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October 28, 2014

C³ : The Dawn of a New Era in Marketing

10.27C3 2014   Keynotes   Presentations » Conductor Learning Center

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to attend , an annual conference gathering search marketing industry leaders, partners, and professionals together in New York City to share their knowledge and unique experiences. C³ is held by Conductor, the creator of the Web Presence Management Platform Searchlight, a tool used by Delucchi Plus, SEO professionals and digital marketers around the world.

At C³ 2014, more than a thousand marketers gathered to listen to 27 industry-leading speakers. In addition to fascinating lectures from some of the biggest names in the business, the conference featured highly interactive Q&A sessions at the end of each lecture, networking opportunities galore, and an opportunity to get certified in the Conductor Searchlight tool.

For me, as a whole, the conference was both enlightening and entertaining. Many of the speakers were really good, and one of the only gripes I had was that I couldn’t see more of them. The keynote speakers were fantastic, but the breakout sessions were split into four sessions at a time, so you had to pick just one. Below are three of my personal favorite lectures from the conference.

Seth Besmertik, CEO of Conductor, opened the conference talking about a “Dawn of a New Era of Marketing.” The “old way” of marketing focused on buying customers and paying for their attention as the only way to get in front of them. However, it’s not as easy to do so anymore because with the evolution of the internet, and technology like Netflix, DVRs, ad blockers, and email blockers, customers can now choose whether or not they want to engage with an advertising brand or website. When given that choice, customers choose content over ads: 82% of website traffic comes from unpaid mediums, while just 6% of website traffic is paid for. Thus, the SEO industry is growing (it basically didn’t exist 15 years ago) but now 1.5 million people have “SEO” in their job titles, and 2 million people have “content marketing” in theirs. As expected, the view of an SEO/Web Presence Management company is skewed against paid marketing efforts, and there is still a place for that in marketing, but I thought a lot of what he said rang true nonetheless. It is harder to buy customers through marketing than ever before.

Rand Fishkin, the founder/wizard of Moz gave a really interesting lecture titled “The Paradox of Exceptional Marketing.” He started by explaining the Fermi Paradox (the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and the fact that Earth has never been in contact with one). The Fermi Paradox posits that there must be a ‘Great Filter’ stopping all of the civilizations out there from reaching the point where it can colonize the galaxy. Similarly, Rand says that of the millions of businesses that engage in web presence marketing, only a select few find scale and success. The key to becoming one of those select few is identifying the ‘Great Filters’ that we as marketers face, and understanding how to overcome them. If you are interested in learning about Rand Fishkin’s 6 Great Filters for marketers, his presentation from C³ 2014 is posted on the conductor website.

Seth Godin is a best-selling author and founder of Squidoo.com. In his lecture, titled “If You See a Fork in the Road, Take it,” he talked about the revolution in marketing and the dawn what he calls the “Connection Economy.” We are leaving the industrial economy and entering the connection economy. The thinking of the industrial economy centered around scarcity; if you needed an item or service, then you had to pay whatever price that product required. The scarcer a product, the more valuable it was. The connection economy centers around the customer. In the new Connection Economy, the more people who use a product the more valuable it is. The fork in the road to which Seth refers is whether to industrialize marketing in this new economy, or turn it into an art form. Industrialized mass marketing is no longer an effective way to reach potential customers, now that they can easily choose which ads they want to interact with. Seth says that marketing today is about giving customers what they want, rather than selling them what we need to. It’s about connecting with the people that are disconnected, and telling them that “People like us do things like this.” His lecture from the conference can also be found online.

These lectures were great, but I also enjoyed meeting my Conductor team, reuniting with old colleagues, and learning about the incredibly useful new features of Searchlight 3.0 (Content mapping and breaking down SEO performance by location/device!). Overall, I thought the conference was an extremely worthwhile event, and I can’t wait to attend C³ 2015 next fall.

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