eBook: Internet Summit 2015 Recap

Recap:Internet
Summit2015
ACTIONABLE MARKETING FOR
SMALL BUSINESSES & STARTUPS

For the ﬁfth time in the row, Internet Summit conference is an event that should not be missed by
anyone in South East region that is even remotely connected to the art and science of marketing.
This book summarized my conference experience and it is geared toward small business owners that
are doing marketing themselves or have one marketing manager. We also focus on startups that are
trying to raise money from venture capitalists.
AGENDA
©2015, ANAGARD, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opin-
ions reﬂect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For additional information, go to www.ANAGARD.com
InternetSummit2015

Internet Summit 2015 Agenda
1:15pm – 2:30pm. Opening Keynote: Jason Miller | Sr. Manager, Con-
tent Marketing, LinkedIn
2:50pm – 3:20pm
• UX as Marketing: The New Mobile Future
• Crafting a Truly Valuable Inbox Experience
• SEO Like It's 2015: 8 Major Google Changes You Should Know About
• Customer Connection: Linking Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty for
Success
• Roundtable: Driving Growth Through Lean Innovation
• UX Hacks for Better Experiences: Faster. Leaner. Smarter.
3:40pm – 4:10pm
• Tactics and Technologies that Drive a Highly Personalized Customer
Experience
• Using Intent Signals to Understand, Develop and Measure Audiences
• Roundtable: Trends in User Experience
• Agile, Delightful & Unexpected: When Social Media and Digital Col-
lide for ROI
• Why Services Are Eating the Universe
• Multilingual Marketing: Data Science Secrets to Open Your Business
to Global Customers
4:30pm – 5:00pm
• No One Cares About Your Content... Yet
• The First Rule of Marketing Analytics: Forget the Customer
• The Rise of the Marketer - Driving Engagement, Experience & Reve-
nue
• How Wearables & IoT Are Reshaping Customer Engagement
• Roundtable: Startup Metrics: What Investors Want to See
• Digital Evolution: An Omni-Channel Customer Journey
5:15pm – 6:00pm
Afternoon Keynote: Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | Search Marketing in
a Two Algorithm World
8:30am – 9:00am
• Design for Sensors, Not Screens
• Customers Trump Analytics: Why Your Email Marketing Is About Peo-
ple Not Metrics
• Flexible UX for Content + Commerce + Customer Experience
• Building an SaaS Marketing Machine
9:15am – 9:45am
Page 2/50 Internet Summit 2015 Experience ©2015 ANAGARD, LLC

• Forget Keywords - Here’s How To Produce Content to Grow Your Busi-
ness
• Narrative Design: The Artful Intersection of Words and Images
• Online Ecosystems Today: 5 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Cus-
tomer Journey
• No Country for Old Mad Men – How Hyper Connectivity Is Chang-
ing Everything
• Roundtable: Smart Hiring & Building a Culture of Success
10:00am – 10:30am
• UX Insights from a Drunk Guy
• Content in Context: What You Can Learn From Native Ads That
Worked
• It’s About Time: The Amazing Convergence of MarTech and AdTech
• Globalization + Localization = “Glocalization”
• Roundtable: Investment Trends & Venture Capital Outlook
• Putting The Audience in the Cockpit: Immersing Fans from the Track
to Mobile Devices @ NASCAR Digital Media
11:00am – 11:30am
• Marketing in the Era of the Connected Consumer: Reimagine Every-
thing!
• Engaging with Digital Natives
• Roundtable: Future of Mobile
• Practical Attribution Modeling - Get it “right” in 2016
• Startup Spotlight: Scot Wingo, ChannelAdvisor
• Hacking Consumer Experiences in the Digital & Physical World
11:45am – 12:15pm
• How to Make Email Awesome
• Making the Case for SEO
• Roundtable: The Future of Content Marketing
• Weathering the Coming Storm - How Today’s Best Privacy Practices
Can Help Reduce the Impact of Tomorrow’s Data Breach
• Changing the Game with Regulation A+ Equity Crowdfunding
• Become a Marketing Measurement Ninja
12:30pm – 1:45pm
Lunch Keynote: Russell Simmons | Chairman & CEO, Rush Communi-
cations and Co-Founder, Narrative All Def Digital
2:00pm – 2:30pm
• Mobile Millennials: The Past is Not Prologue
• Disruptive Content Marketing, Disciplined Results
• All Things Happy, A Holistic Approach to Data-Driven Customer En-
gagement

• The Case for Brand Journalism
• Roundtable: Early Stage Fundraising Strategies
• Wallet Wars: Loyalty, Payment and Beyond
2:45pm – 3:15pm
• SWOT the Competition - Reducing Risk and Improving Odds in Digi-
tal Marketing
• Beyond the #Hashtag
• Roundtable: Trends in Search & Social
• Building a Referral Program From the Ground Up
• Roundtable: Founder War Stories
3:30pm – 4:00pm
• Email Marketing: Sending Less for More Success
• Building Enabling Systems with Big Data
• Automating Email To Reduce Work, Increase Engagement and Boost
Sales
• 'Session Cancelled' - The Future of Design: Bringing Anticipatory Ex-
periences to Life
• Roundtable: Accelerating Professional Development in the Digital Age
4:15pm – 5:00pm
Closing Keynote: Chris Brogan, Best-Selling Author | Winning in the
Choose Your Own Adventure Economy
Closing Keynote: Beverly Jackson, MGM Resorts International |
#formermeangirl How Social Media Helped Me Become a Better Person
and a Better Marketer!

This is my personal point of view as an Internet Summit 2015 attendee. I strive to share the best
practices in marketing that startups and small business owners can use and implement, not
necessarily promote or critique and a particular speaker.
CHAPTER 2
Recap:InternetSummit2015

SECTION 1
Last two years most presenters at Internet Summit were ad-
vising marketing managers in the audience that content market-
ing is the wave to future. This year, most practitioners understand
the value of content marketing, so the focus have shifted away
from producing content for the sake of producing content to creat-
ing content that will be consumed by your target audience in or-
der to create engagement with the brand. Unfortunately, such
goal is much harder to attain than simply creating high volume
content that has questionable quality.
Jason Miller, content marketing manager at LinkedIn has
kicked off the conference with number of data points as he is try-
ing to build the case why LinkedIn platform should be the premier
destination for all market managers to distribute their content to
large audience. Currently, two thirds of all professionals world
wide have a profile on LinkedIn, so audience is tremendously
Opening Keynote: Jason Miller | Sr. Manager, Content
Marketing, LinkedIn
Presentation overview
Jason Miller leads global content and social initiatives for LinkedIn
Marketing Solutions helping marketers understand how to use Linke-
dIn to achieve their marketing goals and deliver real ROI. He recently
released his first book “Welcome to the Funnel” which quickly became
a number one best seller on Amazon. Previously he was the senior
manager of social media strategy at Marketo and responsible for lead-
ing the company’s content and social media efforts. Before entering
the B2B space, he spent ten years at Sony developing and executing
marketing campaigns around the biggest names in music.

large for anyone that is in B2B business. On the other hand, I
would like to know how engaged are LinkedIn users, how active
they are, how often they log in to the platform, how do they use it
and how effective is LinkedIn in providing information users are
seeing. In terms of distribution, he said that LinkedIn content
pages receive seven times more page views than job pages. Yes,
content does increase awareness of your brand or a small local
business, but I have to question his comparison of content page
vs. job advertising. The key difference is the longevity of the job
opening post. Hopefully, the position can be filled in a month or
two, maybe three. If so, the number of views on the job opening
post will be very limited in time, while the content post about your
company ‘s products or services will not be taken down for years.
Continuing on with this theme, Jason is trying to build the case
that SEO and dominance of Google as a search engine has made
much harder for people to find a good quality content. Because of
that, he refers to LinkedIn as a premier destination for quality
posts for professional that can use Pulse to see the trending sto-
ries on variety of business topics. Although I would agree that
some of the posts on Pulse are valuable, the biggest problem I
have is that the search engine for LinkedIn posts is not sophisti-
cated at all, so instead of getting articles on the topic that is rele-
vant to me, I get to see what majority of LinkedIn visitors are read-
ing this month.
Only Quality Content Drives Engagement
With proliferation of content on the Internet, its quality is now
tremendously important attribute that will show that your brand
knows how to sympathize with your prospects and customers
problems. In fact, Jason stated that 44% of people would end
brand relationship due to irrelevant content. Ann Handley, social
media and content marketing keynote speaker, uses this formula
to describe a valuable, innovative content:
Useful * Enjoyable * Inspired = Innovative Content
Clearly, the bar for the “innovative content” that engages a
lot of people is quite high. Highly specific content for your target
audience will not be as hard to reach and it will be to make it enjoy-
able, and then finally so engaging that it will provoke people to act
on it.
How To Distribute New Content
What is lost in missing to reach the highly innovative content
bar, can be mitigated trough distribution. Jason recommends that
a singular message should be repurposed several times, just like
Thanksgiving leftover turkey gets uses into so many different
meals on Friday and Saturday. The same message can be repur-
posed into: slide presentation, blog post, infographics, webinar,
and a series of short videos. He advises us to squeeze every
ounce out of content by utilizing different delivery channels and for-
mats. Most marketeers stop at the blog post, so amplifying distri-
bution channels will amplify your message as well. On LinkedIn
platform, he recommends using Company Pages, Showcase
Pages, Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Groups and SlideShare as
part of a fully integrated marketing strategy.
As a case study for easy to use distribution strategies, he
highlighted the work of only two people on his team that wrote 65-
pages long eBook that they have repurposed in variety of formats.
The eBook is “New for 2015: The Enhanced Sophisticated
Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn. Everything you need to know
about marketing on LinkedIn, in one guide”.
Repurposing the content of the eBook into video doesn’t
have to be a long and expensive to make. In fact, most videos on
YouTube are 2.5 minutes long episodes. So, Jason recommends
making a number for short videos that are few minutes long and
then package them into a channel. For example, 7 -- 10 few min-
7/50 Page Internet Summit 2015 Experience ©2015 ANAGARD, LLC

