SFIMA Pubcon Keynote: The Key to Amazon's Empire

Last Thursday was the SFIMA / Pubcon Annual Summit at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center. With 18 sessions, 2 keynotes and over 30 of Digital Marketing's best internet gurus it comes to no surprise there was only a 1% no-show rate for the 200 marketers that registered for the event. 

The morning keynote was presented by Jeffrey Eisenberg, Co-founder of FutureNow Inc. and author of 'Call-to-Action' and 'Waiting for your cat to bark?', about the '4 Pillars of Amazon's Success'. His one hour keynote was extremely informative, given Amazon is very secretive about their business strategies. 

The 4 Pillars of Success are as followed:

1. Customer Centricity
2. Continuous Optimization 
3. Culture of Innovation 
4. Corporate Agility

First is Customer Centricity. "80% of Company's believe they are customer centric; 8% of their customers would agree".  Amazon has focused their company on giving the consumer exactly what they want - better customer centric service with lower priced items. 

Amazon offer Continuous Optimization. They focus on 4 key points for their optimization objectives:

• Selection
• Price
• Availablility
• Experience

This continuous effort from Amazon has shown that 2/3 of their web purchases are returning visitors; and not only are they returning, but they visit Amazon 3x more and spend (on average) 3x-5x more than new customers. 

Apple is not the only business to be successful in the Culture of Innovation. When analyzing the data of Amazon's reports they look at the data not as a "here it is" but rather a "here is what it could be". Amazon has also created the next generation CEO with the title of the "Customer Experience Officer". With making the head of the company's focus on the customer experience, Amazon is taking customer service to a whole new level. 

Corporate Agility is the ability for a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in the corporate world. Amazon has uses different software to help with their agility opportunities. One software that is used is for Amazon's pay-per-click marketing campaign is DataPop. DataPop has allowed Amazon to create high-performing, customized, relevant ads that have in-turn doubled Amazon's PPC conversion rate and lower their cost per lead. Through DataPop's dynamic keyword ad strategies, Amazon is able to provide more relevant and targeted ads that result in a better customer experience and more sales. 

BloomReach is a software used to help Amazon's Organic ratings on all search engines. BloomReach's data driven technology has allowed Amazon to deliver relevant content that has optimized the customer's experience across multiple channels. Neiman Marcus released statistics after using BloomReach for SEO purposes and confirmed a 31% increase in organic reach! 

The SFIMA / Pubcon Summit was a great one day conference that targeted all areas of digital marketing. If you were not able to attend the conference, Pubcon Las Vegas is from October 6 - 9, 2014 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If you are interested in attending please contact Joe Laratro for an exclusive coupon code. We hope to see you there! 

Pubcon Kicks Off with NeuroMarketing

For those of you that aren't familiar with the conference Pubcon, it is the premier social media and optimization conference and expo. Pubcon is held twice a year in Las Vegas and New Orleans; and is slowly growing to appear in other locations nationally. With over 200 speakers and 1,800 attendees it is definitely the most recognized digital media conference in the US. 

This year was my first time attending the conference and I had one person that I was anxious to see; Roger Dooley of Dooley Direct LLC and the author of Brainfluence (the most applauded Neuromarketing book available on the market). As most of you may know, I am a Neuromarketer and an advocate of how psychology and sales are related; and I believe that when used properly neuromarketing can be an asset to your business. 

Roger Dooley was the keynote speaker that kicked off the Pubcon conference on Monday in Las Vegas at the Master Training. His keynote was focused on this: "SEO, SEM and Social Media help drive traffic to your site. And if you want more revenue you need to turn up the traffic or turn up the conversions." The key to conversions is persuasion. 

Roger Dooley likes to look at the purchase cycle as a slide, 'The Persuasion Slide'. And this slide consist of 4 different features: 1) gravity, 2) nudge, 3) angle, and 4) friction. 

• Gravity is the initial motivation that brings the consumer to you.

• Nudges are little things that your business does to help motivate them to convert. Nudges are ALWAYS about the consumer, NOT ABOUT YOU! Nudges must be seen to provide the initial motivation to start the process.

• Angles are both conscious and subconscious factors that help motivate the consumer to buy. Some conscious factors are free gifts, sales, stats likes savings or other rational decision factors that could help pursuade the consumer from browsing to buying. Subconscious  factors that motivate the consumer without the 'in your face' effect; like emotions, psychology and brain bugs. 

• Friction is anything that prevents someone from purchasing. Some examples of friction are too many lines to fill out on a form or making the conversion sequence harder than it needs to be. Use choice architecture to help minimize friction by creating a 'default' choice.

Roger Dooley is an amazing pioneer of neuromarketing, by far my favorite to follow. His 'Persuasion Slide' is a great concept and has the ability to help promote conversions. If you want to try testing a neuromarketing theory on your website or if you have questions regarding neuromarketing, please contact me at BDiaz@Tandem-Interactive.com Have a great weekend!

