Online Marketing Summit Portland
Jul 01 2009
OMS has been touring the country to spread the word on online marketing the right way. On June 29th, OMS set up in Portland for a day full of expertise. I brought something back from every speaker and got to watch. eROI’s own Alex Williams did a great job of breaking down the value of a good welcome email for the crowd. Here are some of my other notes from the event:
Aaron Khalow started the event off with key points like 63% of website visitors who don’t find what they are looking for will never come back. It makes a strong case for optimizing your site. He stressed that your website is your foundation but it won’t matter unless you have the tools to encourage people to find it. The three pillars were search – with SEO having the largest impact, email – the fabric that holds it all together, and analytics – customization is key.
Ray “Catfish” Comstock, from Business Online, went deeper into some of these subjects. He illustrated a search cycle that went from ranking to repeat customer.
Ranking – [SEO] → Traffic – [Landing Page Optimization] → Conversions – [Marketing and Sales ]→ Sale – [Customer Service] → Repeat Customer
Why is ranking so important? 90% of traffic happens on the first page of search engines which means you have to be in the top 10 results to have a chance. Like Khalow pointed out, analytics play a huge factor in how you get to the repeat customer. Finding out what keywords are relevant is extremely valuable, personalization and location are both key components.
Other strategies Catfish brought up were optimizing video, news and the use of internal linking. These techniques are effective because there is a lot less competition than with traditional searches.