utes long vides is a great representation of a larger topic covered
in an eBook.
Launch New Content Like A Product
Most companies prepare for new product launch, but they
do not plan for new content launch. Jason recommends that busi-
nesses treat new content like it is a new product and give it appro-
priate distribution channels to reach the target audience. In terms
of distribution breakdown, he recommends using announcing new
content via: 34% email, 32% blog, 15% InMail, 9% SEO, Com-
pany Page, Sponsored Updates, SlideShare, Display, PPC, Twitter.
Each time you create a new derivative of the original blog content,
repeat the whole cycle again. Once you exhaust all free channels,
go with paid promotions because inbound alone can get you so
far. If you know your audience, there should not be a miss with
paid ads or waste of money. Finally, keep content refreshed be-
cause late majority and laggers will ﬁnd in later in the cycle, not
right of the bat like early adopters.
Grow Sales Funnel Via Though Leadership
If you are B2B company, your new business buyers buy into
your perspective and approach to solving problems, not necessar-
ily into your services or products described on your web site. To
show your perspective customer whey they should do business
with you, your company needs to demonstrate though leadership.
There are three types of thought leadership: Industry leadership +
product leadership + cultural leadership / social responsibility =
success.
! Without thought leadership, you compete on price
and the lowest bidder always wins
Finally, marketing team composed from people in charge of
SEO, Social, Content, Demand Generation, PR, Community en-
gagement have to communicate. The bigger the company, the big-
ger silos are between these teams, so breaking down the barriers
in order to see a holistic view of all marketing activities is an ongo-
ing task for all large organizations. On the other hand, such prob-
lem is unheard oﬀ with startups and small business where market-
ing team is frequently only one person juggling 100 balls in the air.
Figure 1 Key Takeaways for Content Distribution
• Treat new content launch like a new product launch:
send announcements via your company web page,
email, blog, LinkedIn InMail, optimize for organic
SEO, pay of paid search (PPC), social media plat-
forms
• Repurpose the same message into a blog post, slide
presentation, webinar, video, infographics to amplify
your reach and increase engagement

SECTION 2
Google Search Algorithm Changes In 2015
Currently, 80% of people start researching a product or a
service using online search before they buy something; 68% of
people start with a keyword. From a business point of view, most
marketing manager struggle with finding the appropriate keyword
set because Google changes their SEO algorithm 600 times per
year! In fact, 2015 has been the year of the huge changes for Goo-
gle SEO. Because of that, only 15% of SERP pages are so called
“blue links”, links to the top 10 results shown on the first page.
Clearly, SEO managers have a challenge in front of them to en-
sure their company is found on the Internet.
Every day, 78% of search results will have some ranking
changes as the search algorithm strives to make results personal-
ized. Officially, Google doesn’t give public any updates on this al-
gorithm; but SEO experts have observed that the algorithm is try-
ing to be more human with machine learning embedded in. Rank-
SEO Like It's 2015: 8 Major Google Changes You Should
Know About
Matthew Capala | President, Alphametic, NYU Professor, Author
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times.2015 has already been a rollercoaster
for marketers who are trying to keep up with Google… and we can expect much more yet to come. While
many of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a major algorithmic update (such as Google
Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways. In this session, Matthew Ca-
pala will break down:
• How to stay in front of Google as it evolves at a light speed.
• Algorithm changes SEO professionals should anticipate.
• Ways you can work with (not against!) the constantly evolving ways Google changes.
• Presentation link: 10 Google Changes that Will Make or Break Your SEO in 2015,
http://www.searchdecoder.com/google-changes-2015/

Brain is Google’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) and is is surprisingly ac-
curate. With 2015 changes, Wikipedia links rank 60% of the times
in top 10 on search queries, so wikipedia is clearly stealing the
show.
How To Rank Higher In SERP
For example, so called money keywords such as credit
cards, show unexpected search results. Try it out; search for
“credit cards” and you will see that major banks are not even rank-
ing! Articles about credit cards are ranking higher. Winning links
are blog posts that compare different credit cards or advise peo-
ple on different options. As a bank that actually makes money by
issuing people credit cards, Matt advises that focus should be on
your own web site because in the best case scenario, you could
get up to 15% of traffic with SERP. Because of that, look for off-
page growth and content distribution.
User engagement and web site traffic signals are attributes
that contribute to overall ranking score. If your web site uses Goo-
gle Analytics, then Google knows how much organic, not paid, traf-
fic you are getting and that will influence ranking. If your web site
visitors bounce back quickly away from your web site, if they click
on your link, leave, then click some other link, that will push your
links to the bottom of the SERP. Google frequently reshuffles
search results order because click trough rate matters as an indica-
tor of a good search result to a query.
With Twitter and Google’s deal in 2015, Twitter content is
now indexed and shown. Popular tweet will usually show in search
results.
Contrary to popular belief, mobile friendly web sites actually
didn’t get preference on SERP. Nevertheless, it’s is important to
have mobile friendly web site as more and more people are using
smart phones and your don’t want to lose them because they can-
not read your content. Matt recommends to check mobile usability
in search console within your Google Analytics dashboard.
Security matters. Even though https is highly preferred by
Google, web sites that have actually converted to https from http
have actually seen a slight SERP ranking hit, not an actual boost.
Regardless of the ranking, it’s still a good practice to have a se-
cure web site for hundreds of reasons
Speed of the web site is gaining a lot of attention. The faster
the web site, the higher will SERP ranking be. Most web sites are
not as fast as they should be because they have large images. To
improve overall speed of the web site, make sure that you com-
press all large images, do browser cashing.
If your business is multinational company, then your SEO
strategy should be global SEO. For each country where your busi-
ness operates, make sure that you have a country code top level
domain matters. For example, in France, have ACMEBiz.fr domain
name and in Turkey use ACMEBiz.tr.
For small and local business, having Google business page
profile is a must to take advantage of for local SEO. Ask your cus-
tomers to write you a review. Have citations in Yelp and other direc-
tories that are consistent in terms of contact information.
Google+ Demoted But Still Useful
Google+ and authorships metadata has been discontinued.
Authorship has been removed from knowledge graph for your busi-
ness, it’s gone from predictive search, and there is no need for
Google+ account to access YouTube. Why? Because they figured
out that people didn’t trust other people’s recommendation as
much, they trust SERP more. Nevertheless, it’s still good to have
Google+ account if you have large following, as you can email di-
rectly to followers and people are still very diligent to open their

email and read messages. Plus, with Google+ profile, it is easy to
run events, webinars and place reminders on Google calendar.
Figure 2 Key Takeaways for 2015 SEO changes
Google has made significant algorithm changes in 2015 affecting SERP for
most web pages.
How to increase your SERP position:
- have engaging content, as shown by high CTR (Click-trough rate) and
low bounced pages %. Quality content matters.
- Make sure your web site is fast (compress large images)
- Small business: have business profile page with Google for local SEO.
Global businesses: use appropriate country code top domain name
- Have mobile friendly, secure web site
- Google+ is demoted, but still useful for business with large following

SECTION 3
Tyler currently works for Forrester Research as an analyst
and he also coaches startups. Industry analysts are future ori-
ented as they try to predict the changes that will happen 10 years
from now. Tyler definitely fits the bill of a futurologist as this pres-
entation is filled with broad assumptions and somewhat grandi-
ose statements, so please take this recap with a grain of salt; or
simply read it for the enjoyment, not so much actionable market-
ing advice.
Tyler led off the presentation with homage to Mark
Andreeseen’s seminal article published in 2011 by Wall Street
Journal, Why Software is Eating the World. Andreessen, co-
founder of Netscape, and one of the most influential venture
capitalists in the world, co-founder and general partner of the
venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz argued back then
that software will run the business of most companies, regard-
less of the industry vertical they operate in. Today, we can see
Why Services Are Eating the Universe?
Tyler Shields | Serial Entrepreneur & Coach
2015 is seeing another disruption that will shape how business and the global economy operates
going forward. In this new paradigm, software has already changed how we create business
value for our customers, and now we are focused on fundamental business model shifts that will
again change how businesses execute. Tyler Shields, serial entrepreneur and coach will break
down:
• How-pay-as-you-go Opex will overtake Capex.
• Why the concept Of ownership is now longer valid.
• How products will cease to exist.
• Ways businesses must adapt to new internal and external service models.

