A wrap-up of the best ideas from SiPA’s 25th annual mid-year marketing conference that took place this week in Las Vegas
We love the wrap-up sessions at the end of SiPA conferences. They allow us to hear the best-of the best that we may have missed, as there are always great sessions running concurrently. Here are the tips, along with supplemental Mequoda Daily content that can help put you on path to more profitability and success online.
- Take advantage of social media. Remember to be honest, transparent, and open with your readers. People not only want to buy from other people, they want to buy from someone they trust, someone they know. And it’s a lot harder to say no to a friend. Social media is also a great place to conduct on-the-fly reader research. For more social media advice, read 9 Best Social Media Marketing Sites for Publishers and Publishers Using Twitter.
- Take advantage of free methods for spreading your word, for example by submitting your press releases to free (and paid) sites. Don’t forget to search engine optimize your release. You may also consider listing your events on free event listing websites.
- HelpaReporter.com– Peter Shankman’s free service that invites journalists to submit questions and provides its subscribers with a daily email that digests those questions. Readers are invited to respond to journalists, offering them their expert opinion.
- Analytics – find out what’s working, what isn’t and keep increasing overall ROI. Here are 20+ Google Analytics Tips.
- Monitor your site traffic on Compete.com, because advertisers, competitors and researchers (us!) are looking at it. You should also understand how unique visitors are getting counted on your site so you can explain to advertisers the difference between what Compete.com is reporting and what your internal metrics are showing.
- If you see a chance for your audience to self-select your content, consider segmenting your email lists. Slicing and dicing your lists can allow you to be more targeted and can produce up to 90% better response. See how JohnsHopkinsHealthAlerts.com segments their list and check out 13 consumer email marketing best practices.
- Reputation management — even if you aren’t thinking about using social networks, you should still consider registering your brand before someone else does. A random person registered the Exxon Mobile brand on Twitter this summer and this went on for 2 or 3 weeks before they were caught.
- Apparently size does matter — 70% of users make a decision to open an email based on the 1.5 inch preview pane. Don’t cloud that valuable real estate with distracting graphics or unnecessary information. Here are more email formatting tips for profitable email newsletter marketing, some email newsletter template best practices and some tips for getting whitelisted by your readers.
- Forrester Research gave a great talk about the fundamental shift in how users want content – smaller slices instead of big chunks. Monetize your audience, not your content. Have your audience dictate the information you should be giving them. Here are 3 ways consumers may view your content.
- Landing pages – make sure they are targeted and that the messaging remains the same from the initial offer straight through the landing page. Limit the opportunities to navigate away from your landing pages. Keep testing, keep changing, keep improving. Here are some elements of a successful email capture (aka landing) page, along with 9 ways to drive traffic to online freemiums.
- Traditional marketing – many people in the SiPA crowd are still doing direct mail (including us!). Recommendations included not dropping it all together, but rather doing smaller, more targeted mailings and then supplementing them with other things like email marketing, audio conferences, webinars, special reports, etc. Read about other successful multi-media publishing strategies.
- Use unique tracking codes for each promotional campaign you’re running in order to better analyze the funnel for each campaign. Learn how to increase revenue per thousand with better links in your email marketing and tracking.
More from this event: Top 15 To-Do List for Multivariate Testing with Google Website Optimizer
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