10 Second Summary

The speakers at MozCon said we should focus on producing excellent content, turning customers into evangelists, and connecting our campaigns across platforms.

Mozwhat? MozCon is among the most innovative online marketing conferences in the world. I was lucky enough to attend this year and thought I’d share some of my notes. The speakers included geniuses like Rand Fishkin, Tom Critchlow, Wil Reynolds, and Marty Weintraub. They covered everything from advertising and content creation to highly technical search engine optimization. Without further ado, here’s the good stuff:

Compelling Content Wins

Nearly every speaker at MozCon repeated the same mantra “create awesome content.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge multinational or a hometown retailer, you’re going to need compelling content if you want to succeed online. What should you create? That depends entirely on your business, brand, and audience — but research shows that images and videos score the highest engagement ratings.

Extra Bonus: Are search engine rankings important to your business? If so, there are several ways to get a nifty rankings boost from images. My favorite is to find your image on Google, search for “similar” results, find all of the websites using your image, and then ask the owners for a link to your website. It’s an easy way to get lots of links and increase your rankings! (thank Paddy Moogan for this gem)

Create Evangelists

An evangelist is someone who loves to tell people about your business, and they’re your most powerful marketing resource. The trick is figuring out how to convert people who just “like” your business into evangelists who preach the gospel. First off, remember that not all evangelists are created equal and that you should focus your energy on the people who are most influential (bloggers, leaders, etc). The easiest way to create an evangelist is to provide an exceptional service and then surprise and delight a person by doing something they never expected. Kotex did this brilliantly last year by selecting 20 influential women on Pinterest and sending them a surprisingly beautiful box of gifts with a personal note. Nearly all of the women responded by posting pictures of their gifts and blogging about the event. In total, Kotex estimates that their campaign reached nearly 50,000 women through a trusted source — for the cost of a few gift baskets and a little creativity.

Reallocate Advertising

Online advertising options have improved dramatically in the last few years and return-on-investment (ROI) is very solid, especially compared to traditional advertising mediums (print, radio, television). The trick to running a successful advertising campaign is to tie in social media profiles, landing pages on your website, and interesting content. This obviously works out differently depending on your industry and size, but let’s look at a few specific examples:

Local Grocery Store Uses Facebook advertising to their Facebook page because every time someone “likes” their page they’ll have access to them for future communications. These ads are relatively inexpensive and it doesn’t take long to build up 2000 followers. Now when they post of coupon or a daily special, it reaches between 400 and 700 people without further cost.

Large Law Office Every new client brings in a significant chunk of money, so this law office an afford to spend more money on a conversion. This particular office is doing very well by targeting auto injury and malpractice related keywords in their area on Google ads. Each click costs approximately $35, so they’ve built beautiful landing pages for each topic (auto injury, mesothelioma, etc) to help maximize the number of people who actually convert into clients. This particular office also uses retargeting ads — which means that anyone who clicked on their mesothelioma ad on Google will now see their mesothelioma banner ads on major websites like the Wall Street Journal.

Small Bike Shop These guys have a passionate audience who consume interesting cycling content faster than it can be created, so they’ve focused on building up a blog with tons of industry articles and visual tutorials. They use the same Facebook strategy as the grocery store but they’re also advertising on Google for keywords that relate to bicycle tutorials (in their geographical area). This bike shop is also experimenting with YouTube banner ads that show up when people in their city search for cycling related videos.

The takeaway is that online advertising is quantifiable, targeted, and relatively affordable. There are also lasting benefits if you can link your campaign to a social media platform and retain fans for future communications. Successful campaigns are well targeted, link to great content, and allow visitors to easily opt into something so you can retain them.

Author: Roderick Campbell is the CEO and co-founder of Coral Payments. His background is in digital marketing and search engine optimization. If you have questions, you can usually find him on Twitter @CoralHQ.

Here are some resources for more information: social media articles from SEOmoz, learn Facebook advertising from AimClear, and find dozens of useful articles on CopyBlogger.