that he was absolutely right as we all use a number of software
solutions to automate our process flows, regardless of the busi-
ness size we support. As a followup step, Tyler made a parallel
that in 2015 “Services will eat the universe” as part of the 2nd
phase of a business transformation where businesses will move
from selling of products to selling of services. His prediction is that
in 10 years, companies will sell only services, not products.
To explain the concept of “services eating the world” he
used electric lightbulb. Today, we go to the nearest store and we
buy a lightbulb when we need to and pay anywhere from $3 for
CFC to $10 for LED bulb. In the future, we will be getting new
bulbs as a subscription to our electric bill. In other words, our elec-
tric power provider will expand its service and not only sell us elec-
tricity, but also sell us monthly subscription for light bulbs. Sure.
Personally, I am too tired of monthly subscription service plans for
anything under the Sun, so as a consumer, I am not buying in this
vision. In fact, I think that subscription model will actually increase
consumer prices, so regular people will have to carefully chose
what they get for on a recurring basis. Yes, subscription business
model is absolutely awesome for startups, but I still prefer to buy
my physical products form a brick and mortar store in a real time
when I need them instead of overpaying monthly for something I
may not use or need.
OpEx Beats CapEx
Few technological changes have allowed for acceleration of
innovation and the rate new business could be formed. Internet of
Things (IoT) is changing the world, as billions of devices are com-
municating with each other underpinned by the Cloud infrastruc-
ture. Because it is easy to use AWS to implement a software solu-
tion for under $0.5M, startups have dexterity and flexibility to pro-
duce things faster. Because of the Always-ON, always connected
to network features, global mobile traffic is taking over. This is the
Age of the customer. Before, institutions had all the power over 4P
(product, price, placement, promotion) but now 4P is being con-
trolled by customer! Customer is in charge of 4P? OK, I will not ar-
gue this assumption at this time and let my readers form their own
opinion. All of this is a perfect storm for moving towards service
model over products. OpEx over CapEx.
OpEx is ongoing cost of running the business, CapEx is al-
most one time deal, buying equipment needed to run the business
whose costs is deducted and depreciated over time. On the other
hand, buying cloud computing capacity is payable trough OpEx.
OpEx is better because it’s fully deductible, unlike CapEx. OpEx:
pay as you grow model, spend less at the beginning when you are
smaller company. As you grow, pay for more OpEx. It’s great for
small and medium size businesses because they don’t have to es-
timate their future capacity; instead, they can simply buy more re-
sources when they need it. There’s is no long term commitment,
try it a solution, if it fails, get rid of it. Yes, I completely agree that
OpEx is much better than CapEx, purely from accounting point of
view, but I do now buy into reasoning that services will eat the
world.
What will happen when you pay for light bulb replacement
as part of your electric bill? When you do not have an option to
buy an item directly? Today we have Zip car, eliminating the need
to own an expensive car for people living in urban areas such as
NYC. Some startups are turning Art into service. Subscribers can
change the paintings on their walls and never be bored with the
same picture. Play as a service appeared as well where you can
rotate your Lego pieces. The concept of owning a thing is chang-
ing. This is the change for destruction of ownership and could
have undesirable societal impact as it could widen the gap be-
tween have and have nots. He also believe that most products
will become free under this concept. Well, that sounds too good to
believe.

Financial Sophistication: What Your Customer Lifetime Value?
Startups would need to evaluate the inbound/outbound
model as part of their financial analysis. What service do you need
to buy and what service do you need to create that people will
buy. If lightbulb is part of electric bill, you get immediate feedback
on the service use and what makes sense to bundle, i.e. how of-
ten does an average customer replace light bulbs in their home.
With that information, startups can reach the goal to fail fast,
lower the churn and find a business model that works.
He recommends that new businesses focus on the number
of repeat customers, recurring revenue stream. From that perspec-
tive, there’s something that Tyler calls SMN, Service Magic Num-
ber that takes into account Lifetime Value of a Client and Cus-
tomer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Then:
• SMN = LTV/CAC > 1 = Win
• SMN = LTV/CAC < 1 = Lose — burn too much cash over
time
For example, Delta airlines decided to signigicantly increase
their LTV. They had a lot of cancellation problems in the past. Be-
cause of that VP of OPs decided minimize the number of can-
celled flights because customers hate the cancelled flights the
most. They hired Travelport to get more data to decrease cancela-
tion percentage and became customer obsessed. With all off this,
they increased LTV, and Delta’s has 0.3% cancellation rate vs 2%
for industry average.
Key takeaway for startups: Build annuity based service
model where LTV/CAC >1.

SECTION 4
I highly recommend all entrepreneurs that plan to raise funds
for their business to attend as many investor panels and presenta-
tions in their city as possible. When an investor is on the stage,
audience can quickly learn about their investment preferences,
likes and dislikes and then decide if they want to start looking for
ways to get a warm introduction. If there’s a match between inves-
tor’s ﬁnancial goals and your startup, it’s even more important for
an entrepreneur to like investors’ personality and work ethics be-
cause an investor will not only write a big check for the startup,
but also take a major part in the company’s strategy. Some inves-
tors are truly passionate about their work and would do every-
thing in their power to help startups succeed. Unfortunately, there
are some investors that treat entrepreneurs like commodity. On
the other hand, people in the audience can get a sense of inves-
tor’s attitude toward entrepreneurs based on their answers on the
stage.
Startup Metrics: What Investors Want to See
Roundtable Overview
When initially evaluating businesses, investors want to get a sense of the size of the business
through revenue, bookings, and GMV; once investors have an idea of size, they’ll want to under-
stand the company’s growth to see how well it’s performing. But what’s the best way to present
these key business and ﬁnancial metrics? How can metrics help tell a story? And how do entre-
preneurs highlight real product and engagement metrics, not vanity numbers? In this lively dis-
cussion, get the real story on the startup metrics that matter.
Featured speakers on this roundtable include:
• Jonathan Drillings | Principal, Comcast Ventures
• Holly Maloney | Principal, North Bridge Growth Equity
• Ian Sigalow | Co-Founder & Partner, Greycroft Partners

Investment Preferences
H o l l y M a-
loney, Principal, North Bridge Growth Equity is based in
Boston and she invests in growth stage businesses. She prefers
to invest in companies that have at least $10M in revenue, are
founder owner and operated, are technology or technology en-
abled services type of business with 20-30% revenue increase per
year. The company does not have be necessarily profitable today,
as long as they should be profitable within 12months. She would
typically invest $15-20M per round into owner operated compa-
nies that are established, have a proven business model, are boot-
strapped or financed by few angel investors. Her fund is geo-
graphically agnostic, they don’t focus only on California or Massa-
chusetts like many other venture capital manager. The fund has
some companies in portfolio that are located in Europe as well.
I a n S i g a l o w | C o -
Founder & Partner, Greycroft Partners: Greycroft invests in
seed stage startups and growth stage companies as well. Their
seed round starts at $100k and can be as large as up to $5M and
they can do multiple rounds over time. Their growth fund invests
somewhere between $10-20M per round into later stage busi-
nesses. The fund is based in New York and Los Angels, employing
19 staffers. Their current portfolio has 70% continental US based
companies, usually outside Silicon Valley. They like to invest into
B2B software companies, B2C E-Commerce, media; they prefer
vertically integrated companies with SaaS business model.
Jonathan Drillings
| Principal, Comcast Ventures. Comcast corporate venture
fund invests from a large pool of capital across tech spectrum,
from B2C tech, e-commerce, B2B enterprise tools, lots of digital
media. They make some Seed rounds, but most of their invest-
ment activity happens during Mergers & Acquisition phase, when
established companies are looking to buy growth businesses.
What Are The Most Important Performance Indicators From Investor’s
Point Of View?
One investor evaluates over a thousand different pitches a
year, so it’s really important for startup founders to stand out from
the crowd by showcasing relevant and strong Key Performance
Indicators (KPI).
Holly believes that Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Life-
time value of the customer (LTV) are critical. She looks for estab-
lished companies that have proven product-market fit, look at reve-
nue growth and have mostly subscription based revenue model. A
number of young companies face a challenge to get more revenue
from existing customer bases. Because of that, she looks at LTV/
CAC ratio trend over time as the trend line is very important, LTV/
CAC > 3 or 4 is mandatory for growth companies. She likes to see
20-30% monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth rate. Finally,
showing a gross profit and cash flow positivity is also a strong KPI
that she look for. Long terms, she looks at spending patterns for
existing customer base. Ideally, she would like to see that custom-
ers are spending more money over time by buying more expensive
subscription packages, not just renewing the package level they
currently have. Because of that, she recommend that marketing

managers segment the
customers in cohorts
and perform cohort
analysis to be able to
d e t e c t a n y t r e n d
changes. Think about
each class of your cus-
tomers per year or
some other period of
time and then compare
how they behave over
time: measure churn,
how much they buy, do
they buy more expen-
sive products or serv-
ices. Does cohort grow
or shrinks over time in
terms of revenue? Or
average sales price?
What’s the overall num-
ber of customers?
Ian is reminding us that SP&500 growth is only -0.3% this
year (by November 2015). That’s the type of return you can expect
when you buy index funds. The fundamental purpose of venture
capital fund is to have return that is much higher than a typical in-
dex fund. He refers to Triple triple, double double rule of the
thumb (double or triple annual growth). For example, if you can
grow from $36 to $72 revenue in one year, then everyone on
planet will be wanting fund your business. He also like entrepre-
neurs to keep in mind a typical exist strategy that investors use.
This year is very typical with 20 IPOs and 150M&A exists. Obvi-
ously, M&A is the leading exit strategy. To be acquired, the com-
pany has to show strong growth year over year.
CEOs in Ian’s portfolio are very creative, a lot of them dys-
lexic, very analytical, type-A quants. Eventually they figure out
how to move the business and they become experts in metrics
and what to present to VCs. CEO owns these figures and the cul-
ture is set from the top so KPIs are well understood to everyone in
the company.
Finally, most startups are tracking their KPIs using simple
and free tools. Excel is always the tool of chose along with Goo-
gle Analytics to track web traffic. As the company grows, some
eventually move that data into CRM. By the time VCs comes on-
board, they want you to be on Salesforce.
Who Gets Seed Funding?
Ian invests only in people that have done it before, not met-
rics. He prefers serial entrepreneurs that have scaled and sold
businesses before and still have deep expertise in the industry
they operate in. For Ian, it’s all about the people, not hard metrics.
A red flag for his is a serial entrepreneur that has hard time recruit-
ing new team the second time around.
Holly likes to see a good team without a single point of fail-
ure. The whole team has to buy into a business model and KPIa to
be able execute and reach strategic goals.
How Introverts Can Get Introductions To Investors?
Ian: don’t worry about it, we will find you. His company al-
ways data mine for companies that are growing fast. He believe
that most of the the inbound calls are worthless to him. He recom-
mends that entrepreneurs network with CEOs that have been
funded by VCs and if appropriate ask an intro from them. If Ian
gets a recommendation from a CEO that he funded before, he
treats the tip as a warm referral. Square 1 is Durham is a great re-
ferral source. Otherwise, they will find you if you grow fast enough.
Get an eBook:
Demystifying Venture Capital for
First Time Entrepreneurs

