PubCon 2016 - Moving Forward with Digital Marketing

• Sep 24, 2016
• Architechs for the Web, Inc.
• General

With over 15 years of experience, Architechs for the Web is proud to be one of Daytona Beach's oldest full service digital marketing firms. But, even the experts have to keep learning, especially in the fast paced industry of digital marketing, where new tools, techniques, and platforms can make or break a strategy. That's why we're attending PubCon, the world's leading digital marketing conference, for the fifth year. 

Pubcon is a 4-day event featuring digital marketing experts from around the nation, and the world, speaking on what they know best. And, for us, it's an opportunity to network, share with others, and see the latest in digital marketing research, trends, methods, and strategies, as presented by leaders in the industry. Digital marketing changes rapidly, and keeping up with trends is crucial to success. While PubCon is coming up quickly on October 10-13, we'll give you a quick look at some of this year's trends now. 

Digital Marketing Trends for 2016

Marketing trends are a good way to get a quick look at what has changed in the industry, what is happening, and what’s important now. Most trends are either spurred by changes to Google or Bing algorithms (SEO), updates to advertising, new technology, or new ideas, and can often be a mix of all three. 

Local Search – A surprising 1 in 3 Google searches are now local according to Jordan Kasteler, serial entrepreneur and marketing consultant. What this means is that the searcher is looking for a company or a solution near to them. While similar statistics have been pushed around since 2012, with Ed Parson’s quote about 1 in 3 searches being about a place or location, Kasteler is directly referencing that users are looking up businesses online before visiting them. That's a huge deal, and it is something that should be incorporated into social media, content, PPC, and SEO strategies. 

Mobile – Mobile search now exceeds desktop search, which means that it is increasingly important to not only offer responsive design, but also to design marketing strategies around mobile users. This means making mobile friendly content and optimizing for local search.

Multi-touch Attribution (and marketing) – According to Mark Irvine, a WordStream data scientist, 66% of marketers still use single-touch (typically last-touch) attribution, it's no longer enough. Instead, it's important to track customers across channels, to ensure that you understand where they first touch into your marketing campaign and where they last touch into it. Cross channel and multi-touch attribution are crucial for ensuring that marketers understand where their customers are coming from. And, if you're only marketing through one channel, you have to step up your game, and quickly. Consumers will often interact with you on multiple channels before ever considering a purchase.  

Social Media – Social media is a selling platform and it can help you to rank in search, improve PPC, and much more. Integrating social into your other types of marketing allows you to get the best of both worlds on any platform that you're using. Display ads on Facebook can be more valuable than PPC clicks as well, simply because you have the opportunity to target very specific groups based on their likes, interests, and data, rather than general demographic information. 

Back to Basics – No matter how advanced your marketing strategies are, they won't earn money if your basic foundations of your strategies aren't perfect. This means paying attention to your website and landing pages, maintaining your SEO through by checking for crawl errors, index status, redirects, and backlink issues, and maintaining your brand and reputation through consistent posts on social, attention to your content marketing, and reputation management through customer service. 

While digital marketing trends tend to change every year, they are often crucial to success with a marketing strategy. Most 'trends' typically reflect 'changes' rather than 'what's hot', which means that not paying attention to them will leave you out of the loop, and out of traffic. And, at PubCon, the focus is on learning and staying up to date with the latest and most important changes. 

This year's PubCon will feature keynotes, speakers, and training on topics including social media, search, local search, conversion, link building, bidding strategies, content, mobile, security, and much, much more.

PubCon will feature experts including:

• Debra Jasper, CEO of Mindset Digital
• Scott Stratten, Author and Twitter Influencer
• Gary Illyes, Webmaster trends analyst at Google
• Scott Monty, Social Media Strategist
• Bill Hunt, a 2015 U.S. Search Awards lifetime achievement award Winner
• Jim Louderback, Digital Technology Innovator

If you're headed to PubCon, stop by and say hello. Or, if you need help with your own digital marketing strategy, we’re happy to help. Contact us now and take advantage of our free consultation so you can get started on growing your business.