Wednesday, 21 October 2015

How To Succeed And Be Awesome – ASCEND 2016 Recap

The hard truth: most small businesses will fail. Bummer, right?

Don’t worry – let’s change that.

AWeber created ASCEND Digital Marketing Summit with a single purpose: To help small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed. We recruited the industry’s most influential marketers, content creators, social media experts and conversion rate optimizers to show you the light.

After two fantastic days of truth-dropping goodness, we’re ready to be the exception. We’re ready to succeed. We’re ready to make history – and you can, too (…after reading this blog post, of course).

Let’s dig in.

How to Succeed and Be (Even More) AWesome

2016 is the year that you dominate. (Say that out loud. It feels good.)

The sessions at ASCEND covered a variety of topics, but two resounding themes weaved throughout each: To succeed in business, you must invest in yourself and know your customer.

The Year of the Personal Brand

Jason Miller, Content Marketing Guru at LinkedIn, declared that 2016 will be the year of the personal brand – the year where the marketer differentiates him/herself from the marketers beside them.

Jason broke down how to create massive pillar pieces of content, and deliver value and personality to your customers.

ASCEND speakers declared that it’s becoming more and more important to invest in your own brand and platform.

Leading the “business of YOU” charge was entrepreneur Chris Ducker, who closed out day one. His energetic session (seriously, check out his dance moves) inspired everyone at the event to become a Youpreneur.

Chris promoted F.O.C.U.S. – Follow One Course Until Success – as a means to build your personal brand, deliver value and to stop you jumping from one unfinished pursuit to the next.

What’s your personal brand? It’s what people say about you when you are not around.

Jerod Morris, VP at Rainmaker Digital, continued to lay the groundwork for attendees to invest in themselves and become true showrunners – content creators who deliver remarkable audience experiences. This starts by showing up!

Investing in your brand is just the first step. We live in an age where we can crowd source that investment with tools like Rocket Hub. Brian Meece, CEO of the platform, took the stage to share how to run an affective campaign. He offered some fantastic advice to deliver value and convince others to invest in your success.

Know Your Customers (Before They Know You)

Developing yourself can only lead to profitability if you are serving customers in remarkable ways. Attendees at ASCEND were presented a slew of actionable strategies and tactics to get to know their customer personas and deliver sharp, delightful, and contextual experiences.

Ardath Albee, author and marketing strategist, offered some pro-tips on developing strong personas. One obvious tactic that never even crossed our minds – use LinkedIn to get to know your customers!

Tim Paige, conversion educator at LeadPages, and Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce, shared their expertise on landing page creation, optimization, and conversion. Your web experience should delight your customers, give them what they want and make it easy to opt-in!

Oli delivered of my favorite quotes from the event: “Delight should be the default, not the exception.”

For attendees looking to dominate email marketing (and selfishly, we can’t blame them) Justine Jordan of Litmus presented actionable strategies to create personal and impactful emails that look amazing on all devices.

Justine’s session called back to the need to really define your customer personas. Understanding the context of where, when, and how your customers open email can dramatically impact effectiveness.

Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at AppSumo.com, took the stage to share how he gained 50,000 email subscribers in 8 months. Noah’s “wow, can’t believe I didn’t think of that” tactics (like adding a simple call-to-action in your email signature) generated a lot of buzz amongst the crowd.

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and strategic director of Orbit Media, and Nathan Latka, CEO and founder of Heyo, took the stage to discuss ways marketers can dominate content and Facebook marketing, respectively. Their tactics continued to resound the theme of understanding and connecting with your audience.

The Latest Tools and Trends

Throughout the event, speakers revealed the latest tools and trends in digital marketing that are yielding great success. Gene Marks, president and CEO of The Marks Group, Peter Shankman, founder of Shankminds Business Masterminds, and Andrea Vahl, marketing consultant and speaker, each shared their strategic recommendations and predictions for the future. Here’s a quick sample of what attendees resonated with:

Gene Marks gave the audience a strong call to action – business owners must automate!

To continue our mission to help small businesses succeed, AWeber’s Director of Product, Joe Cotellese, took the stage to debut our latest addition to our email marketing suite of tools – Campaigns, a powerful new email automation platform. With each speaker proclaiming the importance of developing strong personal connections with their customers, we’re confident that Campaigns will empower email marketers to do just that, and then take it to the next level.

Ready to Roll Up Your Sleeves?

“There is no easy button.” This quote by ASCEND opening keynote speaker, Jason Falls, was not forgotten. It’s up to you to focus, build a better business, and dominate 2016.

The good news is that you’re not alone, and when you do achieve the success that you’re proud of, the world will be a better place for it.

Sincere thanks to all of our attendees, sponsors, participants, fans, and team members working hard to make ASCEND 2016 an amazing event to remember.

Want to devour everything ASCEND had to offer? We are editing the speakers’ videos which will be available for sale in the coming weeks. Click here to learn more and pre-order!

The post How To Succeed And Be Awesome – ASCEND 2016 Recap appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.



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