Mastermind - The Coolest Digital Marketing Conference You’ve Never Heard Of

You know that feeling you get after returning home from a digital marketing conference – you’re pumped with energy and inspiration but scattered by information overload at the same time. Your colleagues ask you, “so what did you learn?” You manage to say “a lot.”

Now that the holidays have come and gone if your online marketing strategy is not on track, I’ve got a few insights from a recent online marketing conference that might be just what you need. Last week I attended an event in Park City called Mastermind.

It's the first summit of its kind hosted by digital agency 97th Floor and the speaker line up was incredible – CMO’s, leaders of innovation, chief content officers and SEO’s contributed their insights on business, marketing and tech. It was an amazing opportunity to learn from leading brands like Microsoft, Adobe, Bing and solution providers like STAT and Moz whose representatives also spoke at the event. 

The keynote speaker was best-selling author and thought leader, Seth Godin. His latest print book “What To Do When It’s Your Turn” is an entirely new kind of book filled with pictures, stories and challenges. It’s impossible not to be inspired by this book.

Godin’s workshop was centered around the following questions:

• What are others doing that’s working?
• How are we responding to an ever-changing digital landscape?
• What are the potential roadblocks in the way of our goals and milestones?

These are important questions for any leader to answer and they include all types of industries. To inspire your own answers, what follows are the powerful insights from the Mastermind speakers (including Seth Godin) that will help you create momentum for the path ahead. 

Ben Hawken, Director of Business Communications, Enterprise Mobility & Management at Microsoft

Looking for ways to spice up your branded content? You can definitely get inspired by Hawken’s idea for a web series called “Brad Anderson’s Lunch Break”. It’s become a popular YouTube series starring the company’s biggest customers who get to share their stories on their terms while riding alongside the Corporate VP at Microsoft.

As the show’s creator and producer, Hawken has a unique blend of digital media and content creation that challenged him to develop a new set of ROI metrics in order to understand what was working on YouTube and how it translated to Microsoft’s business KPI’s.

In addition to branded content, the 4-5 minute episodic videos are being used for lead generation where they’ve seen an 86% reduction in the cost of finding qualified leads. Certain episodes have also been engaging viewers by driving CTR to additional, gated content (thereby reducing CPC costs).

How does Hawken do it? It’s a labor of love that requires researching each guest and outline 4-5 questions that keep the conversation rolling (pun intended). Over time, Hawken developed a keen eye for infusing the video content with business value by asking, “if I didn’t work at Microsoft, would this question interest me?”

The takeaway: there’s no special idea that makes a video go viral. It’s a myth. But, it is possible to reverse engineer good ideas that make video content engaging and successful. Hawken’s advice, “Create things worth watching. Be a curator.” 

Ethan Boldt, Chief Content Officer at Dr. Axe

As the number one natural health website in the world, Boldt attributes his responsible journalistic approach to search engine optimization as the driving force behind the brand’s organic growth. Additionally, the brand is committed to its investment in content production. So much so that their “content vision” is genuinely centered around transforming people’s lives, not winning an SEO game.

It’s no secret that the cost of healthcare is rising and in many cases, people are afraid to go see a doctor. To help those searching for health-related issues online, Dr. Axe’s offers information to long-tail queries like, “What is a natural treatment to X symptom or illness?”

Furthermore, Boldt said they hold their writers to strict editorial standards making sure to back up claims with studies or by being transparent in disclosing the professional opinions of Dr. Josh Axe. This goes a long way with consumers and search engines like Google since 77% of people start their health information search at a search engine.

Becoming a leading health industry website equivalently meant becoming a content machine. It required a lot of advanced planning starting with the editorial line up. Boldt distilled down hundreds of keywords into roughly 30 of the most important terms that bring in at least 10K website visits per month. Much of their content optimization is prioritized around continuously updating existing content around those topics.

