Pearl Higgins + DFWSEM = storytelling gold

Do you know how to tell the real, authentic story of your brand? Take advantage of another outstanding digital marketing educational opportunity and learn how when Pearl HIggins comes to DFWSEM.

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Register for Next10x Today

Yes, you’ve heard mobile is the new thing. Yes, nearly every search and tech conference you’re thinking about this year has a mobile component. Yes, you’ve heard your site should be “mobile friendly” and designed with “mobile first” principles.

But have you heard anything about how to develop a mobile digital marketing strategy?

Thinking “mobile first” and getting all “mobile friendly” are great, but without a coherent strategy behind them, they’re like posting billboards in a tunnel with no lights.

But! You can get a huge jump on forming your mobile digital marketing strategy in just one day, and do it with the help of some of the top experts in the field.

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After two incredible events, 2017 is off to an amazing start for DFWSEM. So far we’ve learned how to get our analytics on with Jenny Halasz, and Dave Snyder taught us the secrets to creating kick-ass content — and we’re not slowing down! Next month, Rebecca Gill is going to show us that SEO is NOT a plugin, which we are super excited about, but here’s the thing.

As great as this year has been, it’s been a tremendous team effort getting to where we are right now, and we’re planning to be bigger and better than ever. But we can’t do it alone.

That’s where committees — and you! — come into play.

It’s not all fun and games at DFWSEM events, but we do our best to bring you the best Digital Marketing “edutainment” possible.

If you’re interested in joining one of DFWSEM’s many committees, then join us tonight from 5pm to 7pm at The Social House of Addison! We’ll provide the appetizers, you buy the drinks (don’t worry, just your own), and we’ll talk about how we can work together to create DFWSEM’s best year yet.

What kind of committees are there?

Excellent question. We’ll go into more detail about each one at the happy hour, but here’s a quick list of them all:

• Recruiting
• Programming
• Website
• Registration
• Hospitality
• Communications
• Sponsorship
• State of Search

It takes a lot of hard work, teamwork, and effort to make DFWSEM (and State of Search) happen — and who better to help us out than our own DFWSEM family and friends?

If you have any questions about tonight—or if you want to join a committee but can’t join us at the happy hour—just email or tweet at us and we’ll do our best to answer your questions.

We hope to see you there!

He kicked ass, took names, and showed us how to be awesome marketers

Dave Snyder of CopyPress introduced a new term at our February event: Infobesity. | Photo @lindawhite

Riddled with gifs and brimming with knowledge, Dave Snyder’s presentation blew the audience’s collective mind at the February DFWSEM meeting last week. Think we’re exaggerating? Just check out the tweets!

Starting with @prattprattpratt so it's going to be a GOOD. NIGHT. #DFWSEM https://t.co/pbVLktRVKa

— Christina Galownia (@cagalownia) February 9, 2017

Pure Gold presented tonight at #dfwsem from CEO Copypress @davesnyder ??

— Kris O'Connor (@repairgarage) February 9, 2017

SERIOUSLY, #DFWSEM – we REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY need to get @davesnyder to come speak at #stateofsearch

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) February 9, 2017

Now that we’ve got those out of the way, let’s dig in.

Knowing what makes content tick (and stick) with your audience

After telling the audience he has a degree in creative writing with a concentration in poetry (yeah, we weren’t going to let that go unnoticed, Mr. CEO), Dave kicked off his presentation by highlighting the three main points everyone needs to consider when it comes to creating content:

• How people learn and understand content
• How people react to content
• How to build a content strategy

It sounds simple enough, right? But the reality is that creating content has become more and more challenging over the years, just because there is so much of it on the Internet.

Dave actually coined a new phrase to explain this phenomenon: infobesity. Content has become the high fructose corn syrup of the Internet (aka, junk food). “It’s everywhere,” says Dave, “and while we consume it, we don’t think much about it outside of that consumption.”

