A Day at the DMA Conference

Four members of the Optimising team were fortunate to attend the Digital Marketers Australia annual conference, which included a broad range of speakers with unique insight and expertise in the digital marketing stratosphere. It was a terrific opportunity to learn and broaden their horizons outside of SEO for a day and understand the roles that other channels within digital marketing play.

This year’s event had a total of nine industry speakers who discussed topics spanning from direct email marketing personalisation to building effective sales funnels, offering up compelling case studies, strategies, and practical advice. 

With a whole day’s worth of presentations, there was much for the team to digest and take away that can help to inform their own perspectives. SEO Specialists Clara, Taylar and Amy reflect on what stood out during the DMA conference and what types of digital marketing strategies they are excited to try out next. 

Naturally, our interest perked up when it came to talking about all things SEO. Industry speaker, James Norquay took us through the importance of content within SEO as well as some tips and tricks we could look to incorporate in client strategies.

He noted the importance of not always jumping to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating  new content. Refining and adding to existing content to make it more relevant, topical and unique should be the first point of call that tends to go unconsidered. He also highlighted some great strategies for getting valuable backlinks through student and senior discounts that we can apply to our own clients to grow quality backlinks. 

We also had Nik Ranger talk us through the state of SEO in 2022. Whilst already apparent to us as SEO’s, Nik got the audience to start shifting their thoughts on how different SEO is today. How it’s not just keyword research, title tags and meta descriptions, but central to every other facet in digital marketing to work most effectively, from UX, Brand and PR through to Product, Content and Dev. Highlighting that Google and Bing are becoming semantic search engines was also a focus to shifting thoughts on SEO practices today, with breaking down queries by their transactional, navigational, commercial and informational intent, all practices that we use in our work day in day out. 

Anything SEO will always capture my attention. However, despite my work’s SEO focus, I was very intrigued to learn more from Digital Marketing experts and the industry as a whole. The various talks around social media, email marketing, and funnel building all provided great insights into how to gain traffic from a variety of sources and convert them into results for clients. These presentations helped me think outside of the box, and to not get trapped in one-dimensional thinking. Users and potential customers aren’t all in the same place, and they don’t all use the digital space the same way, so learning from experts in these various fields has greatly benefitted my knowledge and will help me to go further in my digital marketing career.

Attending the DMA Conference was definitely worth it, and I will 100% be back to learn more!

Above and beyond SEO tactics and strategies, we also gained a lot of insight into thinking holistically about brand building and conversion. After that organic click, how do we get a user to actually buy into the product or service? More than just that, how do we get users to buy into the brand as a whole and have them coming back?

Sam Kothari, Head of Growth at AirWallex, spoke about growing a global brand. What I found specifically interesting was his thoughts around identifying product market fit. He explained that we shouldn’t let the current product offering dictate the overall marketing message and restrict the scope. Instead, sell the vision and journey a customer can take. Additionally, he discussed the importance of gaining customer feedback to understand how they’re using the product, what problem they’re solving by doing so, and what’s driving loyalty.

We also heard from Alisha Conlin-Hurd from the Persuasion Experience talk about developing highly strategic acquisition funnels. She highlighted in-depth about how to uncover a business’ ultimate offering and how to showcase that on a landing page. It goes much further than simply a product or service offering, it’s about selling an entry into a desired after state and transformation to a prospective customer. Presenting this offer is about showing them the dream outcome, how it solves a problem, and the eliminated risks.

All of these takeaways have really helped facilitate in viewing SEO through a wider lens.

It’s safe to say that the Optimising team is looking forward to next year’s DMA Conference and learning more about the power of digital marketing.