/50 Demystifying Venture Capital for First Time Entrepreneurs ©2015 ANAGARD, LLC
Figure 3 Key takeaways for entrepreneurs seeking
to raise venture capital round
• Most VCs invest in growth stage companies, led by
serial entrepreneurs
• First time entrepreneurs should figure out how to boot-
strap the first business with the help of few angel in-
vestors or equity crowdfunding.
• Recurring subscription revenue is the preferred busi-
ness model for investors that evaluate LTV/CAC ratio,
annual growth rates and profitability
Click here to book your own
Investor Pitch Consulting session

SECTION 5
“Just Google it!” is a simple statement that millions of peo-
ple would say every day when they seek information. It is also a
statement that testiﬁes to the overwhelming power of the Google
search algorithm. No matter how big Google’s competitors are,
not one can hope to come even close to it when it comes to the
Internet search. Microsoft’s Bing is perpetual second, capturing a
tiny market share. In fact, when I worked in Silicon Valley in 2003
at IBM Almaden Research center, I tried to get a job with a cool-
est new research project at the time, the search engine. The cur-
rent team had the best PhD level computer scientists IBM em-
ployed at the time, including a person that won Alan Turing award
for the work on relational databases. The best and brightest peo-
ple tried to design and develop a computing system that is fast
enough to process millions of search queries, has huge storage
capacity to store information on internet pages and is intelligent
enough to understand human queries. Needless to say, my Mas-
SEO in a Two Algorithm World by Rand Fishkin
Presentation Overview
Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He co-
authored/co-founded the Art of SEO, Inbound.org, and Moz (he
clearly likes doing stuff with other people). Rand’s an addict of all
things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple
blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FourSquare.
In his minuscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his
amazing wife, Geraldine, whose serendipitous travel blog chroni-
cles their journeys.
Presentation link: bit.ly/twoalgo

ter in Computer Science from NCSU did not pass the mustard and
I did not get a job with that group. But, neither did IBM. We all
know today that IBM never launched a search engine. On the
other hand, I will never forget my interview experience because it
exposed me to unbelievable complexity of a search engine design
and algorithms. Today, we all know that Google’s engineers have
cracked this difficult problem.
Reverse Engineering of Google Search Engine Algorithm
Needless to say, Google search algorithm itself is highly
guarded proprietary secret. I am not even sure that anyone at Goo-
gle can fully comprehend its architecture today. Us, outsiders,
can only watch and observe the search engine output results and
try to figure out its inner workings so we can rank our pages
higher. When it comes to black box reverse engineering of Goo-
gle search engine results ranking, Rand Fishkin, is the ulti-
mate guru (his presentation on SEO in two algorithm world).
For the longest part, SEO experts relied on link building prac-
tices, keyword stuffing to ensure their client’s web page is shown
at the top of the SERP. However, in the last 3 years, Google
erased all bad SEO practices regarding manipulative link building.
For example, the query “best beef in Seattle” no longer shows
only results for these keywords; it shows steakhouses, recipes,
anything. Google engineers predicted that we want diverse results
and fresh results. Another example is query for “best marketing
conferences” — search engine knows that we are not interested in
past conferences even though it had a ton of good links. It con-
nects topics and keywords, like marvel super hero. For the first
time people can actually believe that link building doesn’t work
any more for SERP.
Early on, in 2008 Google rejected machine learning tech-
niques as part of it’s search engine algorithm. That has changed
in 2012 as the company started to use machine learning for paid
click ads. With machine learning taking over SERP, SEO is chang-
ing.
Machine learning, or artificial intelligence algorithms are be-
ing dusted off from obscure computer science research papers as
they enter commercialization phase and become more powerful.
Rand speculates that Google uses variety of inputs, such as: col-
ors, shapes, gradients, perspective, interlacing, text, human label
images into its machine learning process to find the best match-
ing algorithm. Using this technique, Google for photos on Android
can search for all your photos of cat and show them to you.
2015 Google Algorithm Changes and SEO Impact
As a user, you don’t know why something ranks; you are not
even aware of the input variables as the system only gives good/
bad search results. Did you click and get satisfied with the informa-
tion presented? If so, it’s good search result. If you click back and
forward, then it’s bad. Click trough rate (CTR), user engagement
matter more than ever. Because of that, make sure to optimize the
landing page for searcher output, not keywords, links, or anchor
text.
Since 2015, its hard to move up the rankings with more traf-
fic visiting your web site and increasing CTR because Google ap-
parently doesn’t use CTR any more. It used to work. Use Google
Trends to see the search volume. Bunch of clicks from a robot
may drive results for few hours, but that’s it; it’s just a temporary
bump.
Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon are Google’s artificial
“animals” battling web spam. Google Panda algorithm introduced
first in 2012 has a goal to crack down on spam, content farms,
scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio. Penguin,

released in 2012 and updated in 2014 focuses on crushing spam.
2013 release of the Hummingbird uses semantic search and inte-
grate better with the Knowledge Graph. Finally, Pigeon focuses on
local search. In 2015 Google made significant strides by adding
artificial intelligence to its SERP trying to predict what a person,
not a computer is trying to find out.
Best SEO: optimize for people + Google at the same time
Unfortunately, web masters and small business owners still
have to use old SEO tactics — keywords, unique content, snippet
optimization, but in the future AI could matter more.
2016 SEO Optimization Goals
1. Increase CTR. Optimize title, metadata description, URL,
keyword, but your ultimate goal is to have get a lot of clicks. If
your CTR goes up, your rank can go up. If you don’t do well,
you will fall back down. Every single element in the search en-
gine results matter, so do not ignore any data point.
2. Beat your fellow SERP competitors on engagement. The
longer your visitors stay on the page and read it, the better you
will rank. If people click on your link, but quickly bounce back
to the search results, your ranking will suffer.
3. Speed, speed and more speed. If your web site does not
load immediately, no one will stick around and wait for images
and text to slowly render.
4. Fill gaps in your visitors’ knowledge. Compel visitors to
dig deeper in your web site and learn more about your business
by positioning yourself as a subject matter expert. Content mar-
keting matters, doesn’t it?
5. Earn more shares and likes on social media. Google looks
at engagement, how long does person stays on it, i.e. links
shared but not read are not relevant. Also, the content needs to
be read on Chrome or Android.
6. Fulfill searchers task. Ultimately, Google wants people to
quickly and efficiently find the information they are looking for
and not go back over and over back to the search engine
screen.
Create 10x Better Content
It’s difficult to create completely original, unique content.
However, that should not be the goal, the goal is to create more
consumable content with better visuals, better writing and up-
dated recent information on the popular topic. News and current
events get AI treatment, not so much medical info. We don’t need
better content, but 10X content. Need to have 10x better answer
that existing results, that’s the only way to stay out from the
crowd. I highly recommend watching Rand’s whiteboard session
that will give you a blueprint for creating 10x better, good
unique content.
Lastly, if you want to get your hand dirty with AI, check out
Alchemy API and Monkey Learn. Enter a keyword of your
choice and their AI engine will show you the related AI keywords.
Enjoy! I wasn’t really impressed with Money Learn output, but Al-
chemy API gave me some very insightful information. When I en-
tered my own web page anagard.com for analysis, the tool dis-
played sentiment as perceived by people for certain phrases. For
example, strategic management consultant was perceived favora-
bly, but marketing manager did not. I guess I have some house-
keeping to do myself.

Rand Fishkin whiteboard, why good, unique content needs to be replaced with 10x better content

SECTION 6
Arnie Kuenn is no stranger to Internet Summit as he has pre-
sented several years in the row in front of the packed audience.
He advises small business owners and marketing managers on
the best practices for content marketing and he uses common
sense approach, strategies that are easy to understand and imple-
ment.
It’s important to remember that 93% of the time people start
researching products or services they look to purchase online, us-
ing a search engine. 86% of searchers conduct non-branded que-
ries, and 90% of buyers prefer to click on organic links rather than
sponsored ads. From that perspective, it’s important for all busi-
ness to create content that will be found easily with organic
search, not necessarily paid ads. In 2015, Google made major
changes to its search algorithm, deemphasizing keywords and
emphasizing natural language processing search, so content mar-
Forget Keywords - Here’s How To Produce Content to
Grow Your Business
Arnie Kuenn | CEO, Vertical Measures, author of Content Marketing That Works eBook
You totally buy in to the fact that content marketing IS the new marketing. But did you know that 93% of all buyers, on-
line or in stores, use search engines prior to making a purchase? And 86% of those searches are non-branded queries? Peo-
ple want useful information and they want to ﬁnd it fast. How are you going to get it to them?During this session you will
learn what it takes to produce the right content to consistently grow your business:
• How to consistently create content your market will enjoy.
• How to produce the right content — even if you think your business is boring!
• The best types of content to create for people AND search engines.
• How to quickly optimize the content your prospects are looking for.
• How to protect yourself against changes in the future.

keteers would need to shift away their strategy of building series
of articles around selected keywords.
5 Types Of Content That Really Do Increase Your Web Traffic
To showcase practical content creation strategies, Arnie sum-
marized methodology developed by Marcus Sheridan, The
Sales Lion.
No matter what is your business, all your potential customers
have top five questions in mind. How much will it cost them to buy
your product or a service; what are typical problems you can ex-
pect post-purchase; how do you stack against comparable prod-
ucts; review; who’s the best in the field.
1. Cost/price articles
2. Problems articles
3. Vs./Comparison-based articles
4. Review-based articles
5. “Best of” articles
Following the Great Recession in 2008, Marcus Sheridan’s
fiber glass construction business in Virginia has been struggling,
but not his entrepreneurial spirit. With less clients and more time
on his hands, he decided to start writing about fiber glass pools.
The first questions he would get from perspective customers is
how much does a fiber glass pool cost? So, he wrote a really de-
tailed article about it. On the verge of bankruptcy in 2009, he di-
rected his sales staff to write about it all questions they have been
receiving over the years so they can put the answers into blog
posts. The results paid off. Today this post ranks the number one
in search results. http://www.riverpoolsandspas.com/cost. High
visibility on the internet resulted into $2.5M in sales via HubSpot
where he captures leads. The other popular article is: who are the
best pool builders in VA? Even though Marcus talks about com-
petitors, his blog post ranks the best, and people will read at the
end how great he is too. Because of that, Arnie advises small busi-
ness owners to embrace their local competition and write about
them, because online researchers will be reading about it on your
own web page, not competitors’. Praising your competitors is a
bold move, but it gives you an aura of instant credibility. Neverthe-
less, don’t forget to include your own call to action at the end of
the article, because ultimately you want to keep online visitors
with your own business.
These are the glass fiber topics that drive web site for Mar-
cus and ultimately helped his business grow in revenue:
• How much does a fiberglass pool cost?
• Top 5 fiberglass Pool Problems and Solutions
• Concrete vs. Fiberglass Pools vs. Vinyl Liner Pools: Which
is Better?
• A Review of Barrier Reef Fiberglass Pools
• Who are the Best Swimming Pool Builders in Richmond Vir-
ginia?
Can you make top-5 content questions for your type of busi-
ness?
Creating content is the first step and results are not immedi-
ate. It usually takes 6-12 months before you start to see re-
sults, such as high SERP ranking, high click trough rate, in-
creased web traffic and ultimately more sales calls from perspec-
tive clients that have decided that you do have authority on the
subject after reading your articles.