This is the challenge for marketers, who’ve literally been tasked with the job of making money for someone else. “If you’re not doing that, you’re failing. Big time.”

This is where understanding how people learn and process content comes into play.

Tricking people to consume healthy content

Marketers shouldn’t just spew out content for the sake of spewing content. You need to tell stories that resonate with readers and compel them to action. In the words of Dave: “You can mold great information into amazing content that matches what the reader is looking to consume, or even better, draws their attention in even if they happen by it.”

You have to find people in their “learn mode,” and then deliver the answers they’re looking for in the format that best suits their learning style (visual, auditory, verbal, etc.). Dave refers to these different learning styles as “modalities,” and his presentation revolved around ways to reach people with a combination of different modalities.

Covering all your (content) bases

“The more modalities you can pack into your content, the more likely your content is to stick with different content consumers,” says Dave. A great real-world SEO example of this is how Google shows Rich Snippets in its search results.

The Search Engine doesn’t just use text, it uses visual and interactive content to reach and engage with more searchers. Your content should be doing the same thing. Doing so will help your content stick with your audience, which gets them closer to converting on whatever product or idea you’re trying to sell.

Interactive images and dual coding are two other points to consider when creating adaptable content, both of which are often used when creating infographics. Dave cited research that shows people are more likely to remember an item if it can be shown interacting with another item. Dual coding takes this a step further, by targeting two cognitive subsystems — one that deals with processing imagery, the other with processing language (think about the data graphs you often see in infographics).

This interactive infographic Dave mentioned in his presentation is the perfect example.

So the real takeaway here is to layer different learning styles together when creating your content. People can process, learn, and remember content much faster when you’re covering all of these bases.

Easy reading, better learning

Of course, you want to make sure people are actually reading the content you produce by making it concise and scan-able. Doing this makes the content visually appealing to intrapersonal learners, but you’re also tackling the infobesity issues. “Give consumers the gist and structure with concise data in a way that entices the consumer to read more.”

Not only that, your content needs to be personal to your readers. Why should they care about what you’re writing? How does the concept affect them? These are the questions you need to ask, to understand how your readers are reacting to your content.

Going viral isn’t everything

Yeah, we all want our content to explode on the Internet and get shared by everyone — but more important than that is understanding how people digest your content. Because the truth is, not everything will go viral, so you need to focus on making the best piece of content that actually speaks to your audience. If you can hook your readers with what you’re offering, that’s more important than meaningless shares — which is why you want your content to stir up emotions in your readers.

This was the biggest takeaway Dave wanted the audience to get: emotions are greater than how people digest your information. Yes, understanding how people consume your content is super important, but if you want your content to resonate with your readers, it needs to be emotive and memorable. Even the most boring topics can cause an emotional reaction! It all depends on how you frame it, and how well you understand your audience. Y’all gotta hit those pressure points!

Time to build your content strategy

Dave’s content strategy is built in ten steps.

First, you need to decide how often you’re going to publish your content. Quarterly or monthly? The answer to this will be based on your KPIs, so be sure to figure them out!

Second, Dave loves a content plan that’s focused on a single time period or theme. Once you have that plan/theme in place, then you can start building ideas from there — and ALL of your content should revolve around the theme you choose.

Third, create an editorial calendar that plans out every step of your content plan — from production to publication to marketing! But be mindful that you should be planning content ideas here, not details for specific pieces of content.

Fourth is the ideation phase! You want to come up with 2-3x the ideas you actually need for your calendar, and then drill down from there. This will help you get the most refined ideas to flesh out. Some good tips for this phase are developing content personas (who are you writing for?), figuring out how to carve up content for different learners, and deducing which emotions you want to trigger in your audience.

Fifth, you want to actually start planning your content. Ask yourself why this content should exist, what problems are you trying to help your readers solve. You should also look at what your competitors are doing to see what’s already out there. This will help your basic ideas become fully formed.

Sixth, start creating your content. If you’ve done all the legwork we’ve discussed, this should be the easy (and fun!) part.

