Hump Day Headlines: Live from the CTA Conference

By Art Unlimited.

Three members of our team were able to attend this year’s CTA Conference put on by Unbounce! Anna Anderson interviewed Elizabeth Chapman live at the event for this week’s Hump Day Headlines.

You can either watch the video or read the transcript below. Plan to join us live each Wednesday on Facebook.

Anna Anderson, CEO: Hi, I have Elizabeth Chapman here. She is at the CTA conference put on by Unbounce in Vancouver, Canada. She's joined with Abby and Amanda; the three of them are learning all about some of the latest strategies in digital marketing. And Elizabeth, it sounds like it's a great event!

Elizabeth Chapman: Yes, it is! Vancouver is a beautiful city and the weather is lovely. The CTA Conference has over 2,000 attendees and 22 speakers. They're really emphasizing the fact this year that they have over 50% female speakers. They're trying to bring diversity into marketing and trying to emphasize the female components and not just all the guys. They’re showing that everybody does great work, so it's fun to see that diversity onstage.

Anna: That's really cool! So, you talked about the female component, and Elizabeth has been feeding our team some awesome tidbits live from the event. So, she shared with us some of

Christi Olson's work as she talked about the question intent funnels. So, we talk a lot about funnels, and how we get from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, and I really thought this was interesting.

What she [Olson] said is the funnel needs to be pinned down into questions that users are asking based on the level of the funnel that they're at. She said, "How do "I, "can I", "which,"

"how much is," and "where can I buy?" are the top questions now. So, you can kind of see how that user experience is driven down along the funnel.

Elizabeth: Right, and then they're crafting content, landing pages, and all sorts of other experiences based on the questions that are being asked by different users. So, she gave us a few interesting ideas on how to make that happen. And our team will be reviewing those and making sure that we're in line with her ideas and the other awesome things that we've taken back from this.

Anna: That's awesome! She [Olson] said 40% of spoken responses come from featured snippets in the search results! You know, when you're speaking into your phone, you're

asking for information based off questions. So, I think that's a great point and

critical information to cover.

Elizabeth: I was just thinking that Christi emphasized—and she has a younger family—she says especially in voice-activated search, the younger generation is using it more and more. So as marketers or business owners--anyone involved in marketing, really, we need to make sure we're actively optimizing in voice-activated search and pushing that to the forefront.

Anna: And speaking of that younger audience, you also shared with us something awesome from Cyrus Shepard, and he was talking about video and its importance and how its working into the mobile experience. And the stat we’ve heard this week is 20% of Google results all have featured videos in the search results. So, tell us what Cyrus was explaining about video and in mobile.

Elizabeth: Right, so he was emphasizing that you have to do a multitude of things in your website to make sure it stays relevant and on top of the results and is highly ranked, and one of those things was adding video. And that stat that you just quoted was from three weeks ago, that Google just rolled that out, that videos are maintaining their place in rank and also taking even more of the ranking share.

So, adding video in and making sure it's relevant to the user and bringing in fresh video content is going to remain important, and that will only grow over time.

Anna: I think that's awesome! I love hearing him speak. Well, thank you for jumping out of the presentations and coming and talking to us. Have a great rest of the event, and we'll see everyone again next week for Hump Day Headlines here on Wednesday!