How Digital Customers Navigate: Call To Action Conference 2016 Recap

Recently the Vantage team attended Unbounce’s Call To Action Conference in Vancouver, where, over two days, we learned and networked with both local and international conversion rate optimization experts.

Speakers covered both specific techniques and high-level strategies for landing page testing and conversion rate optimization that we’d love to share with you.

The gist of conversion rate optimization, and the conference in general, was making digital experiences like landing pages, websites, and ads more appealing to customers and prospects.

So, in case you missed the conference, we thought we’d offer you our favorite insights with this blog series.

We’ve got an initial general impression below, and then specific actionable takeaways from speakers will come out shortly hereafter.

Call To Action Conference 2016 Recap: The Digital Marketing Iceberg

Speakers presented at an Unbounce-detailed Queen Elizabeth Theatre. The cooled blue and purple atmosphere created a feeling of being inside of a glacier, or iceberg.

Perhaps that’s the metaphor we need: move past the icy surface of a user as merely data and get into the depth of the individual.

Throughout the various presentations, the iceberg of digital marketing emerged and reemerged:

Understand how people navigate your marketing system or sink with the competition.

While this has always been an important topic for digital marketers, it seems that now we must truly understand the sentiments, issues, and paths of our target audiences to create rewarding marketing experiences that stand out above the uniform drone of competition.

Landing pages and ad copy become stale and indistinguishable when every marketer follows the same statistics and guidelines. To create actionable calls to act we must create unique experiences that cater more to the specific why that makes our product or service desirable for an individual.

Erin Bury advocated for “a culture of risk” that would not be afraid to find this why.

However, we must avoid the trap of inauthentic-personalization. Receiving emails that mention our name, our business, or our submitted interests in a forced, robotic way reek of insincere automation.

Whatever creativity and navigational data we have at our disposal must be used wisely to create personalized, enjoyable experiences. Rand Fishkin dismissed our obsession with pretty “up-and-to-the-right graphs.”

Instead, we must find “effective targets that impact the right metrics.” And to do this it seems we must understand what truly makes our target audiences move through the digital ocean.

Our next post will cover Day 1 of Call to Action Conference Vancouver, offering you some valuable takeaways that you can implement easily.