When you hear “Las Vegas” you might think of slot machines, the Rat Pack, or “Sin City”, but for the team at IMP Digital, it means PubCon. An entire week dedicated to learning the new tips and tricks in search, social, and design. With the constant change in our industry, it’s crucial to stay informed about the latest trends, strategies, and tactics.
This year’s conference took place from Oct 15-18th at the Las Vegas Convention Center and was attended by thousands of professionals from around the world. Zak, Josie, Darren, Shannon, and I attended 3 full days of sessions covering everything from Facebook marketing to SEO strategies and landing page design.
One of the hot topics at this year’s conference was Facebook marketing and how the social media giant has revamped its platform for better targeting and engagement. You can now create custom audiences from your customer email lists so that you can more efficiently reach them and their fans online. We also heard quite a bit about the “Sponsored Stories” and “Promoted Posts” features – two new ways to reach more of your fans more often, and amplify your online word-of-mouth marketing. We’re really excited about the new possibilities with Facebook, and Josie and Darren will be calling our clients about these new tools and how they can be applied to different accounts.
With search engines paying more attention to local business, another hot topic was local SEO and how to leverage blogging, Google Places, online reviews, and social media posts to gain exposure. When it comes to blogging, it’s important to create a content strategy. Planning an editorial calendar – knowing what you’re going to post when – and reacting to news and events to create unique content is generally good practice for executing a blog. But your goal should always be to establish yourself as an expert, and an industry leader in your respective field. Google highly values good content and consistently adding to your website can improve search rankings dramatically. Claim your local listings in Google Places and change the information accordingly, add photos, video, hours of operation, and categories for your business.
Lastly, when it comes to page design, we’re going to be spending a lot of time optimizing for mobile. With more and more people adopting smartphone devices and conducting their searches on the go, our clients can’t afford to miss the opportunity mobile is offering – and we won’t let them. If you have questions about mobile optimization, give me a call at 1-905-681-8333.
So, what was my favourite part of PubCon? Networking. Each year I seem to meet someone who has a similar client or experience I can learn from. I find successful collaboration critical to the success of my business, internal or external.
Finally, you can’t go to Vegas without having a little fun. The team and I took in some sun, had a great dinner at Jean Georges Steakhouse, where Darren enjoyed this monstrous Tomahawk Steak, and I was able to visit my Aunt Gila from San Francisco; author of Get 100 New Customers in 100 Days. Of course, we did some other things as well – but you know the rules.
For more information on PubCon and next year’s show visit www.pubcon.com