Gather staff that interacts with clients and see what are cli-
ents asking for. Sales people are getting FAQ all the time, so write
them down and write content for it. Sales people have already
been answering these questions in emails.
Tools For Content Marketing Research
It’s important to write content that people want to read, to
provide answers to the questions people are seeking online. The
easiest tool to use to see what people are looking for is Google
Suggest. Enter proposed title into Google search and see what
comes up. Pay attention to related searches and suggestions. To
really win in content marketing, you have to produce hundreds of
articles during the year to make it work! Some articles will be
very popular, most of them will not, but ultimately, with large num-
ber of articles, you will be playing well for long tail keyword strat-
egy.
Keyword Tool IO is a great tool to use to find out what
audience is looking for. Inserting * in search box will make Google
provide you more search suggestions, it will fill in the box for you
what’s popular.
YouTube also provides suggested search capability. People
go to You Tube mostly for two reasons: for entertainment or how-
to videos. Hence, businesses should focus only on how-to con-
tent for B2B.
Finally, do not gamble your success on creating clever, fun
content, as humor is sometimes hard to understand online in a
written word. Stick with the basis, be consistent, persistent, pa-
tient and results will come.
Figure 4 Content Marketing Works. download: vert.ms/cmworks

SECTION 7
The roundtable with four venture capital managers focused
on 2015 investment trends and outlook. Keeping a pulse on the
current trends is always important for entrepreneurs because it is
easier to go with the ﬂow when it comes to fundraising; when cer-
tain industries and applications are trending, it’s much easier to
get investment funds.
Growth Stage Companies Are Getting The Most Venture Capital Funds In
2015
Question
There is a perception that in a current investment environment that some
companies are growing too quickly, overinﬂated valuations. Does this af-
fect your fund and how?
Answers
Investment Trends & Venture Capital Outlook in 2015
Roundtable Overview
Serial entrepreneurs and investors discuss the ins and outs of taking your company to
the next level. Avoid the mistakes most growth companies and entrepreneurs encoun-
ter in this no holds barred discussion.
Featured speakers on this roundtable include:
! •! Jed Carlson | CEO, AdWerx; Co-Founder ReverbNation
! •! Jake Colognesi | VP, Volition Capital
! •! Robert Glazer | Founder & Managing Director, Acceleration Partners
! •! Eric Koester, NextGen Angels

Jed: Capital is abundant for the right type of company. It’s
really hard to write $2-3M checks to an early stage company. Be-
cause of that, I recommend startup co-founders to be prepared
for larger investment down the road and to grow bigger and faster
than you originally thought. With that, early bootstrapping and skin
in the game is essential. Eric: Capital is abundant, but VCs also
have a lot of choices to pick from. Angel List is good tool for start-
ups. Some can raise a ton of money via equity crowdfunding.
Some raised $20M in 30 days, mostly debt, sounds insane, but
some people did it. Bob: start with the end in mind, where do you
want to go. Lifestyle business could be awesome $10M revenue
type of business if you take $1-2M in angel money to get there.
But if you take $5M from VC, things change. Is that where you
want to go? Think carefully. We live in momentum world where
VCs overfund some sectors, but that quickly changes. For exam-
ple, e-Commerce was hot before, but now it’s nuclear winter for
this sector. Be aware where you are in this trend cycles. If you
are at the end of the boom cycle, it’s not good for you. For exam-
ple, Snapchat, Square valuations came out less than expected.
Venture Capital Availability Across Different Regions
Question: is geography a relevant factor when it comes to making an in-
vestment decision?
Jake: yes, different geographical locations have different fla-
vors. For example, there’s a lot of seed opportunities in RTP, but
not so much for Series A level because of the absence of large VC
funds. So, what can an entrepreneur do? How to go from seed/
angel level to Series A?
Eric: I chose to come to RTP as the next location for me to
invest into because of Universities and strong tech background. I
hope that money investors start brining to this region will make it
blossom. Be aware that today’s Seed round was Series A 8 years
ago in terms of money. The easiest capital to raise is not necessar-
ily the best capital to raise. If you get $3M from early investors, do
you know if this same group would be able to double down for the
next round? If not, you could be in trouble. In San Francisco area
it is easy to raise good money after bad, but not in RTP. In RTP en-
trepreneurs are healthy to begin with, which is precisely the reason
why I am attracted to this region. I spent last few years in San
Francisco working for KCP and other big names. Tech talent is
hard to find and RTP has it because of Universities and big tech
companies. So does Atlanta and Georgia Tech. We invest in verti-
cals: rides, groceries, electronics., etc.
Investor’s Money Is Not A Commodity
Jed: I bootstrapped my first business. I echo the sentiment
to recognize that today’s Seed is yesterday Series A. Do entrepre-
neurs know what’s expected from them to get A? No; there’s a big
disconnect. Are you getting scale money or exploration money?
Why do you need money for the business? Be very specific for the
sense of scale and who should be your investor, have detail con-
versation with your early investors about their expectations regard-
ing growth, KPI. I was very lucky that I did spin out from previous
company to bootstrap a new one.
Bob: If you take the money, hire five people, go to market,
and then have no revenue, you have a big problem! Startups are
not treating investors’ money as a scarce resource so they spend
without planning. Unfortunately, startup founders haven’t been talk-
ing much about business model, profitability and capital efficiency
since 2009! Will entrepreneurs have to think about this again, or
just expect that VC money is abundant? Well, a good business
model never goes out of fashion. With that, it is unfortunate that
marketeers wait so long on monetization that they don’t under-
stand who’s their customer yet, but they spend millions of dollars
on FaceBook ads.

Quirky has raised tremendous amount of money trough
crowdfunding. Certain level of narcissism is required to grow a
business, but it can also destroy it. Quirky was a good example of
that. It’s a fine line between genius and insanity. (The company
raised quickly millions of dollars, but spent indiscriminately on frivo-
lous things and didn’t have any plan to scale operations)
Get an eBook:
Demystifying Venture Capital for
First Time Entrepreneurs
Question: How do you allocate time between marketing for your busi-
ness and OPs?
Eric: if you have raised Seed $1-2M range round and your
target market size is $1B, then, you need to do everything you can
to hit your market acquisition goal, and not go around only chas-
ing VCs. Focus on customer acquisition the most important task
for a startup team. For instance, Israel is tiny market, just like RTP,
so they automatically have to think about distribution strategy
needed to capture USA or other big markets. Because of that,
they have different mentality that makes them sharper. Jed: busi-
ness model matters for customer acquisition: is it a free-model;
premium, what’s your pricing strategy? Figure it out from the begin-
ning and execute. Jake: don’t miss your milestones! Don’t spend
6-9 months fundraising because that distracts you from customer
acquisition.
Question: What in IoT excites you?
Eric: smart locks for apartments. Blue tooth next generation
sensors for paper towel in bathrooms that make mesh networks.
Even though it’s very popular, and acquired by Google for $3.2B,
Nest is still tiny! Infrastructure play is interesting, but it has not
emerged yet. Jake: connected home is interesting for wearables,
but in the end, most gadgets will be for the house before the arrive
to enterprise. Successful startups will most likely be acquired by
Apple, Google and other big players. IoT security because security
will continue to be more expensive across the board.
Figure 5 Key Takeaways
• Bootstrap, use angel investors, acquire market share, and
then seek Series A venture capital round.
• Series A round, $5-10M fuels business growth, be prepared
for it with a good business model and operational efficien-
cies
• RTP, North Carolina, is great place for seed stage startups
because of abundant tech talent

SECTION 8
Michael King, Founder and Digital Marketing Consultant at
iPullRank gave advised SEO (Search Engine Optimization) manag-
ers how to communicate the importance of SEO optimization to
C-suite executives using well known business metrics and avoid
SEO technical jargon.
Everyone that is in change of marketing budget has used
paid advertising at some point. Advertising is costly and it pro-
duces mixes results. Because of that, Michael recommends that
SEO effort is used to reduce the paid search budget. After all, peo-
ple rather click on organic search results than paid ones. Over
time, time and effort invested toward SEO, will reduce the need
for paid SEO. Ultimately, your SEO budget will shrink over time
when done right When presenting to CMO level executives, he
recommends talking in terms of “shared voice” instead of “link
building” SEO technical term.
Making the Case for SEO
Michael King | Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant, iPullRank
We all know that Organic Search is a big opportunity for qualified traffic, but how big? And once you’ve de-
termined that, how do you create a compelling business case to get your boss or the C-Level to invest in
SEO? And if you’re an SEO consultant having trouble getting your clients to implement your recommenda-
tions, what steps can you take? In this 30 minute session, technical marketer Mike King will walk you
through:
• The steps for blending the technical aspects of SEO with audience insights.
• How to get your arms around understanding the organic search opportunity.
• How to build compelling a business case and get buy-in for your SEO and Content Marketing efforts.
• Presentation: bit.ly/persona-kwr

