Well, that’s another AMA Conference done and dusted. It was a great couple of days in Liverpool and it was super to catch up with some of our customers and meet loads of new arts managers. I thought I would post a blog on the sessions I enjoyed the most, so this is not a full round-up, but more of a “Nick’s Best Bits” ;)
3rd Key Note of the Conference
Tom Rainsford
A stand out for me was the third keynote of the conference with the very funny, very stylish and the man with the best beard in the world, Tom Rainsford. As Brand Director at Giff Gaff, Tom shared how Giff Gaff incorporates play into their brand. The keynote was not only entertaining but also very insightful and definitely gave me food for thought.
Tom explained that Giff Gaff don't take themselves too seriously; they love to play around and have fun with all of their marketing strategies. One example of this was their Zombie apocalypse advert ‘Don’t Be Sacred’ which ran a couple of years ago. The lighthearted advert didn't even mention that Giff Gaff is a mobile network. The main reason for the campaign was to push Giff Gaff as a fun, “we don't take ourselves too seriously” kind of brand. And it worked. Their customers started to engage with the campaign and it managed to get trending on social media.
This keynote really got me thinking that marketing campaigns don't have to be about the end goal - you can have fun with your customers through your campaigns. Yes, you may not be able to measure the success of these types of campaigns, but you will gain a lot of brand recognition, goodwill, and engagement.
Sales 101
One of the best breakout session of the conference (in my opinion) had to be the SEO 101 by Daniel Rowles of Target Internet. As the name suggests, this was all about how to get the best from SEO and how to do it well. Daniel explained that over the years Google has changed its algorithms quite a bit so the way you did SEO around 2 years ago won’t really work anymore. I remember the days where you had to try and cram as many of your keywords into the copy of the text as you can. But as Daniel explained, Google is there to help customers as much as it can, so when it sees text that is crammed with keywords that doesn’t read naturally you won’t rank high.
Daniel spoke about different ways in which you can get the most out of SEO like link building, keyword research but the one that I thought was the most interesting was the On Page Optimisation. This is where you focus on three areas of the webpage, these being:
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Title Tag of the Page - The title tags of the page are what displays in Google searches (or Bing and all the others if you use those). It’s the blue text that you can click on to visit the page itself. Not only is the title tag important for SEO, but it also plays a part in social sharing.
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The URL - The URL is very important in SEO as it can be read by both humans and search engines and it gives an indication as to what will be on that page.
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Content of the Page - As we mentioned above, gone are the days of cramming as many keywords into your copy. It is all about writing copy that your visitors find useful. In addition, when you add links to reputable external sites within the copy, Google likes this and gives you more rank weight.
I know there is so much more to SEO, (we will be doing a blog on this soon), but I thought Daniel’s talk was a great way to get to started with the basics. Daniel very kindly shared his Digital Marketing Toolkit, which includes loads of tools and information about getting the most of SEO.
Analytics
Daniel Rowles
Yep, another fantastic Daniel Rowles session (as you can probably tell, I love digital marketing). This session was all about Google Analytics and using it in an effective way. We wrote a blog about this a while ago and it was reassuring to hear that Daniel was mentioning everything we have been preaching to our customers. When I give customer training sessions on GA I always say that 98% of users will go to the audience report, look at how many people come onto the website and leave. GA has so much more it can give you and Daniel talked through each of these points.
The main takeaways from the session was the importance of goals. Luckily for our customers, we do all this setup for them meaning that when a customer comes onto your website to buy a ticket, we fire an event in GA so that it is tracked. Without having these goals/events set up, GA is not that informative. By introducing these goals into GA, you can track each digital marketing campaign to see if it is working or not.
So, there you have it, my AMA best bits of 2018. Well, when I say best bits, I haven't counted evening socials for obvious reasons . . . I hope you enjoyed reading through my blog. If you want to chat more about how we can help with SEO or Google Analytics, please get in touch.
