My Recap of the Ohio Marketing Summit

Today I went to the Ohio Marketing Summit hosted by IC SUMMITS. It was great to hear marketing case studies and insights from large and small Ohio brands. My biggest takeaway was the importance of communicating with your customer rather than talking at them. Speak their language. An awesome brand will encourage consumer conversations on social media. I appreciated how Bridget from Great Lakes Brewing Company spoke about how they embrace how passionate their customers are about craft beer. Whether that’s a positive or negative passion, they use their social playbook to engage with their audience online, always in their brand voice.

I always like to write down and share my key takeaways from conferences that I attend:

• Word of mouth, contagious marketing, even in the digital world, remains strong.

• Hold up a mirror when deciding on something. Does this fit with who your brand is?
• Market research, surveying your customer, understanding what they respond to is so valuable.
• Great brands come from great strategy.
• Edit to amplify.
• The peanut butter approach – Spreading everything equally everywhere isn’t always the best approach to marketing
• You don’t need to chase a shiny new object or new shiny marketing trend.
• Status quo is the enemy of innovation.
• Instead of buying expensive commercial time during a TV show, target fans of that show on Facebook. It’s a better use of your budget and it’s more trackable

• Tell a story to executives rather show them the raw data. Give them an overview of if things are good, bad, or okay.
• Sometimes you need to switch your strategy and benchmarks from focusing on conversions to brand awareness. You might need to first educate your audience on who you are.

• Adept Marketing presented case studies that showed how they looked at a client’s existing data, redesigned their landing pages based on that data and saw an increase in conversions.
• Don’t make your customers ask. Answer their questions beforehand. Add FAQ answers to landing pages. They used data from the website’s Live Chat feature to learn that customers frequently asked about price and bulk discounts so they added that information to the landing page.
• Heat maps can validate your hypothesis with data. For example, if you think most people don’t scroll down to see the bottom of your webpage, you can prove that with data by looking at a heat map from a service like CrazyEgg.
• You already have data. Look at it. Make a hypothesis. Test it. Redesign the user experience based on what you learned.

• Don’t talk at your customer. You should be communicating with your customer.
• Over scripting creates a cold response and inauthenticity

• Your app will never be perfect. Try to release an MVP (minimally viable product) asap to get user data and feedback to grow from.

• Great Lakes Brewing encourages and responds to all online conversations. They embrace how passionate consumers are. They created a social playbook for engaging online in their brand voice.