The Online Marketing Summit kicked off their twenty-three city tour here in Phoenix yesterday and we had the opportunity to attend and network with leaders in the SEO and Social Media community.

Here are some of “Gold Nuggets” of information that we took away from the conference.

1.) The single answer to problems around the world, your company and your marketing is EDUCATION!
Aaron Hahlow – Online Marketing Summit 

Breakfast Keynote Address:

2.) Best for audience exposure with Facebook and other social media properties are on Mondays and Tuesdays.

3.) Get Content – Get Users.

4.) Online conversation happens with people, not businesses.

Brad Kleinman – Junat42

Main Keynote:

5.) When a prospective client wants more information about your product or they have a problem with your product or service, they search the Internet, read and comment and blogs and connect with other users of your products or services even if they don’t know the people personally, then engage with the solution.
Bill Hunt – Black Azimuth Consulting

6.) If you don’t listen to your prospective clients and/or customers in social media they will think you’re an arrogant bastard!
Maura Ginty from Autodesk

Building Your List – Email Marketing

7.) Suggest to readers in Welcome email to add you to their “safe senders list” to turn on images, and save your future correspondence from the junk box.

8.) Code matters when it comes to Email: Use HTML tables & code like its 1999. There is no excepted standard for coding email.
Justine Jordan, Exact Target

Justine Jordan, Exact Target

Social Media for SEO

9.)  When a customer types in a keyword one of two things will happen

1. They find your website
2. They find your competitors website

10.) Organic Search can sustain an entire business, even locally.

11.) You need to know customers  mindset and where they are online to reach them.

12.) Organic listings get more clicks than PPC.

Arnie Kuenn – Link Building Vertical Measures

Lunch Keynote

13.) Conversion rate is a measure of your ability to have people take action.

14.) If a customer doesn’t understand what your website in the first five seconds they will leave.

15.) To achieve your goals, your customers first must achieve theirs first.

Jeffery Eisenberg – Eisenberg Brothers & Associates

B2B Case Studies and Best Practices:

16.) You get what you track for…You can’t manage what you don’t measure…Create content with your existing assets.
Bill Leake, from Apogee Results

17.) SEO and Email Marketing are the most effective and have the highest ROI of any marketing.

18.) There is no such thing natural in selling. Each element that you add to a webpage either takes away or adds to the buying experience.

19.) Budget for the user experience, you put 25% of your effort into building a website and 75% of your effort in optimizing it.

20) An integrated marketing system in critical for success, make sure that you have the same message on all your media.

21). You start the dating process the moment your prospective customer lands on your website or engages with you in social media. Remember you don’t get married on the first date, you build a relationship.

Sheila Kloefkorn – KEO Marketing

22.) If you talk to people in social media the way advertising talked to people they’d punch you in the face.
Hugh Macleod (corrected, see comment)

How to Leverage Blogs

23.) Blogging is critical in building the brand of a company.

24.) Blogs are a tool to get new clients and lead them to your website.

25.) You should start blogging six months before a product launch.

26.) Blogs are the winning ticket in doing effective SEO.

27.) When you start a new blog post ask a question, then answer it. Remember it is a one to many conversation.

28.) The biggest failure in blog posting is too much content!  Your blog posts should be 400 words and should include pictures and/or videos. Remember, your job is to start a converstation.

29.) You should post at least one post a week. Once your blog creates traction, increase to two to three posts per week.

30.) Senior management of companies are afraid of blogs and don’t understand their purpose. They are afraid of saying something wrong or having a customer saying something bad.

However, you should encourage these types of comments on your blog. First it is link bait and second it’s in an environment that you have control of.

31.) Blogs put your product on your customer’s radar screens. They get to know about you and your product.

32.) You should be able to read a blog post in 45 seconds.

Dan Tyre from Hubspot

Afternoon Keynote

33.) Test your content/website/email for conversions. Testing is an ongoing process.

34.)  Today’s customers do not use or like “old school” marketing. When was the last time you opened a direct mail piece, when was the last time you looked in the phone book for a product or service. Trade shows are a big waste of money unless they are niche shows.

If you do still use traditional marketing such as magazine ads, radio ads, bus billboards be sure to use a vanity web address that you forward to your main website.

This way you can track ROI of your non digital marketing efforts.

35.) Best books on Internet Marketing:

• Social Media Matters
• Don’t Make Me Think
• One Hour a Day E-Mail
• One Hour a Day Social Media

36.) No matter how you advertise people are going to search about you and your company and read social media posts.

37.) Set up a culture of transparency with your organization and don’t criticize your employees and/or customers for making suggestions.

Culture of an organization is important.

38.) There is no conversation in “old school” marketing. Remember the digital is a two way conversation with a large audience listening in.

39.) Website Analytics are crucial to success. You don’t need to measure everything but you should set up the proper funnels and capture the data now for when you do need it.

40) Analytics have brought traditional and digital marketing all together. You should track phone calls with unique telephone numbers for each ad, track printed material with vanity web addresses.

Frederick Vallaeys – Google Adwords
Arron Kahlow, Online Marketing
David Hibbs -  Off Madison Avenue
Lauren Vaccarello -  Salesforce

Read some of the other participants “take aways” from this conference from Arnie’s blog at Vertical Measures.

Do you have any other “gold nuggets” of information that you would like to share?

What are your top five take aways from this post?