Now for the machine part: the content team posts new content daily (like clockwork) maintaining a regular posting schedule of 3 times a day. Articles are at least 2,552 words in length. Aside from a diligent editorial calendar, Boldt uses his journalistic background to write content that grabs the reader from the beginning. “Write something that makes your reader want to keep reading” he says. 

Dave Dickson, Innovation and Emerging Businesses at Adobe

Hopefully you’re no stranger to Adobe’s hilarious and poignant commercials (AKA marketing pain points). I love this one called “Never Buy Clicks”. 

At Mastermind, we were treated to a few new ones. Including this one called, “The Heist”.

Dickson’s bottom line is that it’s all about the (customer) experience. Technology has enabled users to engage with content in many ways. And it will continue to do so. That’s why creating a seamless online experience is the new currency to attracting and retaining customers. 

Seth Godin, Author & Thought Leader

(I’m going to paraphrase wildly here because Godin gave us a solid hour and 20 minutes of workshop and Q&A.) The good news is, part 1 of the video recording of Seth's Keynote is available to watch on YouTube.

What is a four-letter word that everyone wants more of today? MORE! 

More customers. More market share. More traffic. More leads. Everyone is being asked to produce more with less.

Now, while that’s nothing new, Godin cautions that buying into to this form of growth means our marketing adopts more of a mass market appeal. The only way to get more is to market to more potential customers.

Marketers are responding to this by making messages more urgent, shorter, and louder, to be heard above the noise.

It makes sense, right? Considering that the average person online has the attention span of a goldfish. That’s what you must do to get attention. 

Newsflash: Your customers are not goldfish.

They’re humans. And, Godin says, they’re ignoring you.

Again, going back to those important questions:

What are others doing that’s working?

How are we responding to an ever-changing digital landscape?

To combat this, Godin proposed an alternative. Instead, marketers should seek out the smallest possible market and optimize for those people—what are their needs, their wants, the problems they’re trying to solve? Because in doing so, marketers will focus on creating something remarkable (a product or service) for the group it matters to.

He cautioned, “Your customer doesn’t want to feel like they’re part of a mass market. They want to feel ‘seen’.” You do that by seeking to serve the individual.

Without a doubt this is inherently challenging for businesses to do because, much like a factory, they’re used to producing things at scale. But keen marketers recognize that there is a fundamental shift towards tribes. This message needs to reach contributors in all corners of the business. Consumers like to engage with brands that reflect their likes, needs, aspirations and values.

Godin’s bottom line to marketers looking to grow their audience was simple: Go to the people who care. Go to the tribe. Make things for your true fans. 

Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism at Bing.com 

Olson shared an intriguing stat based on research from Bidu that indicates 50% of search will come from voice and images by 2020. Since this is something big brands must plan for, Olson named online movie repository giant IMDB as an example. They’ve gone back and added Schema markup to the website so that voice search devices can distinguish between a silly or a serious question when a person might ask a question that’s related to or reminiscent of a movie reference. How do you like them apples? (pssst, Alexa. It’s from “Good Will Hunting”.)

At this point in time with voice-activated assistants, consumers are asking simple questions, “what’s the weather today?” But, Olson advised the data from Bing suggests the intent behind questions consumers will ask in the future will become increasingly action oriented. Such as, “Hey Cortana, ask Openable if Alexander’s Steak House has a table for 4 available tonight at 6PM.”

Here the consumer is asking a question and then expecting the device to also handle booking the reservation. It’s a shift from “question and answer” to “question and action”. This will require coding on the back end of the branded device to execute.

You can bet that once the coding language across major in-home voice assistant players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon become more aligned we’ll see a shift towards more action-intent based voice searches.  

Heather Zynczak, Chief Marketing Officer at Pluralsight

If you’ve ever Googled “martech platforms” to get an idea of the landscape, you’ll get an infographic that requires a magnifying glass in order to use.

Just look at how many new logos appear year after year!

We’re thirsty for information but drowning in data. How do we navigate this crowded landscape? That was largely Zynczak’s point. These were her 3 pieces of advice for CMO’s on how to develop top talent internally so that they can acquire new skill sets that allow the business to keep up with the rate of change.

