#PSNI2016 Marketing Summit
Last week, roughly 50 AV marketing experts came to Minneapolis, Minnesota to get a better understanding of where our industry is heading, and how to keep their marketing strategies unique and present in a time of ever-changing technology. The focus of the 2016 PSNI Marketing Summit was working together as a TEAM. Not just working with one another within your own marketing department, but how does your marketing materials work with each other in order to be more cohesive.
PSNI focused on six key areas.
Marketing Through Teamwork
Yes, surprise, the first thing we discussed, what does marketing through teamwork mean?
AVNation’s Tim Albright was the first on the docket to discuss what it meant to be a team when it comes to your marketing. Tim explained to us the value of having more than your marketing department get involved when it comes to marketing. Who knows more about your company than it’s employees do? Combine your voices in order to be heard.
Social Media is Like a Cocktail Party
Yes, I went there… at 10:00am…
But seriously, if you can think of social media like going to a party, you can become a master on social media. Don’t be boring, keep it social, and don’t make it all about you. People want to know that their voices are being heard. None of us like to be talked “at.” It’s all about building relationships, providing content based off my audience needs and being a real person.
Lead Generation
Anyone who says that they’re not interested in lead gen… well, I’d like to talk to them about what they’re doing differently because we are all interested in growing our business. However, it’s not just about capturing a lead, it goes into what do I do when I have that lead, how do I nurture it, how do I give my salesperson real business. Testing is the best way to find out what works for your offers and target audience. Jane Johnson of Pivot Communications tells us her company likes to provide a good mix of gated and non-gated content for the lead generation process. Ideally only gate new content for the first 3 months, 6 months max and then offer ungated or replace with new gated. You can still generate leads from ungated – make sure you have contact us forms on your non-gated content pages.
Really, it’s about working smarter, not harder.
Video
When Video Social Creative’s Noble Crawford, self-described good looking brother, got to the front of the room and told us we need to create more video as a part of our marketing strategy, we all listened.
Video has an incredible power to communicate. We were encouraged to start thinking about how we could incorporate video into our marketing strategies. And what can someone with little to no budget do to create a video? We broke out into teams and were tasked with creating 30 second videos that were relevant to PSNI and the results were unreal. Something I don’t think we’ll be forgetting anytime soon.
Websites and SEO
Rachel Gold from Ingenuity Marketing basically wowed us with her knowledge of Google analytics and SEO. We went through a 50,000 foot overview of how to create goals, what to look for in our website and what it means for lead generation when someone is viewing our website. I personally could have used another hour of her time and then personally picked her brain for another 5 hours after that. Bottom line, there is a wealth of knowledge to obtain if you can get yourself a better understanding of Google Analytics.
Marketing Automation
Jane came back to ask us, “Are you really ready for marketing automation? “ We took not just any test, but the “Spirit Robot” test that got us asking the following questions about our own companies:
- Do we have content to push that nurtures our leads?
- Are we getting enough new leads each month to make an impact?
- What does our website visitation look like?
- Do we have the right resources?
So it’s more than coming up with a good idea and hoping a MA platform will work, we have to step back and take a look at the big picture in order to see significant value.
The Bottom Line
Each speaker presented a different piece of the puzzle in our marketing strategy and at the same time, each speaker talked about how each piece works with each other to create something bigger.
Your content can turn into your storyboard for a video. Your video can turn into a visual message on social media. Your social media can act as a call to action to drive people to your website. Your website can be more identifiable when you have worked on your keywords. Native keywords drive others to us through other outlets. The list goes on and on. When we optimize our marketing efforts and have them work with one another, we have a solid, stronger strategy to go to market with.
The Coolest Part
In addition to the sessions, there was also a level of encouragement. What I mean is, I was in a room full of competitors who, at the same time, all came together, as a team under the PSNI umbrella to learn from one another. We talked business, we were honest about what doesn’t work for us while the next group talked about what they could do better. We were honest and there was a level of encouragement from one another to help. To sum it up, it was inspirational.
A lot more happened throughout the Summit, checkout our tweets @PSNI_AV and hear what others had to say by following #PSNI2016 hashtag.