Seventh, publish your content — and not just on your blog! “A blog does not fix all issues,” warns Dave. You want to send emails and consider locking some content in a resource center.

Eighth, you need to start marketing that published content, via email, social media, and syndicated marketing. What’s the point of creating content otherwise?

Ninth, measure, measure, and measure again how your content is performing all the way down your funnel. Boost what’s working, and fix what’s not!

Tenth, repurpose your existing content. You can refresh and republish content that has worked for you in the past, or even polish up content that might have underperformed. Either way, you don’t have to always start from scratch.

Wrapping things up

At the end of the day, the most important piece of advice Dave could give you is to just identify and know your audience. Understand how they learn and how they process content, and hit them with the same ideas in different ways, over and over and over again. Repetition is key when it comes to learning, and you want your audience to be engaged with what you’re offering.

Slide deck

That’s about all we’ve got for this blog post! If you want to dig a bit deeper into anything we mentioned, check out Dave’s gif-filled presentation below.

Register for next month’s meeting

Don’t forget, Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing is coming next month to show us why SEO is NOT a Plugin. Be sure to register today to secure your ticket! If the last two meetings have been any indication, it’s going to be an event you can’t miss.

Rock Google Analytics like a pro, yo

Jenny Halasz “crushed it” with her presentation on Google Analytics at DFWSEM in January – and the 95 strong audience told the world all about it on Twitter.

Still buzzing from the record-breaking State of Search in 2016, DFWSEM roared back into action at the first meeting of the year with a new board and a newly inspired crowd full of new faces.

Were they all there to see Jenny Halasz? You bet your asz. But before the new presentation, some new business.

Taking care of business

New DFWSEM President Jeff Rudluff started things off at NOAH’s Event Center by thanking outgoing President Scott Vann and ever-helpful sponsors Advice Interactive Group, and introduced the new board members (some of whom are back for another round of unpaid labor and late nights): Kevin Adams, Jason Channell, Damon Gochneaur, Timothy Huneycutt, Beth Kahlich, James Loomstein, Bart Peters, and Scott Vann.

There was a special shiny for the above-mentioned James in the form of the DFWSEM President’s Award. He was rightfully praised for going above and beyond — and gifted with a gorgeous trophy that could be used as a melee weapon in a pinch — especially in the case of State of Search.

James Loomstein shows off his shiny object

And speaking of State of Search, it was the next topic of conversation. Moving from November, this year’s conference will be October 9-10, once more at Gilley’s on the south side of the Big D. And those Super Early Bird tickets are on sale now at the frankly ridiculous price of $400. There are limited quantities in this price range, so act before you miss out. Two days of world-class speakers, an exciting setting unlike the beige big-box hotels, and the best networking in the industry with Texas flair, all for $500? Why on earth would you want to miss out on that?

Getting down to brass tacks — and traffic

Then it was time to let Jenny do that voodoo that she do so well. And did she ever. Starting off, as is only right and proper, with a quote from the great Dolly Parton:

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

But Jenny wasn’t just shouting out an awesome female rocker (as she did throughout). She was pointing out that all the content marketing and SEO in the world won’t matter, can’t matter, if you don’t have a plan.

Jenny advocates breaking down your biz wants into two categories: Goals and Events. What’s the difference? Well, Goals are what you want. Site visitors. Conversions. Etc. And Events? Those are what you track. You can see how long someone stayed on your page and what they did while there, and use the flexible, robust mojo of Google Analytics to glean insight from their behavior.

But you can’t just do this willy-nilly. And if you want to really get into the meat of things, you can’t just trust Google to do your tagging for you. Default tagging lets Google sort your information into buckets, like paid or organic or so forth. But if you want the real skinny, campaign tagging and medium tagging are you friends.

Like Beyoncé, who guided the presentation to the next subject, custom channel grouping can do it all. Need to circle up, say, all your affiliate links? See if your paid is on fleek? This is the Google Analytics section for you. By this point, Jenny’s mad skills were making the data nerds in the audience twitterpated.

