Web Site Design Specialists

by Jason Stewart

Wrapping up a thwirlwind (if you’re on Twitter or saw Tim Ferriss’s presentation, you’ll get it) two days of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Holy cow! What a great conference! Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs organized a breakneck-paced non-stop buffet of new marketing information and best practices and general “deep thoughts.” Easily one of the most informative and exhilarating conferences ever. Even the sponsor presentations were worth watching! Here are some highlights, followed by today’s best tweets and a list of really cool links I heard about at the show…

1. Build detailed buyer personas for your social marketing efforts, then decide on appropriate messaging for those personas.Speak to them in their language, not yours.
2. Nobody cares about your product except you. They care about their problems. Don’t worry about what your product does, worry about how it can help your buyers solve those problems.
3. Don’t be afraid to relinquish control of your content or message. Think about how it helped The Grateful Dead.
4. The overwhelming fear regarding starting a community is: if I build it, will they come?
5. When you are building a community, focus on small groups and then expand outward.
6. Anybody can complain, but if the complaint is backed by constructive suggestions on how to make things better don’t you want to hear them?
7. Make sure the things you measure match the goals you set.
8. Regarding your website…how do people find it, and how do they find what they are looking for when they get there?
9. My landing pages have too much “friction”
10. Outbound Marketing is not dead, it just needs to be really, really, really targeted and specific.
11. TweetDeck is not all that different from my Outlook inbox, when you think about it.
12. If you “suck” then people tell everyone. If you don’t they will tell two people. You need to be there and be aware of people who say you “suck.”
13. Simple recipe for driving organic web traffic: create unique content, make sure it is valuable, create it often, and make it available to people for free
14. Listen to your customers and feature requests, but always keep a few product innovations up your sleeve to be a “surprise”
15. Chris Brogan enjoys beer, scotch and Canadian Club.He also knows a TON about inbound marketing.
16. Not the end of the world if a blogger or user posts something negative, it’s an opportunity!
17. The first step in building a social marketing strategy is deciding who you are as a company. Businesses need to find their humanity if they want to do social media properly.
18. Social media is big on tactics, short on strategy.
19. Jeans and a jacket are the official uniform of inbound marketing.