Digital Elite Camp 2016 – Round Up

Stacey MacNaught and Hana Bednarova spent three fantastic days near Tallinn, Estonia attending the Digital Elite Camp.

There were amazing speakers presenting the latest tricks and tips when it comes to traffic & conversion, and you can find all key points right here.

Paul Rouke, from PRWD, kicked off the conference with his keynote presentation. He highlighted that although industry leaders do recognise the importance of conversion optimisation, they sometimes still lack the skills to carry it out.

“Talking the talk, but not walking the walk”, said Paul Rouke when addressing the issue of an optimisation that is jumped ‘onto’ but not gotten ‘into’

Second on stage was Karl Gilis from AGConsult. Karl focused on how to make sure your new website won’t be a failure.

What we found very interesting was a specific approach that AGConsult follows when helping their clients:

• User research (Find ‘real’ users)
• Strategy & Roadmap
• Structure
• Mockups

Karsten Lund from Jelly Fish was the next up. His talk was all about mastering the moment of decision using applied neuroscience methods, for measuring attention, emotion and memory.

Karsten highlighted that decision-making has evolved as one of our key abilities. The key factors determining decision quality, however, are attention, emotions and memory

He identified that unconscious factors influence the way users pay attention to visual information provided (such as colours, schemes, and details).

One of our favourite speakers was an experienced copywriter, Amy Harrison. Her presentation was all about the science of screenwriting for online marketers and copywriters.

Amy pointed out that when writing, we are using the same story elements, but we should never tell the same story.

Amy listed three basic techniques to write better copy:

1. Get to know all of the challenges via surveys
2. What symptoms does your product solve? – Address them
3. Spy on your customers by putting yourself in their shoes

Andre Morys, representing WebArts, was another very interesting speaker. Andre talked about what we should really copy from Amazon.

He highlighted that the impact of raising user motivation is higher than reducing friction. Most of the time companies invest in traffic, sites, analytics, but not user research to find out about the true motivation of their customers.

Andre also stressed that when doing any change to a website, you should ask yourself three simple questions:

• Will your change need to be perceived?
• Is the change you make relevant to your customer?
• Can the change amend customers’ behaviour?

Peep Laja, who’s one of the organisers of the conference gave an insight on a research that was conducted by ConversionXL.

Research revolved around one major question:
How can we know which changes will be effective?

Peep stressed that ‘conversion magic’ does not work anymore. We need a structured process:

1. Where are the problems?
2. What is the problem about?
3. Why is it a problem?
4. How big is the problem?

Our very own Stacey MacNaught talked content marketing and covered the fact that social shares won’t pay the bills.

She highlighted that the investment in content marketing has gone through the roof in recent years and so have the expectations.

Stacey pointed out that the aim nowadays should be to create great content that directly converts into sales.

To achieve this we need to not only understand the customer but discover what actually brings them to us.

We need to decide between desire and need products and plan content around the triggers that begin the consideration.

We should use PPC to promote content cost effectively, and we should choose keywords nobody’s bidding on. It’s also very important not to expect conversions directly.

Stacey highlighted that companies should not expect people to just remember them when they are ready to convert – we need to retarget and measure. Check Stacey’s presentation here.

Phil Nottingham spoke about CRO with video and shared his tips, tricks, and tactics.

Phil pointed out that videos can massively help to increase conversion, but we need to know how to use video effectively to get results.

Follow Phil’s advice:

Select video hosting platform according to the goal.

1. Video types

• Teaching video
• Live action explainer video (not only screencast)
• Personalised sales message

However, there are also videos that don’t tend to help with conversion as much.

• Culture video
• Animated explainer
• Customer testimonial videos

Andrus Purde from PipeDrive covered how we evolve as marketers.

He introduced us to PipeDrive marketing story. Their marketing approach started with hand-to-hand combat, meaning they targeted each of their customers individually.

Then PipeDrive moved onto scalable weapons (aka channels), meaning they used every single channel possible and targeted mass amount of customers. After this approach, it was time to mobilise and use relevant weapons of mass distribution.

Andrus shared PipeDrive’s marketing template:

• Foundation: analytics, user insights, product marketing, brand, and website
• Pillars: Content/SEO, Paid, Growth engineering, Referrals
• Top: life-cycle management

It was a fantastic conference. We met some great industry leaders and gained new knowledge about traffic and conversion.

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