The Trinity Insight Philadelphia team attended this year’s Digital Summit held in Philadelphia. Over the course of two days, industry leaders from across the nation came together to share thought provoking insight and practical tactics. Content strategy, user experience, SEO, data analytics and social media were a few subjects explored by experts at both the agency and enterprise levels.

While we left this conference with plenty of new actionable strategies and general inspiration in our toolkits, here are just five of our key takeaways from this year’s Digital Summit.

HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT IS THE STANDARD, NOT THE EXCEPTION

As keynote speaker Mitch Joel, President at Mirum, asserted, forget about future trends – make sure your business is focused on the here and now. Brands that are only now kicking off content marketing initiatives are years behind the curve. In 2016, unique and engaging copy is expected by consumers – in the form of header content, blog posts, product descriptions, user guides, and more.

Quinn Whissen, Director of Marketing at Vertical Measures,stressed the importance of making sure your entire copy-editing team understands SEO. What’s more, the whole office should be on board to help promote important content via their personal and professional social channels as it rolls out.

Successful brands are regularly delivering 10x content, or content that is at least ten times better than what their competitors offer. They do this by creating interactive landing pages, workbooks, infographics, and other solutions that engage and delight their customers.

Companies dedicate resources to building a strong, active social presence, and leverage the trend of impermanence through SnapChat, Facebook Live, and Instagram Stories. It’s not enough to create great copy; your business requires a full-on strategy for the seamless creation and promotion of content that goes above and beyond anything offered by your competitors.

GO FAST. NOW

Page Speed continues to be a focus in the battle for rankings as evidenced by the recent emphasis on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, as stressed by Mike King (Founder, iPullRank). Although re-coding pages to meet AMP specifications may not be realistic for most eCommerce retailers, there are some things they can do right now to improve performance, including:

• Optimize images to reduce file size
• Serve different image sizes based on browser size
• Use Google Tag Manager to enable all tags and pixels to load asynchronously
• Understand & Code for the Critical Rendering Page

It’s also recommended to use Resource Hints (prefetch, prerender, preconnect) where appropriate to reduce load time.

DON’T IGNORE A GENERATION WITH ONE OF THE LARGEST PURCHASING POWERS

Anne Gherini (Director of Marketing, StumbleUpon) spoke about how companies need to use a different strategy if they want to effectively market to millennials online. Millennials often split their attention between two devices, such as a TV and their smartphone, at the same time, making it difficult for brands to reach them. However, just because this generation is harder to reach than others, companies cannot afford to ignore them. Millennials have a trillion dollar purchasing power, and their preferences influence the purchases of other generations as well.

Banner ads and old forms of advertising are ineffective because millennials are more likely than any other demographic to install ad blockers. To reach this lucrative target market, brands have to meet millennials on their own terms. One way to do this is through sponsored content. While millennials find pop-ups and banner ads annoying, they will engage with sponsored content, as long as it is authentic and high quality.

Meagan Cignoli started making her own Vine videos in 2013. The content she created was real, unique, and engaging. Now large brands pay her to create their content on Vine with budgets ranging from $10,000 to $250,000 to reach their customers.

Create original, engaging content for your brand to target this trillion dollar market. If you bring relevant content to the conversation, you’ll reach a wider audience of potential customers.

“BEST IN CLASS” MEANS MORE THAN YOUR BEST COMPETITOR

Whether you’re looking at building a platform, a service, or selling products, Rose Cameron, Director of Innovation at Penn State, urges businesses not to limit themselves to only looking at what their direct competitors are doing. Your customers interact with hundreds of company websites — some in your industry, some outside of it — and they’ll compare their experience on your website to their overall experience.

You want every step of your site experience to be best in class for all companies because that’s how you make an impression. For example, if you’re a bank designing a customer portal, you’ll want to be better than Amazon, Netflix, and Google — not just another bank.

CONTINUOUSLY EVALUATE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY

In today’s ultra-connected world, you are constantly receiving feedback from your audiences – especially when your user base can interact with you in a matter of seconds via a 140-character tweet, Facebook post or Instagram comment. Once you’ve got your content strategy nailed down and a content calendar mapped out, it may be tempting to frontload your efforts and produce batches of content all at once. Don’t.

Content should be dynamically developed and rolled out as you get a better understanding of who your audience is. This is exactly what Lauren Saks, Director of Programming at PBS Digital, did with PBS’s Youtube presence, which aimed to cater to a younger, more digitally savvy audience.

Instead of going the cost-effective route by producing content in batches, PBS created and rolled out content on an ongoing basis. They were able to monitor engagement and feedback for each series they produced, and based on this feedback, PBS was able to continually improve their content and cater to the expressed interests of their customer base.

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR

Our team learned a lot during the two days of the summit. It was hard trying to distil it down into just a handful of takeaways, but these five points stuck with us the most. The speakers gave insights that anyone, from digital marketers to established corporate directors would find informative and thought-provoking. We’re excited to use what we learned in the coming year, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s event. Maybe next year we’ll see you there!

