Traffic and Conversion Summit 2018
Posted on March 15, 2018 nerdymind
In February, some NERDS had the opportunity to attend the largest digital marketing conference in the United States, Traffic and Conversions Summit in San Diego, California. By day we participated in sessions hosted by some of the brightest thought leaders in the industry, and by night we enjoyed the amazing food and drinks that San Diego has to offer (tacos... lots and LOTS of tacos).
Traffic and Conversion Summit 2018 was all about putting human interaction back into the digital marketing equation (well, sort of). The way people buy from and interact with brands is changing and in order to keep up, you have to invest in the 3 C’s - Conversations, Community, and Customers.
Lions, Tigers, and Bots(?)! Oh My!
Consumers today love to buy, but hate being sold to - and even more than that, they hate sales people. We were trained to watch out for the “used car salesman” of the world that is just trying to make his commission. To successfully get in front of your customer, you have to find a way to get back to the root principles of successful sales - start a conversation. Don’t go reaching for your landline just yet. In 2018, marketers are using bots to message and vet potential leads that come through their website or social media channels automatically. Bots save you and your sales team time by getting the lead directly to the right person - no more “if you don’t know the number of your party’s extension...”
Keep in mind, this is not a fully automated “bots are taking over the world” scenario (more like nightmare). Bots are for vetting your leads, not converting them!
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Now that you have learned more about your customers needs and wants through messaging and conversation, you have to make them feel at home. A community is not an audience to be sold to directly, it’s a group of people who have similar interests, goals, or experiences. Based on what point of the sales process your community members are in, the groups will help to nurture marketing efforts like strengthening brand awareness, raising offer awareness, growing retargeting and email lists, increasing word-of-mouth referrals and buyer frequency, and harboring active promoters.
Don’t forget, no one community can guide your customers through the entire sales process.
We Meet at Last
Ryan Deiss, Founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer, said “stop defining your business by the products you sell and start defining it by the people you serve”. Pretty often you see a business making decisions based on sales or their own personal preferences. 2018 is the year of spending time investing in your customers themselves. What do they want? How can your product or service add value to their lives?
Traffic and Conversion Summit 2018 was an amazing and educational experience - from learning about the 3 C’s to all of the ways you can further invest in them. The team is excited to take everything we learned and apply it to our client’s initiatives and to our own customers!