In his presentation, Persona driven keyword research, Mi-
chael recommends to map keywords to persona and their intent
(transactional, informational and navigational) and need state
(brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, loyally).
However, a short keyword can be ambiguous, so it’s best to go
with entity matching, describe what is the intent of the search
query.
Keyword data collection tools are plentiful and most of them
are free, see Figure 6.
With all these tools at your disposal, you can start to build
keyword portfolio. Do search volume analysis, audience survey to
build your first keyword portfolio. Also, be mindful of keyword diffi-
culty, competition and how to take advantage of long tail keyword
strategy.
How To Pitch SEO Project To C-level Executives
How to overcome failures? Don’t give a weak presentation to
C-level executives, and even worse over the phone. Always lead
with beautiful visual presentation to top executives that include VP
of Marketing, SEO manager, different stakeholders and show
value to everyone in the audience. Balance data with telling the
good story to get buy-in to get things done. SEO agencies should
give content why a detected technical issue matters. Never stop
pitching for SEO as there will always be opportunity to go after,
more keywords to explore.
Key Takeaways For Small Business Owners
• SEO is getting more and more complex.
• If your business is very specialized, you could do your own
SEO. Otherwise, little outside help would be welcomed.
Figure 6 SEO and Keyword Planner Tools
TOOL PURPOSE COST
Google Adwords
Keyword planner. Enter URL and Google will tell
you keywords associated with that page. http://
www.google.com/adwords/
Free
Semrush
Spy on your competitors http://
www.semrush.com
From $70/
month
Keyword Tool
A great tool to discover long tail keywords
http://keywordtool.io
Free
Bottlenose Sonar
social media listening tool, highlights
conversations and relationships between Twitter
users https://bottlenose.com
Paid
Topsy
social media search and analytics http://
topsy.com
Free
SEO Tools for Excel
Bring data directly to Excel file http://
www.getpostman.com
Free
Grepwords
Robust API for keyword data http://
grepwords.com
From $15/
month
Keyword studio
Keyword search and automatic categorization
https://www.keywordstudio.com
From $39/
month
Alchemy API
Build smart apps with natural language
processing http://www.alchemyapi.com
Paid
STAT
Rank tracking and SERP analytics https://
getstat.com
Paid
Excel-Rest GitHub
plug in
Get your API data directly into Excel https://
github.com/VBA-tools/VBA-Web
Free
SEO Gadget for
Excel
Get data from Moz, Majestic SEO, Grepwords
within Excel https://builtvisible.com/seogadget-
for-excel/
Free

SECTION 9
Geoffrey Colon is in change of Bing Ads at Microsoft. He re-
cently published a new book, Disruptive Marketing: What Growth
Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us
About Navigating the New Normal.
Marketing is a lot like art, because popular marketeers are
doing some interesting things that make people want to follow
them and engage with them. The trick is to figure out how to
make people to act, to do something, what is that magic call to
Disruptive Content Marketing, Disciplined Results
Geoffrey Colon | Communications Designer, Social Data Expert, Microsoft
Modern communication forces Fortune 500 companies, C-Suite execs, entrepreneurs, small businesses and startups with little to no resources to adopt the
technology, the platforms and behavior of its customers in order to feel like a partner, an ally, a friend. Customers have the upper hand and will always move
faster than businesses who are mired in decisions by committee, lack or resources or where to allocate resources for biggest business impact.
In this discussion, Pay-Per-Click specialist and social data expert Geoff Colon of Microsoft will present how to best approach your content marketing strategy:
1. How do you find your core group of early adopters who will be your most loyal customers?
2. How do you use analytics as a core part of your planning and results measurement strategy?
3. While content may be king, distribution is queen and guess what piece yields more power on the chess board? When and where
do you invest in search engine marketing and paid social ads to help with conversion rate optimization?
4. Real decisions are not made solely from the logical areas of your mind but the emotional areas rooted in biology and evolution.
How are you using “sight, sound and motion” to connect with customers so they can ingest content in an emotionally resonant
form that is most friendly to their learning/adoption style?
5. How to make your organization more disruptive while being more disciplined in your marketing approach whether you are a growth hacker or a CMO.
For tips on content marketing follow Geoff on Twitter @djgeoffe. For tips on search engine marketing follow Bing Ads on Twitter @bingads, For a preview of
his presentation check out the presentation on SlideShare

action because at the end of the day all people are looking for solu-
tions. Unfortunately, we are overwhelmed with information in this
day and age, so how do we carve out the space where we have
more time to think and contemplate and automate repetitive task s
as much as possible? Because of the huge amount of automation
that marketeers are currently using, the emphasis has shifted to
people, face-to-face interactions. Because of automation preva-
lence, we chose to engage with each other in person, so live
events are getting increasingly important as they provide opportu-
nities for people to get together. We are moving from knowledge
economy to creative economy. It’s all about people. People partici-
pation is what drives us to participate with each other.
The Five Dynamics Of Content
What makes vendor stand out from others? Utility or creativ-
ity? What’s relevant? Current relevant news make people to con-
nect.
1. Understand your audience. Abundance in the world is not
evenly distributed today, even though we have a lot of re-
sources. Distribution is a challenge. To stand out from the
crowd, one has to be authentic. Figure out who’s your cus-
tomer and how to reach them specifically, so don’t try to reach
everyone. If you stand for everyone, you serve no one because
there’s overabundance of services and products and you have
to find your match. Unfortunately, most marketing managers
don’t do that because we are fearful of the rejection. Storytelling
works because for centuries it enabled us to make sense of the
world, so we are moving back to that era, using stories to con-
nect to each other in the world of abundant content.
2. Entertain the crowd. People seeking information online
are temporarily escaping their day-to-day reality of executing
tasks. Even though they may be seeking information that is rele-
vant to their job, they still prefer to be entertained in the proc-
ess.
3. Educate the crowd. Web site visitors came to you be-
cause they seek specific information to the problem they cur-
rently face. Give them meaningful answers, ideally using a lot of
visuals and less dissertation style papers.
4. Content curation. There’s no reason to reinvent the well
and constantly product original content; curate your favorite arti-
cles. When curating content, pay attention to conversation oc-
curring on social media platform, analyze the chatter, if people
engage with certain theme or not.
5. Original content is creative and it disrupts the status-quo.
How To Create Disruptive Content?
Start searching for disruptive content themes first with peo-
ple with whom you have strong ties: people you talk to on regular
basis. Then, for marketing purposes, you want to look for weak
ties, talking to people outside your circle. Social media makes that
easy.
Read the long tail because today’s economy is niche econ-
omy. Influence few to buy into your business and most likely you
could create new category of content of products. For example,
can people use a smartphone app or responsive web site to order
pizza from your small business? If so, that’s a differentiating factor
for your shop.
How do you differentiate yourself from the noise and clutter
out there? Be generalists hybrid, know little bit of everything: know
content marketing, SEO, paid social, distribution, be a person to
be able to work end-to-end projects. Some small businesses have
to do that anyway because they have only one person on market-
ing team.

Post-digital world is even more important now than yester-
day because everyone is online. So receiving a really creative, nice
physical item (book, gadget) it feels nice. That’s the reason why
events are so important.
Unfortunately, this year ISUM15 presentations have been re-
duced to 30 minutes, so most presenters rush trough their usual
presentation without having time for Q&A. Because of that, some
presentation summaries don’t have a lot of actionable information
for small businesses.

SECTION 10
Ryan manages brand strategy for Twitter for the East region.
He helps brands connect with Twitter audience. For example, mar-
keteers like emojis, and can help them figure out the right one. He
helps them create moments that matter, as he can work with busi-
nesses in-house advertising agency.
How To Be The Best Brand On Twitter?
Based on his experience with brand marketing managers,
he observes that the best brands in terms of customer engage-
ment on Twitter have 6 things in common:
1. Timing. Be ready to respond in real-time and prepare for
big events. Everything is about now, current moment.
2. Adventurous. If you want to be the first one to do some-
thing, don’t ask for the case study and KPI first … nope! Just
try.
3. Customer focus. Know your audience and connect with
them. Fortunately, knowing audience is easier than ever with
pleura of analytical tools available to marketing managers.
4. Resourceful. No matter marketing budget, enterprise or
startup size, everyone can be creative, resourceful and effec-
tive in reaching out target audience. How do you do build your
following matters.
Beyond the #Hashtag
Ryan Oliver | Brand Strategist, Twitter
Brands are utilizing Twitter to connect to their core audience. No other
platform combines the live, public, and conversational nature of Twit-
ter, which presents a unique opportunity for brands to connect in mo-
ments that matter. Learn about some recent campaigns that have helped
brands maximize their digital dollars, along with how they are leverag-
ing new Twitter products like consumer video, Twitter cards, and Vine
influencers.

5. Insights. Good brands knowing something about their
audience speciﬁc behavior, so they are ready to react to it.
6. Personality. If your brand could be celebrity, what would
that be? Chevy did a bunch of emoji tweets, Bud Light too,
Domino Pizza, Taco Bell is searching for an emoji. Most se-
lected successful food brand
tweets have up to 100 retweets.
The power of now. Mobile
has disrupted everything, so it’s a
battle to get person’s attention. It
takes only 76 seconds before per-
son moves on to your competitor
web site. An average person un-
locks smartphone 150 times per
day! The challenge is how to win a
battle for relevance? By connecting
to people’s passion in the moment,
in real-time when people are tuning
to Twitter as major events are unfold-
ing.
Targeting Customer Segments
On Twitter, marketing managers can target people by: geogra-
phy, age, gender, conversation, interest, events, TV show prefer-
ences, etc. For example, during MTV VMA, 675M tweets were
sent during the show that lasted only few hours! 1B tweets per
year are associated with music alone. Because of that, Verizon
started #WhyNotWednesday to connect with music fans and talk
to them. My personal observation: Taylor Shift had 10k retweets,
while a major brand has only 2-300 retweets on the same subject,
so celebrity trumps business, which reinforces the message that
being authentic on social platform matters.
Capitalize on culture — know what major events are coming
and prepare for them. Plan for predictable annual events and pre-
pare tweets ahead of time. 28.4B tweets are sent during Super
Bowl broadcast alone! But, how do you stand out from all that
noise? McDonalds sent out 50 tweets asking people to retweet
and enter into sweepstakes for Toyota Camry.
Move from product as a hero to
brand as a purpose. REI closed its
stores on Black Friday because
they knew that a lot of people hate
shopping on that day. They created
a very popular hashtag #OptOut-
side to stay true to their brand val-
ues, even though they would miss
out on the Black Friday sales.
Moments feature allows brands
could curate content on their own,
they don’t have to wait for media to
take the lead by singling out a hash-
tag that went viral.
Ryan believes that when connect personal passion plus time-
lines of the message you get personal paper letter quality of en-
gagement. But, some people think that direct messages are spam
particularly when received from a small business. What do you
think?

