The Lowdown from Digital Growth Unleashed

This week our Managing Director John Campbell was invited to speak at Digital Growth Unleashed 2019 in London.

His sessions focused on three ways you can start to understand your voice visibility;

• Voice search rankings reports
• Your Google Action / Alexa Skill being invoked implicitly
• Data from Alexa answers

Please get in contact if you want access to the slides from the session. Sample reports mentioned can be downloaded via our whitepapers page.

John explaining why 50% of searches will not be via voice in 2020!

John also had the chance to attend a number of other sessions over the two days. Here are some highlights from the conference.

ELLIOT ROSS – Taxi for email – Making Awesome Email In 2019

Elliot started his sessions with the question that is often posed to the team responsible for your email campaigns.

Can you just send another email?

Elliot then went on to explain why this simple question could result in hours of work between multiple people and the file at the end called “This ONE – email template – v3. 2019.html”

Email is great channel however like all channels there can be issues which make email… well less awesome.

Long time / resource / team isn’t happy / not getting value out of email / get more money out of the channel

So how do you go about making your email awesome?

1. Create a design system

Build a whole selection of assets of code with the various shapes / formats etc. This helps increase efficiency by reusing assets on an ongoing basis.

2. Be accessible 

Need to consider the different types of accessible reasons and how one changes helps more that just the first considered group.

Hearing – Subs for videos

Visual – code for screen readers

Dexterity – easy to interact with – consider tab users

Cognitive – easy to understand, San-Serif fonts easy for Dyslexic users

Emails need to work without images, e.g. the tube example of getting your email when the tube is in the station, then as it pulls away you open the email but no images.

Screen reader – helps for Siri and Alexa.

3. Do it for the inbox

The phone is the inbox, but there are now lots of platforms with inboxes, e.g. instagram, ring, facebook, snapchat. You are competing.

So how can your email work both for short attention spans and those with longer times to engage with email.

Example of this PrettyLittleThing email using similar design and copy that matches their existing audience from instagram.

4. GDPR

Less said about this the better but quickly what you need to be responsible for it;

• Know when people sign up
• Know how they signed up
• Put processes and policies in place

However GDPR will help keep trust and authenticity in the channel. So overall it will be positive.

5. Be authentic

Examples of brands using messaging around a social message, be that the rights of people or the environment. However it needs to be tightly planned and designed correctly otherwise the results can be poor.

6. Be responsible

Last point Heuristic and cognitive bias – why do people make decisions? How can we use this in the designs and what we do.

Bad example a flight advertised at $9 but in the end the cost is over $200 once addons have been included.

You need to avoid those short term hacks with can trash your brand.

What Happens when Everybody’s Website is Fixed? – Jono Alderson, Special Ops, Yoast

Jono’s opening monologue explained how the modern web has expanded at such a pace that our businesses haven’t been able to keep up.

As such brands need to gain trust of the users using all the various tools and techniques that they have access to. But what happens now as Google moves to omniscience is changing the web, Google have all the data which means they can start to make these decisions for the user.

Google is able to do this by understanding your actual product, to decide if that product is a good fit for the user.

What does this look like in practice, its SERP features that allow the user to get the information they searched for without a click. The 10 blue links moving to Zero-Click search.

Google is starting to see websites as friction, as such Google think they can provide the information to the user directly.

Google is obsessed with structured data and this is required as the next generation of this is voice search / personal assistants which will be driven by structured data.

However it’s hard to get websites to adopt this tech. So their strategy is changing to work with CMS providers to change the fundamentals of the web. The first target is WordPress who power 35% of the web. Alberto Medina at Google is spearheading this.

AMP, Gutenberg, Site Speed are all examples of Google getting access to the data quicker and faster which helps reduce costs.

PWA kill the app vs web, which again means that content isn’t hidden in the app store.

Site Kit is a WordPress plugin which pulls data into WordPress from several sources.

Its clear to see the direction of Google, and it you want to rank well in the future you need to consider adopting a tech stack that allow you to take advantage of all the features mentioned above. That stack is the WordPress stack.

But not all companies want to adopt WordPress.The alternative, employ a team to implement all these features above, but the speed and amount would make this not very cost effective. Therefore if you competitors start to adopt the WordPress stack they will gain an advantage in being able to keep up to date.

Building Resilience in a 21st Century World Cate Murden, Founder, PUSH

On the second day Cate Murden kicked off the second room talking about a very relevant topic around our mental health in the 21st Century. The modern world can be relentless and all encompassing and this is increasingly resulting in more people having mental health problems.

Cate identified multiple demands on us:

• Work demands
• People demands
• Tech demands
• Our own thinking

All of these demands require our energy, we can implement strategies and techniques to manage and reduce those demands but we should also be looking towards how we can increase and revitalise our energy levels.

So in order to be our best at work and keep energy levels high we need to look after our basic human needs. Cat split this down into four categories:

Physical

• Do I get enough sleep?
• Varied and healthy diet
• Exercise

Emotional  

• Do I feel safe?
• Do I feel valued?
• Am I aware of my triggers and do I have the tools to manage myself well?

Mental

• Focus on a task
• Do I feel busy versus do I feel productive?
• Do I need to multitask to get work completed?

Social

• Do I feel fulfilled?
• Do I know what I want to be know for?
• Am I doing what I want to be doing?

For all of those points above you need to think about what you can do to make sure you generate more energy and avoid things that draw too much energy.