Seerfest 2022 Recap: Do Good, Do Well

Seerfest 2022 Full Recap

🎉 That’s a wrap for our 4th annual Seerfest!

With more than 600 marketers joining us (virtually!) for Seerfest this year, we raised over $17K for our local community partners Think Dignity and Covenant House PA.

Here are a few things attendees had to say about what they liked:

"Besides the many, many lessons I learned? The focus on charity! I love how every speaker talked about a different charity or organization they support."

"EVERYTHING. Amazing speakers, great experience with the event platform, the content was priceless. Awesome all around "

"Great presentations, different experience compared to other conferences."

Key Takeaways

Seer’s very own, Wil Reynolds, keynote on using data to become a better human, marketer, and consultant summarizes our key takeaways of the event: 

1. Who is Left Out?
2. What Does Your Brand Stand For?
3. What's In it For Them?

Who is Left Out?

Inclusion throughout an organization is crucial to success today. We learned how impactful it can be when you challenge your own biases by raising the voices in your audience that are so often left out. 

DEI

In our opening keynote session, Google Diversity and Inclusion Lead emphasizes that today’s demographics of the world are shifting rapidly. We as marketers and business leaders have an obligation to recognize our unconscious bias and integrate DEI throughout our processes. 

Tomas shares the three P’s of DEI Google lives into:

• People: Sense of belonging
• Process: Equitable systems
• Product: Inclusion

Consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that aligns with their values, therefore DEI is a business imperative. 

💡 Related: Google's Annual Diversity Report

Inclusion

When we design with inclusion in mind, more people will benefit from it which means we end up making our products better for everyone.

Brian Crumley from O3 World highlights the importance and value of designing web experiences for all humans -- no matter what their life-long or temporary situation is.

In his session, he walked the audience through the principles of web accessibility and the relationship with SEO:

If the investment in designing for inclusion seems daunting -- don't worry, the impact on business goals vastly outweighs it:

💡 Related: How Accessible Design Can Enhance Your SEO

Seer's Innovation team also shared their experiences building new products and creating new technologies within existing systems.

They answered key questions about leadership buy-in, learning from previous process failures, and balancing the needs of man-power vs. technology.

What Does Your Brand Stand For?

Consumers want brands to stand for more than just making a profit. And they'll put their money where their mouth is.

If your business is in a position to make an impact, it shouldn't be an afterthought. Purpose-driven marketing is a growth opportunity that you don't want to overlook.

Purpose

BLVR exemplifies those exact sentiments by emphasizing the impact of authentic brand experiences from the start through:

• Belief: Heart and soul of your brand guiding everything you do and say
• Purpose: Intersection of what you do and why you do it
• Behavior: Every action your brand takes (or doesn’t take)

Profit

Shine Bootcamp Co-Creator guides our audience through an interactive workshop of developing a net-positive business -- which contributes to a brighter future by investing more into people and the planet than it takes.

The three key characteristics of a net-positive business:

• Solve real problems while repairing systemic issues
• Empowers people within and outside the organization
• Redistributes wealth and power

What's In It For Them?

One-way marketing is dead. Consumers are highly invested in building connective relationships with the businesses they engage with and buy from. Shouting into the dark at them without truly understanding what they value is NOT a recipe for success.

Messaging

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted how brands and marketers are telling stories—and how audiences receive them. 

Adobe Sr. Content Marketing Manager shares how you can connect with your consumers in today's changing landscape:

• Place your values up front
• Authentic visuals matter
• Create a conversation

Irene also highlighted the differences between positive and negative brand storytelling -- and why it's so critical for brands to be in tune with their audience.

Content

SparkToro VP of Marketing breaks down CaaS (Content as a Service) how content fuels and impacts more than SEO:

• PR
• Social Media
• Product
• Demand Generation
• Sales Enablement
• Customer Engagement
• Events

Each type of content has a marketing goal and a stage in the funnel – the key goal: marketing enablement. Traditional marketing metrics matter, but these are more qualitative, utility, user action, conversation quality, etc.

💡 Related: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content

While VP of Product Marketing at Verblio shares how AI can humanize your voice and fuel your content strategy to scale your channels. The #1 takeaway: AI enhances and simplifies the complex process that is content marketing. 

Laura highlights how marketers can use AI for things we are bad at:

• Get the SEO process started: Topic and title generation, relevant keywords, meta data, and so on 
• Reduce bias: Automate style and language checks that also understand content, and provide real time feedback and direction consistently 
• Inform your instinct: Use AI to develop a data-driven content strategy, and get validation before anyone starts writing or looking at a brief 

CRO

Now that we understand our market opportunities and can create integrated content strategies -- it's important to test and re-iterate for maximum impact.

That's where Seer’s Director of CRO, Rafael Damasceno, comes in. He reminded our audience that experimentation is a fast path to growth: think Netflix, Microsoft, Google and how they scale their testing strategies. 

By focusing on understanding what works vs what doesn't, you can increase the performance of your campaigns and content. A/B testing is a great way to figure this out and landing page segmentation is just one output.

• Match the motivation
• Present a value proposition
• Reduce friction  
• Increase trust
• Add urgency

💡 Related: What's All The Hype About Experimentation?

Additional Learnings & Insights

Connecting with your audience isn’t always about strategy and campaigns though.

Measurement

63% aren’t confident in digital measurement, which is why Heather A. came in at the right time.

In this session we learned: how to build a business case, technical approaches to closed loop marketing, and critical collaboration elements required for success.

Children's Health Sr. Marketing Director also dove into the benefits of sharing data and audience insights with other teams in your organization. 

Court walked through real success stories from working with Seer’s Paid Media and Data Strategy teams. Including one where we took search and conversion data broken down by zip code to identify areas of best opportunity for Children’s Health to place their billboards.

💡 Related: Case Study - 69% Increase in Conversions from TV Test

Seerfest’s audience walked away with three considerations:

• Introduce your search agency to your strategy and insights team 
• Build relationships with leaders across every department in your organization that can benefit from audience insights
• Consider what you can learn by stepping outside of your digital comfort zone

Analysis

How impactful can visualization be for media buying?

In PowerBI, very! Cory Henke showed the impact visualization of data has on media buying focusing on the weakness of current user interfaces, speed of PowerBI, a combination of data platforms, organic and paid channels, development of new metrics, new channels (TikTok), COVID19 impact.

💡 Related: Power BI Guide for Digital Marketers

In Conclusion

In our closing keynote, Wil brought us home by highlighting ways to better connect with consumers (both online and offl!) and live up to your brand promise by:

• Speaking their language
• Checking your bias
• Continuing to learn and evolve

It was awesome spending two days with you all learning, growing, and getting to know one another better. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

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Get More Seerfest 2022

Dive deeper into the themes and topics we covered during the event: