It had been several years since I attended an in-person professional development conference so when my Husch Blackwell colleague Ethan Kelly forwarded me a digital marketing conference invitation with a registration offer, I explored the opportunity.

Like many people, I always go right to the agenda when considering a conference. If none of the sessions are appealing, why bother attending? Sure, there are peer-networking opportunities and chances to meet new vendors, but I want to gain knowledge and implement any strategic learnings at my workplace. While reviewing the agenda for the Digital Summit - Kansas City, I was impressed with the diversity of topics and caliber of speakers and with it being a short 4-hour drive from St. Louis, I signed up!

I was glad I did.

The conference took place at the Kansas City Convention Center in downtown KC. Outside of the conference hours, it was nice to walk around the city and check out the sights. I visited Cosentino’s Market twice because I really liked the ambiance, and the prepared offerings and salad bar were amazing! Before the conference on Wednesday, I got in a workout at the Downtown KC Orangetheory where the staff was very welcoming. Now, on to the substantive part of the conference…

It started with a keynote presentation by Wall Street Journal best-selling author Ann Handley who was kind enough to autograph copies of her book, Everybody Writes: You Go-to Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content. The rest of the conference was filled with 30-minute sessions on digital marketing topics like email marketing, SEO, social media, content marketing, automation and how to market to demographics like Gen Z. I took notes in pretty much every session I attended and wanted to share my key takeaways, broken out by discipline.

Quick-Hitting Digital Marketing Takeaways

Content & SEO

• Brand voice, be relatable. Signal to the client, “we get you.” Build trust and affinity with the client by having a relatable voice.
• 71% of consumers say content matters more now in a post-lockdown world. They expect better quality and relatable stories.
• Don’t be so strict with following a style guide. Lead your company’s branding evolution.
• Try to have content at the ready – consider an online content library.
• Develop a CTA safelist by auditing your website and social and putting all the call-to-action words and phrases into a list. This will let you plug and play.
• SEO rarely goes as planned. It’s a long-term discipline but short-term tactics can be implemented immediately. Have someone dedicated to maintaining the SEO knowledge base and staying current on trends.
• Second screens are the norm. Are you marketing to the second screen?

Email Marketing

• When you issue email campaigns, track activity and metrics and alert the sales team of any significant findings.
• Create emails that sound like your salespeople talk. Don’t overuse marketing and branding lingo. Businesses aren’t B2B or B2C, they’re human to human. This goes back to being relatable.
• Emails with emojis in the subject line perform 56% better than those without.
• Audit your email marketing efforts and create a list of yearly top performers and also make note of any underperformers.

YouTube

• There is a massive opportunity to leverage YouTube for marketing. Take a look at your competitors’ YouTube channels and their most viewed videos. Create content around those topics.
• Use QR codes in videos to drive viewers to your website.
• Rich media ads get 26% more engagement than static ads.
• Videos on YouTube must capture attention and provide value as soon as possible to avoid the skip.
• YouTube Shorts will be big. These are up to a minute in length. Use #shorts in the video description.
• There is such a thing as YouTube Stories, but you have to have over 10K subscribers.

Social Media

• Most trends on TikTok last about 2 weeks. Don’t get behind the curve.
• Set up automated replies to DMs on your company’s Facebook.
• In the settings on Facebook and Instagram, you can exclude words in comments so they don’t appear in your company’s feed.
• Always seek out brand mentions on social. Check hashtags, geotags, mentions, and even misspellings in hashtags.
• When responding to social media comments as your company, don’t sound robotic. Your social tone can be different than approved brand voice. Have a document of FAQs so you can pull the answers quickly.
• Build and communicate a brand hashtag and search/listen for it on social.
• ALWAYS give proper credit on social when sharing someone else’s work such as video, photos, and other content that isn’t yours. Request consent.
• Incorporate trending posts into your social media strategy. Retweet a popular tweet with your own comment.
• When you cross-post content on different social media channels, always remove watermarks and upload natively. For example, remove the TikTok logo from videos that you share on LinkedIn. The algorithms will penalize content from other channels.

Marketing to Gen Z

• Gen Z – anyone born between 1997 – 2012. Gen Z has a social media attention span of 8 seconds. Capture their attention immediately.
• Gen Z likes content that includes one message, one CTA, uses organic visuals, short copy, entertaining and authentic. Use in-app production.
• TikTok has over 1 billion users. 80% of users are 16-34 years old. This is a Gen Z playground. Content must be authentic!

I hope some of this is helpful if you are a marketer! All in all, it was a worthwhile event and maybe the conference organizers will bring this event to St. Louis next year. I am grateful that Husch Blackwell affords these career development opportunities to their business professionals.

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[Stephanie Dorssom is a Senior Manager - Digital Marketing, Communications, & Alumni Relations - at Husch Blackwell. Connect with her on LinkedIn.]