5 Marketing Tips and Takeaways from Internet Summit ‘19
As day two of Internet Summit 2019 drew to a close, what tips, tricks, and actionable items did we take home with us along with all the sponsored swag? And what did this conference say about the landscape of digital marketing going into 2020? By the last talk, my head was swimming with these looming questions:
- What role is AI going to play in the future of digital marketing?
- Which social media platforms do we need to be focusing on?
- Who is Gen Z and how do we connect best with them? (Should we be on TikTok?)
- What is the future of organic search and SEO?
With a diverse range of speakers in attendance, the answers I got to these questions varied and oftentimes conflicted. In this article, I’ll cut through the clamor and provide some context as we move into the new year.
Internet Summit 2019 at a glance:
- Ja Rule (Iconn) shares his experiences rebuilding his personal brand after, well, this.
- Randi Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg Media) sings, dances, and gives us the gospel on personal branding.
- Tony Marlow (Integral Ad Science) shows us your brain on the most powerful drug of all: advertising.
- Reshma Saujani (Girls Who Code) delivers a powerful interview and offers her solution to the gender data gap: enabling women in technology. Mind-boggling, right?
- MGM Resorts’ Beverly Jackson shows us what we’re all missing out on and how to capitalize on the pagan gods of Instagram.
- Rand Fishkin (SparkToro) reads aloud the obituary for organic search, engagement, and competition.
Without any further ado, here are 5 essential marketing insights from the first day of Raleigh’s Internet Summit:
Let’s quit making content that doesn’t matter
“Just quit.”
Reshma Saujani was unquestionably one of the best speakers on any stage, and her message resonated. Timely and provocative, her talk (entitled Brave, Not Perfect) underscored the importance of getting women into positions to effect change in technology.
This quote, “Just quit,” kicked off a story she shared about being stuck in a job she wasn’t passionate about. So what did she do? She quit. She ran for office, she lost, and she landed back on her feet.
“I’m not broken,” Saujani thought to herself the day after the election. And she hit the ground running again, founding Girls Who Code, with the mission statement of closing the gender gap in technology. So, how do we get more women interested in pursuing careers in technology?
Change the Culture
Change the culture, change the conversation, and change the world’s perspective on women’s relationship with technology. But to move culture, as she put it, you have to be fluent in what’s happening right now. And to get a feel for what kids are thinking, who do you think we should ask? For Saujani, the answer was obvious: the 11 to 12-year-old kids she was teaching to code.
So, what are they thinking?
They’re Tired of Us
“Us” is everyone working in the industry today. They don’t want empty promises and they definitely don’t want empty content. They want to learn. They want value.
What does this mean from a marketing perspective? We need to be creating content that is authentic and conscientious. We’ll circle back around to authenticity when we talk about social media, but what can we do in advertising to be more conscientious? For one, we can be making content that educates or adds additional value. As Sarah Weise (Bixa Research) emphasized, this is a generation of action. They watch tutorial videos and implement the skills they’re learning in real-time. Give them skills, give them knowledge, give them anything as long as it’s something.
Social Media: Gen Z 101
Beyond making connections and sharing cat GIFs, social media is becoming the market for consumers to find information. The connotations around platforms are changing: YouTube is educational, Twitter is for news, and Facebook is for, well, parents and businesses. The next generation has carefully classified these channels and is turning to social media for purchases and information.
Weise warned that the current models for how consumers determine what to purchase and how they connect with brands are expiring. They’re Googling less and searching for alternate channels to get the information they need. Not to mention, new features from Google like rich snippets and knowledge graphs mean that fewer and fewer searches are ending with a click.
Your Content, Their Platform
A common thread that I noticed throughout day two was an increasing awareness of social media sites and Google’s shifting motivations. I mean, the endgame hasn’t changed; everyone is still trying to make money, but their philosophies on doing so are changing.
They want to keep users on their platform. If Google can provide a user with an answer to their question without them ever leaving Google, they’ll do it. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve scored the number one position for your keyword; the customer will have the answer they’re looking for without ever having to waste a click.
