Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) Vancouver 2008
Last week Friday I went to the Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) held in Vancouver, BC. The topics ranged from SEO, visitor intent tracking, A/B testing, Google Website Optimizer, Social Media, website monetization, CMS systems, web 2.0, community engagement, mobile marketing, conversion optimization, website analytics, email tracking, copywriting and online advertising. The conference has previously been held in New York City, Las Vegas, Montreal, Stockholm, Berlin, and Copenhagen.
There were over 50 speakers from Europe, the United States and Canada coming together to speak at this sold out conference held at the Coast Plaza Hotel. The speakers were from companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Victoria Secret, VanCity, and Aeroplan.
I was having lunch with one of the past presidents from the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA) and after talking about different CMS option and he asked if I would speak on a panel about CMS for them. I’m looking forward to meeting with IIMA and the other panel members.
I feel there were three main topics that seemed to seep through each topic, SEO, testing and social media. (I’ll put these topics into short bullet points to recap for you).
SEO
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) are now more important than they ever used to be!
- Go after long term results not the quick fix ranking jump (Don’t use “Black Hat” tactics like link buying and link sculpting)
- Content is King
Testing
- If you're not testing your website (A/B testing, conversion optimization, landing pages, etc.) then you’re behind the game already.
- Test for visitor intent on your site
- Use your analytics to conquer the “big-dog, little-dog syndrome” (the boss going with his hunch)
Social Media
- Use relevant media to correctly seek out your target market
- Go where your market is, get down on their level
- Be authentic, they will be able to sniff you out if you’re faking it
- Use it for the long term, social media might not pay off short term