Increasing Conversions in a World of Convergence: Must-Attend Sessions for SoLoMo Marketing

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.

With buzzwords such as SoLoMo (a term that describes how technology continues to blur the lines between social, local, and mobile) being constantly tossed in marketing blogs, tech news, and on social media, today’s digital marketers have their hands full trying to juggle multiple marketing touch points as users flit from one device/channel to another.

While we’re not big fans of buzzwords, we do care when they represent key changes in the environment that have tremendous impact on the bottomline. And SoLoMo is one of those. Unfortunately, going SoLoMo hasn’t really been that easy for many. If anything, these trends have increased the complexity (and unpredictability) of marketing. As if converting visitors on landing pages wasn’t challenging enough, today digital marketers confront the unique challenges of persuading customers in an always on, always connected, multi-device world.

With this in mind, we compiled a list of sessions at the upcoming Conversion Conference Boston (happening in a few days!) that can help you in your quest to become better SoLoMo marketers:

Beyond social chatter

Admit it: you’re still baffled by social media. Yes, most of us know by now how important it is to the success of online businesses and are spending resources on maintaining several social media accounts. Heck, we may even know which types of content can drive engagement through the roof. But there’s one area where we’re often stopped dead on our tracks: ROI measurement. Put simply, we don’t really know what the actual value of a tweet, like, or comment is to our business. Without this knowledge, you and I are unlikely to find genuine success in social media marketing beyond generating chatter or buzz. Not to say that buzz doesn’t have value, but again, how do you know if you’re getting your money’s worth?

If you want to get real leads and find out the impact of social media marketing in terms of $$$, you’ll find valuable advice from these sessions:

• Real Leads, Measurable ROI: Successful Strategies for Converting Through Social with Harry Gold: Founder and CEO, Overdrive Interactive
• Facebook’s Hidden Conversion Rate Impact with Dennis Yu: CEO & Founder, BlitzMetrics

Local is personal

The “localization” aspect of SoLoMo stresses the importance of providing localized experiences, such as location-specific offers and services (e.g. store locator, customer assistance, etc.). made possible by the geo-targeting capabilities of devices customers use. Beyond geo-targeting, localization also emphasizes the need to deliver highly relevant web experiences to visitors at the right place and at the right time. And relevance can be better achieved with personalization: digital marketers must be able to use tremendous amount of data on their hands to create messages and offers that mirror the unique context of their visitors. This doesn’t only mean your generic templates won’t cut it anymore, but also that you gain the ability to decode visitor intent, values, and behaviors and use this knowledge to design experiences that correspond to their real-time needs.

This is often easier said than done so make sure to brush up on your skills with these sessions:

• Behavior-Based Personalization Secrets with Karl Wirth: CEO and Founder, Evergage
• LPO 2.0 – User Experience Optimization with Lance Loveday: Founder & CEO, Closed Loop
• You Don’t Know Juan: The Top 10 Cross-Cultural CRO Mistakes with Joe Doveton: Director of Conversion Services, GlobalMaxer
• Maximizing Conversion with Common User Scenarios with Brian Lewis: Director of Optimization, SiteTuners

Mobile first, Mobile now

You can no longer afford to ignore mobile. As we noted in an earlier post, having a mobile strategy is no longer optional. A well-defined, well-executed mobile strategy is now critical to your success as a business. Sadly, we have yet to see more companies taking mobile seriously. As Conversion Conference chair Tim Ash observes, “Mobile is today where desktop website experiences were in the late 90s: few user experience champions, little understanding of true potential, inappropriate designs.”

Then there’s the reality that many marketers are jumping into the bandwagon without a clear idea of how their customers are using mobile devices. For instance, how many digital marketers really know what their visitors are up to when they’re visiting a website on their mobiles? Do visitors really visit your site to buy or are they looking for other information?

Lucky you, we gathered top experts to help solve your biggest problems in mobile optimization. From planning to developing to usability testing on mobile, these sessions have you covered:

• Mobile First? 5 Reasons Why You Might Build a Mobile Site First with Ariel Weil, Director of Products, Yottaa
• Fleeting Opportunities: Capturing the (Mobile) Moment with Charles Nicholls: Chief Strategy Officer, SeeWhy
• Mobile Usability Testing: Can You Click Me Now? with Alfonso de la Nuez: Co-Founder and Co-CEO, UserZoom
• Optimizing Phone Calls: Five Steps for More Rings with Joel Harvey: Managing Partner, Conversion Sciences
• Small Screen, Big Conversions with Ian Everdell, Mediative

SoLoMo is just one of the reasons you should pay more attention to conversion rate optimization. It has given rise to multi-channel CRO, wherein digital marketers must optimize for every channel that visitors use and interact with, from desktops to tablets to smartphones (and in the future, wearable devices like Google Glass). This opens up a lot of opportunities for those who get SoLoMo right. But to be effective at it, your digital marketing beliefs, frameworks, and practices have to evolve.

So pack your bags, book your flight, and get ready for Conversion Conference Boston, Sept. 30-Oct. 2. Don’t forget to check out the full agenda for other must-attend sessions and register today.

See you at Conversion Conference Boston on Monday!