nudge over time, not all at once
- Embedded steps can create powerful nudges. Interesting example provided of a Texas high school. In order to graduate a high school, students have to send an application to higher education institute. This improved the number of students getting in college by 14%.
- Q/A: With the current shift towards inbound marketing, what will SEO in the future look like?
SEO is an important component of inbound marketing, but will not exist on its own. There will be a greater focus on CRO and brand building. 10 years from now SEO will still be around, but as part of a wider strategy. - Q/A: Is Google winning the web spam battle ?
Yes, in the market they care about.
10:40 am: Conversion Rate Optimisation
CRO: it’s about understanding people. Real people.
Interesting analogy comparing website to a bar, where you ask the bartender for a scotch on the rocks, but he pours you a cheap champagne and then won’t let you leave… much like a pop-up asking you to stay on a website with content you’re not interested in.
CRO and SEO are both driven by keyword research. Content strategy is equally important.
3 reasons to care about CRO:
- Your customers are leaving you
- You’re leaving money on the table
- Your competitors are already doing CRO
2 key areas of CRO: the demographics and the psychographics.
Who should be design your Website? Not CEO , creative agents , IT department… VISITORS.
Conversion Trinity:
- Relevance
- Value proposition
- Calls to action
Personas need to go deeper than just age, gender, location…
- Common goals
- Manageable set
- Specific
- Detailed
- Usable
Conversion funnels & persuasion
Funnel: loss at each stage of the funnel, clear navigation and calls to action are essential,
Testing: A/B split, choose the best then conduct multivariate testing.
Conversion Approach:
13 quickwin consideration:
- Headlines
- CTA
- Unique value propositions
- Eye gravity
- Urgency
- Relevance
- Non clickable, clickable
- Site quality
- Funnel
- Forms
- Risk reversals
- Navigation
- Content navigation
Useful tool: Feng Gui Attention Report
DEVELOPING PERSONAS
If you target the average, you end up average!
The persona core: location, device, age, sex, interests
(For example, females like to browse, so breadcrumbs are important).
Situation, social media profile, pain points, core needs, solutions.
Tools: Facebook, Google Analytics, Clicktale, Feng-GUI and members research.
5 step persona development:
- Set clear objectives & priorities
- Gather data
- Develop a hypothesis
- Test and confirm
- Publish detailed persona
Persona Implementation:
SEDUCE:
- Stakeholder buy in and sign off
- Educate
- Deliberate
- Understand
- Calculate
- Execute
1:30 pm 40 tips to improve WordPress Security
Straightforward stuff, very good for newbies. Introduction to some good WordPress plug-ins.
2:45 pm Progammatic Optimisation with Bill Hunt
Interesting topic, but several people seemed put off by the word “programmatic” and left.
Bill talked about:
- Optimising the catalog
- Optimising templates for Scale & Global: in reality people use the same CMS but different versions for different languages; need to rethink and optimise
- Developing “Building rules” into CMS/Database Integration
- Ensuring templates are “shared” with all countries
- Optimising at the wireframe stage (making it easier for web developers, as they haven’t built the code).
- Deploying optimisation consistently: interesting example from Nestle website: The title is different in every version. For Singapore: Home Page Nestle Singapore.
- Standardizing URL development logic
- Keyword segment drive rules
- Understanding the CMS well (so the web developer can’t say “No, we can’t do that”)
3:30 pm Mastering the four crucial ingredients for Successful Landing Pages
THE PROCESS: Brand Strategy for Conversion, define customer experience by personality type, apply best practice insights for layout & design, optimisation.
Aesthetics, Marketing & Context
- Logos with taglines make a differences.
- Use a headline to meet user intent
- Create a compelling offer (better than your competitors)
- Make your copy and visual content scannable (with sentence spacing etc)
- Make an enticing presentation of your product offering.
- Make it easy for visitor to trust you
- Make your target audience see that you are talking to them (“powerful websites for serious photographers”)
- Allow different personality types to link to more targeted information
- Use colour to your advantage
- Be easily contactable
- Add Call to Actions for Researchers & Buyers
Usability:
- Help visitors reach their goals faster on your site
- Win the Speed Race (use Google PageSpeed service), refer to competitors
- Is your website rendering to mobile and tablet formats?
- Make your hyperlinked text user-friendly
- Allow sufficient spacing for text
- Include a site search bar for big site
- Q/A: Check out processes: 1 step or 4 step?
Shorter is better, but it depends on the information to be collected. Testing has indicated that 1 page is more efficient.
Well, that’s all the live blogging we’ve got time for here. We hope you enjoyed the ride, and we’ll see you round… maybe at SMX next year!
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