When a business starts experimenting with paid advertising, the story is almost always the same. The company will big on a handful of brand terms, and see a large portion of their budget go to high-cost generic terms that don’t lead to conversions. To maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns, businesses quickly learn they have to invest time in building a keyword strategy.

Companies want more than a large number of words to bid on,  they want to find high-converting keywords that will drive sales — without the cost of bidding on expensive broad terms.

Very few PPC campaigns follow a “set it and forget it,” strategy, and the process of adding keywords is only the first step. Once there, you need to regularly adjust the bid type, cost, and thresholds to make sure you’re only spending money on your terms. Follow these steps to build out your keywords and create a clean, tailored campaign that converts.

DO YOUR RESEARCH WITH GOOGLE’S TOOLS

It’s in Google’s best interest to make sure brands find advertising through Adwords valuable. If they don’t, they’ll stop their campaigns, which means lost revenues and customers for the search engine. This is why Google provides so much training for beginners and tools that even experts continue to use.

The Adwords Keyword Planner is a tool that suggests keywords and bid groups based on related interest. The program pulls in thousands of related terms, making it easy to set up a simple campaign quickly.  While the Adgroup is a suggestion for where the new keywords can live, customers can add and remove keywords that aren’t relevant to their brand or are too expensive.

Google Opportunities is another must-use for Adwords managers. The search engine will suggest new keywords to add, different bidding strategies, and other tips and tricks for teams to use. They also try to estimate the impact based on clicks, impressions, and conversions. Remember, however, to apply critical thinking to these suggestions. No one understands your business better than you, so if the tool suggests terms that don’t make sense, be sure to research them before adding them to an active campaign.

TURN SEARCH TERMS INTO KEYWORDS

While Google specializes in estimating what your customers are going to search for and showing them what they want, it will never completely know what goes on in the minds of your customers. The best way to harness your customer’s thoughts is by looking at keywords and phrases that drove customers to click on your ad and on-site search terms.

Some brands set up multiple ad groups with similar keywords so they can have broad, phrase, and exact match settings on each of them. As you expand beyond exact match keywords, you should have a treasure trove of similar words and phrases that you had never thought to use before. It’s entirely possible that your customers are using a search term that never dawned on you during your brainstorming sessions with Google Keyword Builder. For example, a shoe retailer might not think to bid on searches using the term “thong,” despite the fact that many customers use it interchangeably with flip-flops.

SEM managers don’t even have to leave their websites or Google Analytics accounts to dig into the thought process of their customers. Adding tracking to your site-wide search might require a small edit to your analytics code, but the data you glean from it may be potentially invaluable.

What keywords are your customers typing into the search bar? Are they relevant to products that you offer? If so, do they have a landing page that would be appropriate? If you see the same phrases appear in multiple searches, consider adding them to your AdWords campaign.

Not only can your customers provide keyword suggestions from your website, they can also let your team know what’s on-trend and how their shopping habits are changing. You can see when it’s time to start bidding on swimwear when you start to see an increase in traffic and searches for bikinis and trunks on your landing pages.

CREATE RETARGETING CAMPAIGNS TO KEEP CUSTOMERS IN THE FUNNEL

Some marketers are still cautious about retargeting campaigns because of the so-called “creep factor,” or the idea that the Internet shouldn’t know what you browsed and continue to follow you around the Internet. While many customers would agree, this is because they have had terrible retargeting experiences in the past. Who hasn’t clicked to their favorite news site only to find three massive banners at the top and sides advertising the gym socks they just looked at?

However, smart PPC teams can create remarketing campaigns that gently pull customers back to the website and deeper into the funnel. Google’s RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) program is different from remarketing campaigns on the Google Display Network, but they both use cookies to determine whether a user has visited your website before. If they have, RLSAs will show your retargeting ad to bring them back to your website and into the funnel.

On Google’s side, retargeting ads increase the likelihood that a user will click on a paid ad instead of an organic result, meaning they get a paycheck. On the business side, SEM managers are able to reach audiences who are already familiar with the brand and have shown a past intent to buy, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Some companies have questioned the value of RLSAs in the same way they question brand terms: if the customer was already familiar with the brand, why should businesses waste money attracting them? With brand terms, companies bid to take up more real estate and improve branding. With RLSAs, companies have opportunities to show up on more non-brand terms and can be more competitive against their peers. Without RLSAs, many brands wouldn’t be able to compete in non-brand searches as competitively as they do.

NEVER STOP IMPROVING

Keyword building and strategizing are easy when you have the tools to think like your customers. Google offers Keyword Building and Opportunities to add popular phrases, while your onsite search and retargeting provides insight into how your customers think.

Once you have your Google SEM campaign configured, you can copy the results and upload them to other advertising networks, such as Bing Ads. This will give you a consistent, clean, and unified SEM campaign. After allowing it to run for a while, you can adjust the parameters and tracking as required.

To get the most out of your AdWords campaign, Trinity Insight’s PPC team can work with you to increase your Adspend ROI.

Advertising, like SEO, is a process. Effective campaigns are never truly done, but instead are in a constant state of improvement. With these new tools, you should be able to build a new, more effective, PPC campaign.