This morning, I got to take a break from my normal routine and spend the day at MozCon! After Rand’s kickstart to the day, we were treated with an entire day of fantastic speakers. Since the list of learnings from today’s panelists is endless, here are our top three learnings from the day.
MozCon Day One: 3 Things I Learned
1. Create a Brand Strategy and Live It
When thinking about your brand strategy, mission, and values, remember that it isn’t about the document. It is about every interaction your customers and potential customers have with your company. It is about your internal decision-making processes, from how you market to how you hire. Your employees need to believe in your mission and live your values.
As explained by Dana DiTomaso, when creating your brand strategy, start with your core values. May those be a mission statement or brand brief. Express your brand like a human being. Here are some basic steps to follow when building a brand strategy:
- Step 1: Identify why your brand strategy failed before. If you are at a large company where people have tried to do this before, figure out why it died. Look at the SWOT analysis and get C-level on board.
- Step 2: Identify what your brand is and is not
- Currently the brand is: list 2 characteristics
- In the near future, the brand may be: list 2 characteristics
- The brand is not: list 2 characteristics
- Step 3: Define voice and tone. While brand strategy is more than just voice and tone, it is important to have these defined to keep your branding consistent. At the end of the day, it’s all about living and believing in your brand.
2. Create Discoverable Content
There are 2.5 million blog posts published every day. That may explains why your content isn’t always being discovered. However, that doesn’t mean you should give up. Here are some tips by Matthew Brown on how to make your content stick:
- Create content that is relevant and recent. When readers are already thinking and talking about your topic, the more likely it is to get read.
- Long form blog posts are superior. I remember four years ago learning that blog posts should not be more than 500 words. Well, that is clearly no longer the case. Now, it’s all about long form posts that include high quality keywords for optimization. More keywords means higher discoverability. Pro tip: Evergreen content performs 10x better over it’s lifetime!
- Target your content to specific audiences. Not every piece of content needs to be relevant to everyone. It’s important to get specific and target your content. Publish and promote content on streams that work for the audience you are targeting.
- Let users control their experience and make it about them. An awesome example is Bloomberg’s post “What is Code?”
3. Personalization Enhances Customer Experience
Personalization can help your company build a relationship with your customers. By investing in personalization, you are that much closer to closing a sale. As Cara Harshman frankly stated, the one-size-fits-all web is dead and plain old lazy. It’s time to start delivering content that will help your customer convert. So, how should you go about implementing personalization? Well, there is a framework for that. Here are the three components of personalization:
- Who are you targeting? Think about contextual, demographic, and behavioral data. These factors can include if the customer is logged into their account or not, if they are visiting the site the the third time in one day, or if they just purchased a product.
- What are you showing them? Every visitor/user is different — think about ways you can appeal to them. This is where A/B testing comes to play. Improve the experience for segments of your traffic. Think about the onboarding experience for a new visitor vs the return visitor experience. It’s all about hypothesizing, testing and refining. Just don’t be creepy!
- How to prioritize. Once all the ideas are out on the table, narrow down what ideas get locked down and shipped. It’s time for prioritization. You might have millions of awesome ideas, but start by understanding these three key prioritization perspectives:
- Potential Business Impact: The bigger the bite, the bigger the impact. Segment by audiences who bring the most traffic and value. Focus on them.
- Technical Effort to Execute: Be realistic about the technical effort. Can you actually identify this audience? Do you have the software required to implement the personalization?
- Requirements to Sustain: Don’t slice your audiences too thin to avoid content problems such as not having enough unique content and pigeonholing your audience.
The power of personalization is in how you wield it. Give your visitors the experience they are expecting.
“Great marketing feels right!”
There is no better way to wrap up day one of MozCon than with this fantastic quote by Dana DiTomaso.
Also, you can download each presenter’s complete deck here: https://moz.com/mozcon#schedule
