This weekend I had the very good fortune to attend Ryan Deis and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion Summit in downtown San Francisco.
Headlined by speakers including Guy Kawasaki and William Shatner, it was an awesome gathering of 2,000+ of the best, brightest, and most accomplished from the worlds of online marketing and sales.
“Aha” moments were aplenty for all who made the effort to attend. Here were a few of mine:
These are the Worst AND the Best of Times for New Client Acquisition.
To large part because of gatherings like this – where the best SEO, SEM / PPC, landing page, copy-writing, and e-mail marketing strategies, tactics, and techniques are shared and then used (and in volume) by creative and aggressive marketers worldwide – it is more challenging than ever to attract new customers online.
Today’s online buyers have developed a killer combination of hardened skepticism AND sky high expectations as to pricing, product and service features and benefits, and to performance guarantees.
Now for the ambitious online seller this represents not just a great challenge, but an incredible opportunity as well.
You see, while these expectations have driven up customer acquisition costs, they have also driven the cost of a competitor acquiring that customer away from you even higher.
Now, this is where most companies who sell online get off track.
The very nature of the web – with its seductive ease of marketing to prospective customers worldwide – often causes the very dangerous myopia of neglecting those so good and honorable folks that are your customers now.
It is a bit funny that this was my big “aha” moment from a conference gathering of the some of the world’s biggest, baddest, and most aggressive online marketers.
And this led to my second aha.
The truth is already out there.
In this brave new world of ours where tens of hundreds of thousands of online businesses worldwide put their best stuff online for all the world to see…
…that imitation is not just the highest form of flattery, but it is great business strategy as well.
Now yes, what to do with all of this stuff can often feel overwhelming.
And this is where events like the Traffic and Conversion Summit are so valuable.
Ryan and Perry and their merry band curate and interpret this global treasure trove of strategies, techniques, and tactics for you.
AND they give you a framework for how to do so yourself.
And finally, the energy one draws from a gathering of 2,000+ of decidedly private sector, decidedly ambitious Internet entrepreneurs and executives…
…animates in one the energy and inspiration to take all of this knowledge and translate it into that most precious of all business assets.
Opportunity.