And if you’ve been following the resurgent hype surrounding voice commands, Rand Fishkin (SparkToro) shed light on a problem that future marketers will inevitably face: if Google’s AI can answer a question a user asks the bot directly through voice, where does your brand come in? This might be the million dollar question in 2020.
For social media, likes and retweets are no longer a reliable KPI. Virality and level of per-post engagement are now the crux of what retains usership on Facebook or Twitter. This means internal backlinks get less facetime with social media users unless you have a track record of engagement across consecutive posts. Controversy and provocative content back the currency that social media requires for viewership.
It’s a tradeoff. A, ahem, quid pro quo if you will. You give social media platforms content to keep users on their site; you build social media clout with a streak of valuable, non-promotional content; and you can coast the occasional post with linking to your site.
Sell Your Story
In a world with a high premium on authenticity, you need to understand the way your brand is being perceived from a narrative context. WRAL stressed the importance of spinning a good yarn in advertising, and Randi Zuckerberg lauded the importance of the personal brand (hers was, self-described, an awkward mom persona if you were wondering).
Get users to invest emotional capital in your brand. Matthew Capala (Alphametic) shared a couple tricks designed to tap into consumers’ natural loss aversion bias paired with a little foot-in-the-door psychology. Start a conversation with your customers and make your story their story. At the end of the day, approaching customers with a “let’s talk” mentality can lead to a greater sense of personal investment in their visit on your site, and a sense of ownership can guide them down the funnel to conversion.
Context is King
Conscientious consumers care about the context of your brand . Not unlike Google’s bots judging your site based on who linked to you, consumers are going to make judgments about your brand based on where they see it appear. It’s about knowing your brand, who connects with it, and what those people value. By extension, that means knowing what they don’t care about or even hate.
Let’s say you’re a hiking shoe company and you’ve worked sustainability into your brand identity. You’ve worked hard for your B Corps certification, you’ve taken on green initiatives in your office, and you’ve cultivated a network of similarly aligned businesses. Maybe you’ve even ethically sourced your rubber. Great.
To the customer, that all goes out the window the moment they see your brand in a context that conflicts with that image. If pictures of your ethically sourced foot-mitten wind up on the feet of someone working on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (god forbid), all your good eco-branding juju goes out the window.
This isn’t going to change. In fact, it’s expected to play an increasing role in where customers spend their money. “They’re empathetic,” remarked Reshma Saujani regarding the next generation of consumers. They care.
Less Complaining, More Adapting
From a consumer’s perspective, Google can be terrifying. Through Captcha, we, the consumer, have been training driverless cars to recognize street signs. Facial recognition software is training Google to read our expressions and reactions. Google Home fills the data void between logins.
From a marketer’s perspective, Google can also be terrifying. They are ever-changing and fluid, and let’s be honest: does anybody really understand what’s going on with rankings? If you said yes, I’ve got about 5 speakers I’d like you to meet.
This technology isn’t going away. And this data mining isn’t going to become any less invasive. So adapt. Be on the cutting edge and adapt, because if you don’t, someone else in your space will. This means making tough choices at times, sacrificing clicks to knowledge graphs, but it’s the agreement we made with Google when we collectively stopped asking Jeeves.
Daniel Russell’s (Go Fish Digital) recommendation? Keep up-to-date on patents. Knowing what technology is out there is the first step in making an educated guess as to how Google will profit from it. And if you don’t want to read through all those patents, he said you can just follow him on Twitter. He’ll sift through the *ahem* stuff and show you where to go.
The Last Word:
A special treat for anyone that read to the bottom.
- Randi Zuckerberg has some pipes. I was absolutely terrified when she said she was going to sing, but she sang, and it was good.
- Google’s AI might trick us into learning more about ourselves as marketers study people to order to guess Google’s search algorithms.
- Podcasts are a free-for-all with a closing window and are all sponsored by the same three mattress companies (credit to Rand Fishkin for the observation)
- Marketers really want other marketers to check out TikTok first.
- Google’s facial recognition software is tracking your eye-movement and would like to remind you: its search results are up here.
