From the plaid-suited Jay Baer we got a great refresh on what makes marketers truly great. You need to do or say something different than the rest of the market to trigger a conversation. What types of things are “talkable”?

• Responsiveness to your customers
• Empathy with the consumer
• Generosity of the brand
• Attitude and Realness

Fun Fact: A locksmith in Manhattan maintains the highest yelp rating of any business in NYC. Why? Because he made people talk about him. His talk trigger was fueled by his consistency in going the extra mile for his customers. Whether that was oiling their locks free of charge, checking their apartment for security on every visit, or not up charging for night and weekends. He got his customers talking about him. For example, he left one of his customers wishing they would get locked out again because the experience was so great. You can’t pay for that kind of advertising.

Opening Keynote | Jay Baer | Convince and Convert

The keynote speakers today brought some serious marketing power to the table, and amazing insights. The afternoon kicked off with Jay Baer from Convince and Convert and the evening featured Lee Applebaum from Patron. Both men feature a stunning career in the digital marketing world. Both men spoke to the point that authenticity brings in the kind of value and customers that brands try so hard to acquire.

Jay addressed the need for brands to have “talk triggers” that help to differentiate the brand. These are items that make fans rave about their experience and can be accessed by everyone. An example he gave was a locksmith in New York that goes above and beyond in his service requests. He is top of the charts in many review sites, and people want to be locked out again so they can experience his services again.

Lee addressed using technology to help fans and skeptics alike experience the Patron brand. It allows them to become immersed in the process of creating their high quality tequila from start to finish. Through Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies, Patron is able to deliver experience that help craft authentic experiences with a brand that is known globally, but is a truly local production. With voice search technologies like Amazon Echo, Patron is able to serve up delicious drink options to their customers that allow them to develop or refine their skills in creating specialty cocktails. These technologies allow Patron to market in completely authentic and fun ways.

Opening Keynote | Jay Baer | Convince and Convert

Closing Keynote | Lee Applbaum | Patrón

Finding the perfect email mix for your clients is just like creating a recipe from scratch according to Carly Brantz of SendGrid. The key point being that email can be easily customized, personalized, and tested without spending a lot of money. Keeping your consumers experience in mind, it’s a good idea to implement a preference setting up front with your audience so they can tell you how often to email them and what type of content they want to receive.

Another key aspect of a good email campaign is to use email for delivery of smart content and segmented strategy as much as possible as it applies to your brand. Utilizing a series of welcome emails educating the customer, and creating re-engagement campaigns helps to alleviate email fatigue. Segmenting your audience to identify with the international readers vs. the college students vs. the stay at home mom’s will make your message really hit home in a crowded inbox.

Some other quick takeaways were:

• Keep subject lines and paragraphs short – 3 words per subject, and 2 sentences per image.
• The #1 goal is to drive a click – so use copy strategically.
• Keep your CTA in the top 20% of the email.

All in Good Taste: Effective Email Marketing | Carly Brantz

I’m old enough to remember looking through, but not really having to use phone books. I distinctly recall that each page featured a number of ads of all shapes and sizes. In the space of advertising, size did matter. Today though, clever marketers can take advantage of digital tools to help level the playing field with the big guys. Number one organic rankings are great, but sometimes that isn’t enough when it comes to common questions or specific queries. What you should aim for is the featured snippet.

The snippet is Google’s way of saying “here is probably what you’re looking for” in a neat, little box at the top of the results. This can be pulled from any result on the page, but it will be the one that Google thinks solves the problem the best. What Ronell Smith taught us today is that in order to win in this space we need to think like a searcher, write content for human and not AI consumption, and to answer the question better than your competitor.

Featured Snippets: Your Path to Earning Traffic, Beating the Competition & Delighting Customers | Ronell Smith

The Patrón brand of tequila doesn’t have a market share problem, (being that they have 70% of it) but they did face an ongoing reputation problem. Perhaps even being the most misunderstood tequila on the market. While they were outselling other liquors, it was “cool” to make fun of them and write them off as another unauthentic corporation. But what works for well-known brands can also work for lesser-known brand on a smaller scale.

Patrón found innovative ways to bring their true brand story to customers in a fun and valuable way using VR and AR technologies and Alexa-based voice search. CGI virtual tours of Hacienda Patrón brought Mexico to the consumer in a very real way; conveniently in the customers pocket so-to-speak. A branded app and summer campaign sharing drink recipes and creating a community of tequila aficionados cemented their brand history and personality in consumers’ minds.

For brands who aren’t well known and are still fighting for market share, educating and engaging their audience is just as important. We can take the spirit and forward-thinking ideas of Patron and apply those to our own clients’ brand stories too.

Closing Keynote | Lee Applbaum | Patrón

Every marketing campaign must be built on a solid foundation. That foundation includes a great idea to execute, and rock solid data to help understand how successful the campaign was. Ryane Askew from JCPenney is a dinosaur loving data nerd that taught us just how to use the data we collect to drive actual revenue.

When starting out with a new data source, or reconfiguring your current data structures, you should not aim to be fully perfect, but get into a high range of accuracy that you can achieve measurable results from. That just means that your data and reports will make sense when you review them. From there we must focus on measuring anything and everything available, and when we’re asked to analyze that data to ask the questions that will help provide context to the reports we’re creating. My boss might ask for keyword rankings, but if I don’t ask some questions to find out what he wants to accomplish with that report, then I can waste a lot of time pouring over data that might not help him.

Lastly, when we are able to answer the right questions, and have data on our side to support our ideas, we must put forward recommendations that we can justify and the actions that must be taken in order to drive revenue.

How to Drive Dollars Through Digital Data in 5 Easy Steps | Ryane Askew

Check out our takeaways from Day 2 of Digital Summit Dallas 2017