Google has also added some new features, one of which is vastly overdue. First up? Templates. Launched in December, they are both sexy and free. Double Click Campaign Managers have also been added as a source. And finally, only a decade too late, property moving is available!

Drawing from the data

Jenny made a final and excellent point after unfolding all the grooviness Google Analytics can do, and it boiled down to this: information is important, but only in that it tells a story. How did people get to your site? What did they do while they were there? Why did they leave? This information builds your data narrative so you can extrapolate meaning. As she put it,

“Data is just data. Analysis leads to insight.”

Secret analytics weapons

Of course, one can’t attend an epic event and not be provided with ultimate secret weapons for analytics success. To this end, Jenny shared a wicked cool Custom Google Analytics Dashboard that asks (and answers) a lot of valuable questions about your site. Check it out here:

bit.ly/ga-dashboard-JLH

And if you’re wanting to learn more about setting up snazzy segments with Regular Expressions (regex), Jenny shared another secret weapon in the form of this awesome blog post (which you should totally check out):

bit.ly/regex-for-marketers

Slide deck

Check out Jenny’s slide deck for details on how she makes Analytics jump through hoops.

Next meeting

Don’t forget to check out DFWSEM’s meeting next month! CopyPress’ Dave Snyder will be talking about the hidden art and science of kick-ass content. We’re talking mind games, y’all. You won’t want to miss it.

Stephanie Studer is a writer, editor, cook, and massive nerd who calls Dallas home. A social and content marketer, she’s deeply in love with all that language can do. She blogs at storytellingforsuccess.wordpress.com, tweets at @Editrix_Steph, and posts entirely too many pictures of dishes she’s made on Instagram. Don’t ask her about ukuleles or comic books unless you have nothing to do for the next several hours.

What’s Next? A World of Possibilities…

DFWSEM favorite Duane Forrester keynotes at State of Search 2016.

At State of Search 2015 Duane Forrester announced after his departure from Bing, that he was moving to Bruce Clay, Inc.

Today Duane announced that he is leaving Bruce Clay.

I’m making a change. Yes, I’m leaving Bruce Clay Inc. today for another opportunity. As much as the learning over the last year has excited and engaged me, it’s time to follow a different path.

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He says no but, in true Rand fashion, tells us who to watch

Rand Fishkin Keynotes State of Search 2015 in Dallas, TX.

Someone popped the question on Quora “Is Rand Fishkin the best SEO Expert?” Rand is a favorite at DFWSEM having keynoted our annual State of Search Conference on two different occasions. He quickly responded to the question in typical Rand fashion.

No. I’m a very visible person in the SEO field, but I think on any given aspect of SEO (e.g. link building or keyword research or crawl optimization or Google News SEO or image search optimization or any number of others) there’s someone with deeper experience, greater knowledge, and more insightful tactical recommendations.

My strengths come from a long history in the field, a propensity to share publicly, and a remarkably awesome network of people—friends, colleagues, and connections—that I can lean on to seem smarter and more talented than I really am (or than I am by myself).

He then went on to suggest 29 other experts in various disciplines of search marketing for you to follow.

• Emily Grossman from Mobile Moxie
• Rob Bucci from STAT — spoke at State of Search 2016
• Samantha Noble from Koozai
• Dr. Pete from Moz — scheduled to keynote State of Search 2017
• Marie Haynes from Marie Haynes Consulting
• Mike King from iPullRank — spoken at DFWSEM & State of Search
• Cindy Krum from Mobile Moxie
• Jenny Halasz from JLH Marketing — speaking at DFWSEM January 11, 2017
• George Frietag from Moz
• Lisa Meyers from Verve Search
• Ross Hudgens from Siege Media
• Marta Turek from ROI DNA
• Shahzad Abbas from Define Media
• Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO
• Britney Muller from Moz
• Paul Haahr from Google
• Wil Reynolds from SEER — keynoted State of Search 2014 and 2016
• Christy Correll from Honey Tree Media
• Russ Jones from Moz
• Dana DiTomaso from Kickpoint — has spoken at State of Search
• Dan Shure from EvolvingSEO
• AJ Kohn from Blind Five Year Old — spoke at State of Search 2015
• Cyrus Shepard from Fazillion
• Jon Henshaw from Raven — spoke at State of Search 2016
• Sheena Schleicher from Schleicher Marketing
• Gianluca Fiorelli from ILoveSEO
• Will Critchlow from Distilled
• Barbara Starr
• Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting — spoke at State of Search 2014, 2015 and 2016