• Follow the money

Put your business’ ROI metrics first. Being held accountable for something you can’t measure is ineffective. Whereas if an employee knows how their contributions affect the bottom line they can be more effective.   

• Use data to be scrappy

To surpass your competition, speed is important. Which means when teams spend time finding the right answer it’s ultimately wasted time in today’s digital age. That time is better spent extracting a directional answer that allows teams to implement, measure and course correct along the way. 

• Create a culture of accountability

Similar to the first point, Zynczak suggested that by giving everyone on the team a clear understanding of their channel impact on things like organic traffic, individuals can better scale and adjust their marketing program to contribute to the bottom line. 

Pluralsight isn’t just another platform adding to the noise of the martech landscape. It’s helping modern marketers build skills and work smarter in a digital world. 

Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz

It’s no surprise that the SEO landscape will continue to evolve. At present, there’s a lot of buzz about content marketing. Muller introduced us to some pretty awesome and actionable tools to help blend SEO and content marketing initiatives. If you’re like me, you’ll love geeking out on these too:

Lucky Orange is a real-time usability and support tool for website owners. The tool offers real-time analytics, heat maps, visitor recordings, polls and form analytics.

Ad Espresso by Hootsuite uses machine learning to optimize Images & titles for Facebook ads.

TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework accessible to everyone.

Keywords Everywhere – A free keyword tool (functions as a Chrome browser extension) showing search volume, CPC at 15+ websites like Google Analytics, UberSuggest, Moz, Majestic, Amazon & more (screen shot below).  

She also taught us a fun Google search bar hack. Type in a search for any keywords separating them by the word “versus” to see more kinds of comparison combinations your customers might be searching for. 

Rob Bucci, CEO at STAT

Rob is one of my favorite people and speakers too. His topic “How to win (and keep) featured snippets” is one I also find fascinating as a digital marketer.

At the start of 2018, we’re seeing Featured Snippets commanding a first-place presence on the SERPs. They provide an opportunity for SEO’s and content marketers to heighten their site visibility, establish subject matter authority and in some cases, drive traffic.

FYI his entire slide deck is available here to download.

Featured Snippets are a form of Extended Search Elements that Google uses to provide answers to user queries. Searchmetrics has a great complimentary study & Infographic on this too.

It’s exciting to think that your optimized content could end up on top of the search results heap or better still, among the “People Also Ask” boxes which expand when a user clicks on the box. 

 So, what you’re saying is…

Ok, ok all kidding aside. Bucci had some great insight here, “Let PAA’s inspire your snippet content. Featured snippets and PAA’s are BFF’s.” Essentially, using the search term as a topic you can use the PAA’s to map out which ones you want to try to rank for. This is a great area for local SEO’s to get in on the action too.

Typical formats include lists (using bullets or numbers), tables, and paragraphs. Which type is seen the most you might ask? Paragraph format is the most popular. Followed by List where we’re seeing an increase in these types of formats. This is because Tables are tricky for Google to get right.

Here’s what’s interesting about Featured Snippets in 2018: snippet format and search intent are going to combine. 

Ultimately, these elements will become intent-based boxes serving up information in the form of a short list or paragraph. “Is it worth it?”, you ask. Absolutely. 

Based on STAT’s research done in April 2017 using one million keywords, 232,451 returned featured snippets, which they then tracked for 19 more days. The result: 

If your content is good enough (and formatted in one of those three ways) you could earn a spot as a featured snippet. If you’re thirsty enough.

Final thoughts... 

Mastermind was one of the best digital marketing conferences I’ve been to in a long time. The size and venue made it intimate in nature and encouraged lots of conversation and knowledge sharing among those in attendance. You can check out more fun images and Tweets from the conference under the event hashtag #97Mastermind.

Do you have any recommendations for conferences I should check out? Let me know in the comments below! What are some informative and/or inspiring events you plan on attending related to social media, online marketing or SEO?