The famous annual festival that adds to our economy each year is now bigger and better than ever with more brands, music, and educational events. These events focus on specific areas of professional development, new business ideas, technology leaks, and free food!
The team at Fahrenheit Marketing took full advantage of these free and paid events to further educate ourselves with new trends, knowledge, and information to increase our skill-sets. We accomplished this through sitting in on information sessions and collaborating with other professionals in the digital marketing industry. Below you will discover a summary of our priceless experiences at SXSW2015.
Our project manager and creative director attended Build Brands Customers Love hosted by Lauren Perkins, CEO, Perks Consulting. Here at Fahrenheit, we strategize with our clients to increase their online brand presence through web design and public relations, typically in the form of content creation and syndication.. Most people assume the brand is the logo or the colors of a business, which is only a component of the overall brand. We heard and were reminded once again of the common myths and truths about branding for a business and how it affects the consumers emotions. The key takeaway from this session was brand connection. We learned the fundamental truths about connecting a brand name to its “followers.” Branding is an consistent experience that builds preference with your customers and community.
Fahrenheit’s nerds (developers) decided to expand their knowledge base on areas that would further develop their business skills through Digital Strategy for Small Business hosted by Howard Greenstein and Marc Sirkin, marketing technology strategists and digital marketing communication experts. Howard is the President of the Harbrooke Group, which specializes in communication using the latest web technologies. Marc is a Marketing Innovator & Technologist, Director at PwC, Digital Services.
Our developers learned the importance of social media engagement and the stages involved in the conversion rate.
There are 4 stages for you social media converting rate:
- Crawling (less than 10 interactions per post): Social media engagement is not affecting the growth of the business. If the company is truly seeking to reach people through social media, new strategies/investments should be implemented. If social media is not the main path to reach people, they just need to make sure that they are not over investing on this medium, otherwise this would be waste of money.
- Walking (between 11 and 100 interactions per post): Social media posts are relevant. This usually means you’re on the right track.
- Running (more than 101 interactions per post): Social media posts can be a powerful weapon at this stage.
- Flying (over 1000 interactions): With the right advertisement strategy, you could make a $300 investment turn into $10,000 profit. Some cases were quoted on this at the workshop.
Lastly, we learned the concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). When you are planning on creating something new, it is very important to launch it as soon as possible. So it is a good idea to create an MVP to present your new “thing” to the community. In order to truly reach your target is to obtain some sort of contact info, like their email addresses. This will help you further engage with them in the future. Exposing your brand somewhere online is not actually reach. The key is to gain their contact information. This is always more important than just “clicks”.
Obviously, being in our space, most of what we heard wasn’t anything new. It is always refreshing to hear it from others, however, and we wanted to share this with you too, as we believe small nuggets of goodness such as these could make the difference between okay and great!