Rand then went on to say:

There are dozens if not hundreds more folks who should be on this list, but hopefully this gives you a sense for the vast range of SEO expertise that’s out there in our community. We’re all lucky to get to stand on each others’ shoulders and to have such a kind, transparent, sharing ecosystem in the SEO field.

When you start making a list like this it is inevitable someone will be missed, but we think all the speakers coming to DFWSEM this year are pretty epic so we want to nominate them for your consideration as well:

• Dave Snyder of CopyPress
• Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing
• Pearl Higgins of Outspoken Media
• Ruth Burr Reedy of UpBuild
• Tyler Hakes of Optimist
• Mike Esordi of The Marketing Center

If you’re in the Dallas area you definitely want to come hear them speak.

We know there are likely others you would have included on this list so feel free to add them in the comments below.

Want to be sure you’re always hearing from the best of the best? Go ahead and get yourself a ticket to State Of Search 2017. We’ve already confirmed Duane Forrester, Bill Hunt and Dr Pete Meyers to Keynote, and there will be many more of the world’s best SEO  experts walking the State of Search stage with them in October. You could be here to see them all.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to drop and give her twenty

By its very nature, SEO is a confusing beast to understand, let alone master. Google is constantly changing the rules and regulations, making it difficult for even the best SEOs to stay on top of it all — but you don’t have to go it alone! There are all sorts of awesome meetings, workshops, and conferences you can attend (like State of Search!), but in case you hadn’t heard, one of the best in the business is coming to Dallas next month, from January 11-13th.

Yes. We’re talking about SEO Bootcamp, hosted by the one and only Rebecca Gill (who, it so happens, will also be speaking at DFWSEM in March)!

What is this SEO Bootcamp?

It’s a hands-on, intensive, three-day training that walks you through the various facets of search engine optimization. Rebecca is an industry expert with more than 15 years’ of digital marketing experience. She’s spoken at more than a dozen engagements, and has been featured on just as many podcasts, talking about the ins and outs of digital marketing and SEO. In fact, her knowledge and skills helped increase her company’s sales by 400% in just two years, largely because of her inbound marketing and SEO tactics. Clearly, the woman is a champion you want on your side.

But let’s talk about what actually happens during Bootcamp – and don’t worry, physical exercise is not required (though we do encourage you to stay active on your own). During day one, you’ll learn about core SEO concepts, competitor and keyword research, site mapping, content reviews, and editorial calendars. Day two digs in deeper, focusing on content optimization, off-page optimization, and some of the more important bits of technical SEO. The final day gets up close and personal, turning into a day of one-on-one coaching and collaboration, helping fine tune the SEO skills you learn over the first two days (but this session is capped at ten people, so you gotta sign up sooner rather than later).

Sounds like a lot of work?

That’s because SEO is a lot of work. But if you want your digital marketing efforts to succeed, you have to put in the time and effort to make sure you’re doing the right things. And you’d be hard pressed to find a better teacher than Rebecca Gill.

Sound good to you? Great! Because we’ve got a special discount for our DFWSEM readers. If you use the Coupon Code DFWSEM2016, you’ll save $500 on your ticket for Days One and Two! This SEO Bootcamp is something you do not want to miss, and tickets are already selling fast, so click here to get yours today!