Subconscious Directional Cues

 

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 was the SFIMA Pubcon Summit in Davie, Florida. Some of the world's leading Internet marketers gave presentations on SEO, SEM, and Social Media Marketing. One of the most interesting presentation was given on Conversion Rate Optimization. In the lecture, they gave examples of how clear logos, toll-free phone numbers and visible shopping carts can give a boost in sales. They also showed that a strong return policy (if your site is E-Commerce) or a strong sense of Customer Service will help the audience to convert more easily. When you are trying to convince your audience to convert you should use 'directional cues'. This caught my attention when the subject was introduced because directional cues are a form of Neuromarketing. There are two forms of directional cues: (1) Implicit and (2) Explicit.

 

Implicit Directional Cues are those that are implied such as direction of view, color, visual weighting, prioritization, repetition of color, size or shape that engages your audience more. Explicit Directional Cues are very direct, they have arrows, lines, or curves showing them 'this is where your eyes should be'.

 

Although explicit directional cues are useful and obviously engage your audience they can sometimes be too overbearing. This is why it is important to constantly be testing your landing page to see what engages your audience most. Test your site using both implicit and explicit directional cues. For implicit use people then objects, what does your audience convert more on? If it is people, then test a single person or a family? A male or a female? White or ethnic? Older or Younger? The greatest 'take-away' that I had from the SFIMA Pubcon Summit was a quote by Paul Ryazanov that said "In God we trust, everything else we test". I believe that in marketing and especially Neuromarketing this is true.

 

Call my office 954-281-9995 or email me at BDiaz@Tandem-Interactive.com if you would like to have a meeting with me on some ideas for Landing Page Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization using directional cues and Neuromarketing.

Recapping Las Vegas Pubcon 2012

Last month, Lauren and I had the privilege to head out to Las Vegas and watch Joe and a slew of other internet marketing professionals speak on various topics relevant to today's search industry. I took copious notes and have been summarizing sessions for the official Pubcon blog, in case any of you would like to take a peek at some of the knowledge that was shared to us. The first blogs have been posted, which you can check out here:

http://www.pubcon.com/pubcon-recap-seo-hot-topics-and-trends
http://www.pubcon.com/latest-topics-and-trends-on-twitter
http://www.pubcon.com/seo-lessons-from-disneys-jeff-preston

I will continue to post a few more blogs into November, and Lauren and I hope to give our link building tactics and upgrade and offer some cutting edge ideas to each of your accounts. If you ever have any questions or concerns you are always welcome to email me!

Recap: PubCon Las Vegas 2010

Last week, Tandem's own Joe Laratro flew out to Vegas for PubCon, a three-day event considered by many to be the top conference for Search Engine Marketing. Basically, it covers every aspect of Online Marketing. PubCon is hosted by Webmaster World and its founder, Brett Tabke. Joe goes out to Vegas to act as a moderator for the conference and also as a speaker, offering up information from his SEO Diet.

Several attendees have already blogged about this year's event, and there is a comprehensive recap of the conference available on Search Engine Land. As you'll see in this breakdown of links from the event, PubCon covers everything from e-commerce to Wordpress, social media to mobile marketing, and much more.

The next PubCon will be held in Austin, March 8-9, 2011. More information is available on the official PubCon blog.

Tandem Interactive's Joe Larato on Women's Radio

Tandem's owner, Joe Laratro, was interviewed last week for the national Women's Radio station and shared his thoughts about search, the future of SEO, and getting the most out of internet marketing. The interview will be available from November 2-November 8th, and you can listen to it here:
http://www.womensradio.com/episodes/PubCon-Takes-a-Hands-On-Approach-to-Search-and-Social-Marketing/6885.html
Past November 8th, the link will take you to the archives, where the interview will still be available for your listening pleasure.

Top Secret WebmasterWorld Meeting at WMW Headquarters in Austin, TX

(The WebmasterWorld Brass and me!)

I had the pleasure of joining a strategy meeting in Austin, TX (The Headquarters of Brett Tabke's WebmasterWorld) a few months ago. I was sworn by a blood oath not to discuss many of the elements of our strategies. I can let you know that all efforts were geared to making the next Pubcon even better than the past ones!

The dates are set! WebmasterWorld's Pubcon 2007 will be in Las Vegas, Dec 4- 7 2007. The available tracks are being expanded and fine tuned. It will be another great event for Web publishers, online marketers, and just about anyone who loves (needs) Web traffic.

As a regular moderator of the sessions, I get a good amount of feedback from attendees. We are going to do even more this year to promote networking. Since I am also a techie, I am well aware of the challenges of getting certain personality types to leave their comfort zone or crack their shell. There are lots of new friendships and business relationships to be made at Pubcon. We will do our best to faciliate that process while providing one of the most educational conference around!