The 2019 Digital Summit Experience

The Dallas Digital Summit is a yearly event for digital marketers to gain insights, continue their education, and share knowledge with their peers. The summit is a two-day event of non-stop talks from brilliant speakers in the digital marketing space. Let’s recap just a few who spoke this year:

David Shing

One of this year’s keynote speakers was David Shing, an Australian marketing executive who is proclaimed to be a “digital prophet”. In his talk “Are We There Yet?” he addressed how the digital world is evolving to integrate with human behavior. David cut the cord in the 1990’s, years before it was a trending term. He fully submerged himself in the internet; it was his life. It was his source of truth. However, currently he is seeing a change with the emergence of social media. He claims that too much shallow content is making us miserable. Our phones are now a source of anxiety. The internet is no longer fun. As marketers, we have the opportunity to fill that void. He offered no solution, rather a challenge to his audience to make the internet fun again. Here, at AVX Digital we fully embrace that challenge. 

Samantha Kermode

One of the most impactful decisions a business can make is to migrate to a new website. Samantha Kermode from Investis Digital delved deeper into what it takes to successfully migrate a business’s site in her “Website Migration: What to do Pre, During and Post” talk. Many business owners are focused on the aesthetics of a website, when the true goal of website migration is to increase conversions. A better-looking site won’t be enough to increase revenue.

A migration involves three steps; pre, launch, and post. It turns out that prelaunch is the most important step in site migration. This is because, once a site is improperly migrated, it is harder to remedy. Prelaunch is used to mitigate risk of losing traffic and authority. In her talk, Samantha, referred to a global company that lost 50% of its traffic for 6 months due to an improper migration. To avoid this, she recommends analyzing user behavior with heat mapping and A/B testing before planning out a new site structure. It is also important to complete a SEO health check with tools such as Screaming Frog and fix any 404 internal broken links. Next, the development team has to work in a no-index dev site to safeguard against appearing in search results prematurely. Finally, 301 redirect links should be used to move traffic and authority to the new site.

 Post launch, the site should be crawled and evaluated for speed performance. This can be done with multiple tools such as Google Analytics, and the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress users. New, relevant content and reclaiming backlinks are essential to minimizing traffic loss. Keep monitoring analytics though this venerable phase. Nurture leads by providing valuable services to past customers through email before they turn to search engines for answers. Finally, focus on quick wins with second and third page keyword optimization.

Daniel Russell

Daniel Russell, a patent attorney by trade, at Go Fish Digital gave us insight into where Google may shift its future focus during his “How A.I. is Changing Search and Bringing Google Further into Your Home” talk. Many of us use webcam covers on our laptops for privacy, but have we considered other cameras in our everyday lives? Cameras such as our cellphones, smart doorbells, and home security systems, are constantly providing feedback to search engines. Google has now filed a patent to further mine video data with its AI (Artificial Intelligence) facial expression recognition. Imagine a world where your facial expression determines which restaurant search result you are served. Now that is amazing!

 Why is this so important for marketers? Currently we target traffic on keywords, but we may see more opportunities to market based on expression and feelings of a user. We are already seeing elements of this with Google’s recent question answering system called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer). BERT processes natural language rather than the choppy keywords we are used to typing into the search bar. Google most likely implemented BERT to better market to voice and video search queries.

The digital marketing work is rapidly and constantly evolving and the Dallas Digital Summit showcased just a microcosm of the overarching advances to come. At AVX Digital, the team is ever evolving to stay on top of those changes and develop strategies to stay at the forefront for our clients. If you are interested in exceptional results for your business with the most up to date marketing tactics contact the team today![/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

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