SECTION 11
Internet Summit is almost done and fatigue sets in. Bart has
a challenging task of keeping the audience engaged late into the
conference, late in the afternoon, when most people are starting
at the clock or scrolling endlessly trough their FaceBook feed.
Email Open Rate
Numerous studies have been written about email marketing.
Most small businesses by now use some sort of email automation
tool and can get plenty of advise from their providers. Neverthe-
less, getting people to open the email is not getting any easier.
95% of email sent does not get open, so there’s room for growth.
Bart advises people not to focus so much on open and click rate,
but to provide the best experience with your consumers. Sending
less email is certainly a good value proposition for time starved
small business owners. From personal experience, I have to
agree that less is more. There are few retailers of women fashion
that send me a promotional email every single day. After several
Email Marketing: Sending Less for More Success
Bart Thornburg | Sr. Manager, Email Marketing, WeddingWire
Most marketing emails make it through this world with the status “unread “- that’s a pretty depressing
statistic for an email marketer to live with. Ignore your open rate for a moment and think about your “did
not open” rate? Depressed? Not yet? Go ahead and calculate your “did not click” rate. In this 30 minute
session, Bart considers the subscriber experience and presents a case study on actions taken at Wedding-
Wire that have lowered their send volume but increased engagement. Session attendees will:
• Gain a thorough understanding of email marketing best practices.
• Walk away with tactics for reaching the right people with the right message at the right time.

days of receiving the same email over the over again, there’s only
one thing a person can do: unsubscribe.
Most people that receive B2B content open email on desk-
top during regular work hours; otherwise, they open it on mobile,
but not as often. People using mostly large desktop screen, can
pay attention to a long email with more thought provoking content.
On the other hand, B2C communication has to be short and swee.
Email is 1-1 authentic conversation that needs to be sent when
user is ready. Consider open environment, what client is doing and
how busy they are at that moment. Your subject line sends sig-
nals, so that’s the most important signal to open/not open email.
A/B test your segmentation that you put in place a year ago and
haven’t challenged since then.
Always end all emails with call to action. For example, add a
button that says: cannot register at this time? Register anyway
and we will send you a link to content for the webinar anyway be-
cause we know that this time may not work for you. This call to ac-
tion should get better click rate because it is lower commitment
than actually agreeing to watch the webinar in real-time.

SECTION 12
Chris is engaging, well known speaker and he again proves
his reputation at ISUM15. To se the tone, he wants us to think
about the ways we engage or more often do not engage with peo-
ple around us as we are glued to our smartphone screens. Re-
cently, he talked to a taxi driver that complained that no one talks
to him any more! The other person used to be soccer coach and
had rough last year when kids told him that he sucks. Because of
that, he changed teams, and at the end of that experience, he re-
ceived a cake and party because he truly cared that kids have
good experience, not necessarily win at all costs. Personal interac-
tions today are degrading; so is marketing and advertising.
Marketing and Advertising is so broken today
Marketing managers are not talking to their customers in per-
son as much as they used to. The focus is on push marketing. If
Winning in Choosing Your Own Adventure Economy
Closing Keynote: Chris Brogan, Best-Selling Author | Winning in the Choose Your Own
Adventure Economy
Chris Brogan | Author, Journalist & Business Advisor
We used to try to sell to everyone, but times have changed. Finding the speciﬁc people we
can best serve now outweighs the intent to reach the masses, but that means we must build
even deeper connections, and do more with them. How have technological shifts empowered
more selective marketing, selective selling, and frictionless buying? What can you do to take
advantage of these trends? What will your business do to breathe life and purpose into all
these new digital technologies so that you’re building business and not just bleating into the
void?
Contact: chris@owner.media owner.media/adventure

a person does not click the button in their email, web site or social
media, we send them even more messages; if they don’t open
email, send them more. One day we will be able to use Minority
Report like screens and look even more stupid than wearing Goo-
gle Glass.
IMPACT = C * (R + E + A + T + E)
To stand out from the noise and have your message reach
the intending audience, Chris has created a simple framework, an
impact equation, IMPACT = C * (R + E + A + T + E). C represents
being seen; R, whom you connect to; E, how often you connect;
A, being understood instantly; T, why we trust someone; and E,
the feeling of connection conveyed to our audience. This impact
equation is the basis for his book, The Impact Equation: Are
You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?
Contrast, how to be seen? Being different from your com-
petitors is very important to stand out. To demonstrate his point,
he shows several University web sites main pages. Most of them
look the same as they show multiracial kids smiling, sitting on the
lawn in front of the library and looking at books. It’s almost always
the first web page and it doesn’t differentiate your college from
other. Because marketing agencies are not keeping up with the
change, and now showcasing unique flavor of their clients, the cli-
ents themselves do not stay with agency for longer than two
years, which is frustrating for both clients and agencies.
Reach. How far can you send your message around? In its
rawest form, the reach is about the size of your list or RSS feed, or
your number of followers. The bigger the number is, the better.
However, marketing managers should always look for ways to ex-
tend their reach and they can do that by latching on the current
events. For example, if you are Star Wars minded marketeer, you
can even reach makeup, dark/white Loreal makeup! Everything!
Exposure. How often do people see your message? If you
are not very relevant, people will ignore it.
Articulation is about being understood instantly. Most peo-
ple lose here because they look for funny and snappy and miss
the target. Don’t try to be funny all the time, because it’s hard any-
way. Be very clear in your message that is easy to understand.
Steve Jobs didn’t talk about 1MB capacity for iPod but of 1000
songs that can fit on the music player and that’s the type of lan-
guage that people understand. Another examples is for Nike zero
running shoes, targeted for people that want lean, natural feel to
the foot, bare style.
Trust. Do people believe you? It’s amazing to me to see busi-
ness that don’t put photos of their employees on the web site, but
generic stock photo of multiracial people. Put your people on the
web page, they run your business. Smile is something we relate to
from birth, so put smiling employees on your web, real live hu-
mans.
Echo. do people see themselves in you? Do we see what we
are looking for in you? Echo is all about the feeling of connection
you give your reader, visitor, participant.
Business is about belonging
In the world where we can buy from anyone, why buy from
you? Carpet-bombing people with links to the content others
wrote is not an engagement.
Chris advises Marketing Service Agencies to connect specifi-
cally to their target audience and then clearly explain who do you
serve, how and why? Do not be full a stack digital marketing
agency because everyone says exactly the same thing all the

time. Sell your services to the right 1,000 people. Find the right
people to serve, not all people to serve.
Your buyer has a decision fatigue, they don’t want to spend
so much time deciding what to buy. Make it easy and quick for
them. Brevity matters — use short email with fewer links, give
them fewer options, simple language, don’t raise barrier to pur-
chasing. Connected. People want to belong. FaceBook groups are
the new FB pages. Put a group that is useful with few moderators,
invite relevant people to join and don’t use generic # that don’t
have a speciﬁc meaning.
People don’t want a lot of options, if any, simple talk sells,
know who you serve, cut, chop, simplify, stop doing. More is your
enemy. Also, new is your enemy. How many times did you look to
try new system because the old one didn’t work out.
For small businesses, Chris uses an example of a chiroprac-
tor. For this type of business, people want to know your hours,
rates, how often do you want to to see clients, so the cost over
time, what will you do to me? Show simple video of an adjustment
so people can see what it is. It does not have to be complicated.
Cut trough the noise and engage your business in the world where people
are less engaged to each other
Key Takeaways
• Fight buyers’ fatigue by clearly articulating the
value of your service or a product
• Brevity matters, keep information succinct, rele-
vant and simple
• People want to belong to a group and feel a per-
sonal connection with a business, small business
or large enterprises

High level overview, Internet Summit 2013 and 2014.
FIRST IMPRESSION
InternetSummit2013,2014

