Call To Action Conference 2017
Learning from the experience of others is one of my favorite ways to learn – which is one of the many reasons I was so excited to attend Unbounce’s Call To Action Conference last week in Vancouver! It was a great mix of everything digital marketing: landing page optimization, PPC, copywriting, SEO, even a bit of AI fun mixed in!
Help Me Help You
There was an insane amount of info but I think what I walked away wondering the most was how, as marketers, can we actually help people find what they’re looking for, and be less worried about CTRs, CPCs & CPA.
Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive (clearly an Adster fave!) had a great session about why people search – it’s for solutions to their problems. Sometimes we search for fun (did Adam Lambert actually win American Idol or was he a runner-up*? ), but more often than not, people are searching for actual solutions to real, sometimes serious problems. We see this all the time when looking at data via our clients – people searching for legal advice because their parents didn’t leave behind a will, someone searching for a psychological assessment, or maybe a A grandparent trying to find a good deal on dance lessons for their grandson.
How can we (or, our clients) show up for people when they need answers? How can we really help people?
This paired well with another one of my fave sessions. Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media had some amazing tips for content marketing but he also talked about how if you’re going to write content on a subject, you should be trying to write the best content on that subject. And, if you aren’t trying to make the best page on the whole dang internet for that particular topic, you aren’t doing content marketing, and you aren’t doing SEO, so why bother? Google will reward you by getting people to that amazing content, but only if it’s actually the best.
Let Dat Content Write Itself
ALSO, Andy taught us eager conference goers something that I cannot wait to do. Writing blogs is hard (or at least, there’s a perception out there that this is true), especially for a busy agency – how can we make this easier? We’ve been tracking our time here at Adster for almost a year and I’m sure our team can all tell you how much time we spend writing client emails and client conversations all together. We dole out a lot of knowledge to our clients (and sometimes internally) – why send that just to them individually where, honestly, sometimes they may not understand it or really even read it? Andy puts every question he answers via email into a spreadsheet, categorizes the questions, and then expands on them to create blog posts. He’s done this to create over 170 pieces of content! Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Side note: this conference was HELLA organized. This week they sent out a big ol’ Google Doc with all the conference notes which I knew was coming, so I didn’t need to be taking detailed notes of my own all day. Most presenters had their sliders available online and also, Unbounce sent out videos of every single session! They also had amazing swag! And food! And they even made the weather in Vancouver amazing the whole time I was there! Geez, they’re the best. 10/10, would go again.
Second side note: this year Unbounce committed to gender parity for speakers at CTAConf. That is just the best. I can’t even. Except that I SHOULD even because this should be the norm at all conferences but – this is still pretty great. I loved seeing so many incredible women (and men!) up on that stage – seeing people who look like you in leadership positions instills confidence that you too, can be a leader. So thanks for committing to this super important concept, Unbounce. Now – how’s bout some more cultural diversity when it comes to speakers ? 👀
*My boo Adam was totally the runner up but don’t worry, the secret to winning a reality show is to NOT win the reality show.