INTERNET SUMMIT 2013:
FIRST IMPRESSION
Last week I spent three days at the Internet Summit confer-
ence in Raleigh Convention center. For $200 or so early bird regis-
tration fee, this is the best $200 spent on continuing education
you can get! The quality of presenters, panelist and keynote speak-
ers is extraordinary as they all have the common one thing: they
share freely and openly the knowledge about industry trends and
best practices.
Three day long conference started off with Startup Summit
where local Internet and digital media startups had an opportunity
to showcase their companies. As a startup consultant, I pride my-
self in being knowledgeable about Triangle startup ecosystem, but
I was surprised to see a number of companies completely new to
me! They are mostly companies that are bootstrapping them-
selves. Because of that, they typically don’t socialize with people
associated with local entrepreneurial organizations and accelera-
tors. I find this encouraging because these new companies are fo-
cusing all their time and energy on product development and cli-
ent acquisition, not on chasing prominent angel investors and lo-
cal journalists covering the tech scene.
The main conference started off with a phenomenal keynote
by Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-founder VaynerMedia, a successful entre-
preneur with a talent for marketing that takes advantage of the lat-
est technological and social developments.
“Marketers ruin everything”
is his favorite quote. Once a methodology or practice sur-
passes early adopters stage, marketers swamp the market and
Figure 7 ISUM13 stage
Kevin Pollak, actor, standup comedian, entrepreneur at Internet Sum-
mit 2013 stage

make this method useless for everyone else. For example, email
open rate in 1996 was over 88% and now it’s about 9%, and go-
ing down fast to about 4% with Google Promotion tab hiding a lot
of messages from the main Inbox. This trend makes really hard for
all of us to stand out from the crowd and one way of doing that is
with superior and customized customer experience. Hence, the
rest of the conference was filled with panels sharing their wisdom
on how to use content marketing, customer engagement and new
social media channels to stand out from the crowd.
There were well over 2,000 people in attendance and it
seams that every company in Carolinas that has at least one mar-
keting person on their payroll was there. That means that small
businesses, the Main Street businesses have a tremendous inter-
est in digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean that they have hu-
man capital to execute new marketing strategies. Regardless, it’s
good for them to be at the conference in order to keep abreast of
the new trends in marketing tactics and strategies.
Finally, the keynote lunch speak by actor and stand up come-
dian Kevin Pollak is hard to beat! He’s incredibly funny, talented
and business savvy. His advice to all creative people (actors, art-
ists) is that they need to create artistic content and share it instead
of waiting on the phone call from their agent to do the work. Inter-
net makes content distribution easy, and number of followers on
social media networks speaks to your talent and popularity. With a
strong social media following, a big shot media producer will no-
tice you and give you a call; no agents are necessary.
I look forward to next year conference!
MARKETING TRENDS AND
BEST PRACTICES
This is my second year attending the Internet Summit, proba-
bly the largest conference in the Southeast region for profession-
als that apply their expertise to the overall marketing strategy for
their companies and organizations. Most attendees work for small
and medium size regional businesses, so learning from the ex-
perts what are industry best practices and marketing trends is tre-
mendously valuable. (See full agenda here).
Proliferation of cheap programmable sensors
David Pogue, Tech Columnist, Yahoo & Host, NOVA Science-
Now, opened the conference with his keynote speech. He set the
stage by highlighting emerging trends in technology that will be im-
portant for the next five years. First, the pointed out that smart-
phones really shouldn’t be called smart-“phones” because these
devices are used for number of applications, and phone calling is
just one of them, a feature that is being used less and less. Smart-
phones today are sophisticated computing machines loaded with
sensors that can detect user location with GPS navigation, ana-
lyze the movement with variety of motion sensors, pay for pur-
chases, receive offers from retailers nearby via iBeacon, take pho-
tos and videos, measure user’s body vitals, etc. This list will only
grow with proliferation of cheap, easily programmable sensors.
This represents an incredible opportunity for a number of hi-tech,
or Internet of Things (IoT) startups to emerge in the market
space. Steve Wozniak, a keynote speaker and co-founder of Ap-
ple, is excited about advance of artificial intelligence, made possi-

ble by these cheap hardware layer. He believes that Siri is the best
AI software solution to date with a lot of room for improvement.
Ubiquitous Device Screens will Open New Marketing
Channels
Currently there are 14B connected devices worldwide; their
numbers will grow to tremendous 45B over the next 5 years, gener-
ating incredibly rich data set. Big data analytics will continue to be
incredibly important part of analyzing this tremendous amount of
data as companies introduce new produce lines and change their
marketing strategies. Further, most of these devices will have
some form of screen to display information to the user. Because of
that, proliferation of screens is seen as a perfect channel for send-
ing advertising messages to the consumer.
Screen itself is ubiquitous and it can be found at the usual
places such as your smartphone, tablet, laptop. But, the growth
will happen in screens embedded in your car dashboard, home
thermostat, home appliance such as washer and dryer, or a vac-
uum cleaner. Simply put, if device is connected to the Internet and
has a screen, this screen can be used as a distribution channel for
advertising and promotions.
One of the panelist during “disruptive tech, 5 year outlook”
panel, speculated that one day Nest can display you with a cou-
pon for a nice cashmere sweater when you increase the tempera-
ture in your home. Personally, I would be very disturbed by such
violation of my privacy, so I am curious if I am in minority. Let me
know your opinion by answering this quick poll.
Situation: you are chilly and you increase the temperature in
your home using your internet connected HVAC thermostat (like
Nest). As you set higher temperature, a coupon for a warm cash-
mere sweater from a local retailer shows up on device screen.
How would you feel at that moment:
▪ That’s creepy! I don’t want marketeers observing
me in my own home.
▪ Indifferent. I am aware that my digital footprint is
constantly used for commercial purposes.
▪ Awesome! I just got a good deal on a sweater! I
don't care how did retailer decide to give me a deal, as long as I
save money.
When I asked the panel if they see anyone competing on cus-
tomer’s privacy, they said no, it’s hard to compete by protecting
customer’s data. I can only hope that they are wrong, or that at
least tokenization (think ApplePay) will make all our financial trans-
actions seamless, encrypted and personally unidentifiable.
Proven Marketing Techniques
Some marketing advice has not changed over the last few
years and they still hold true. Consumers have fully embraced
their smartphones as they use then constantly throughout the day,
so it is imperative that all communication sent to people is in mo-
bile friendly format, with a font that is no smaller than 14 points.
Content Marketing is still one of the best strategies to build brand
name recognition and to attract customers. SEO is still very impor-
tant as customers rely on search engines to find the relevant con-
tent before they make a purchase decision. Quality content de-
scribing your product or a service is very important as 78% of
search engine visitors trust organic search results over paid
search. Finally, email marketing is going nowhere, but the chal-

lenge is to make the content relevant and engaging to the reader
that is very quick to unsubscribe from marketing mailing list.
Finally, I highly recommend that all attendees download rele-
vant presentations as most of them contain up to date information
that can be used to fine tune marketing tactics. For more tactical
information about best practices for small businesses, please read
this blog post.
MARKETING ADVICE FOR
SMALL BUSINESSES
About 2,000 people in the region took time away from their
work to attend two days long Internet Summit conference, which
speaks volumes about the value of the information shared and pre-
sented. As people shuffle from one are to the other, I like to en-
gage in people watching. From my observation, I can estimate
that most people in the audience are working for small regional
companies and are performing some type of marketing activity as
part of their job. Most of the attendees are either entry or mid-level
career professionals that work in marketing, web development or
design. Yes, there are some senior level managers, but not many.
Because of the audience composition, most of the presentations
are focused on practical techniques that can be implemented to
improve company’s marketing strategy.
The ultimate goal for all businesses is to have paying custom-
ers. To that end, most presentations and panel discussions were
designed to help digital marketing managers convert more of their
web site visitors to paying customers. Regardless of the type of
business your company is in, the process from product concept to
a sale is the same.
Four steps to customer acquisition
1. Product — market fit. I am making an assumption that
company has already done extensive market research, prototyp-
ing, customer discovery and beta testing to be confident that
the target market segment is significant in size and attainable.
In other words, the product or a service that is being offered is
something that people are willing to buy.
2. Content Management. Communicate to your audience
what value would they get from buying your product.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The first thing peo-
ple do is to consult search engine when they intend to buy
something.
4. User Friendly UI — make it really easy for people to
want your product and easily find the “BUY” button.
Content Marketing is still the Most Important Customer Ac-
quisition Tactic.
People evaluate 10 different products of service providers be-
fore the make a purchasing decision. They start their search proc-
ess online, talk to friends and family, evaluate comments from
other users at social media. Because of that, your digital content
(web site, blog, social media channels) have to beat your competi-
tion and clearly articulate the value of your product to the potential
customer.
The best way to speak to the customer is to use their lan-
guage, conversational, but informative tone of voice geared to-
ward different personas that represent different market segments

that you target. Since most of my blog readers don’t have an
MBA, so they may not understand the previous sentence, let’s illus-
trate that point with an example most of us homeowners in
Raleigh-Durham area can relate: lawn care.
Content Management Scenario: Lawn Care Company
Competition between lawn care companies is stiff because it
doesn’t require a lot of money to start one. A pickup truck, few
lawn mowers and you are in business. Every few weeks I get a flier
at my door from a new company in the area advertising their serv-
ices on colorful letter size paper. But, does this advertising chan-
nel work? Further, most lawn care web site showcase beautifully
manicured lawns and a phone number to call. From that perspec-
tive, if you invest in content development, it will be easy to be-
come a regional expert on this topic and get that recognition from
search engines as well. First, create an easy to navigate web site.
Then focus your writing energy on Q&A for different type of cus-
tomers that you serve: people without a green thumb, people who
are clueless about anything related to plant life, people that know
their yard well, but are too busy to take care of it. Write short arti-
cles about different types of laws that grow well in your region and
provide a picture! How in the world do I know what’s growing in
my yard? Grass seeds don’t come with bar codes. Explain what
works well for a small yard, big yard, shaded yard, fully sunny
yard, sloped yard… the combinations are endless. The more sto-
ries you have, the more content you have to offer to even hungry
search engines which in turns builds your credibility in the eyes of
the (potential) customers. Make sure your office manager asks
weekly for any interesting stories from your people in the field and
share that on your web site, blog or social media. If you have at
least one customer with that particular problem (document it with
photos), there must be hundreds of people in with the same issue.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Multi-Channel Attribution & the Digital Media Food Pyramid –
Dan Golden.
Now that you have written valuable content, it has to be
found. Only a quarter of marketing managers spend their time ac-
tively distributing the content they have developed, missing out on
the opportunity to reach more leads. Organic search is vastly pre-
ferred, as 82% of users trust more organic search results over
paid search results (The ‘Next’ SEO: Evolve Your Approach to Cus-
tomer Acquisition or Risk Extinction by Seth Dotterer, Conductor).
Hence, you are better off spending your resources on writing en-
gaging stories for your customers than blowing your budget on

eBook: Internet Summit 2015 Recap

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eBook: Internet Summit 2015 Recap