Every year, Moz, an inbound marketing software provider, brings the digital marketing community together for MozCon. MozCon is a three-day event that focuses on forward-thinking, actionable sessions on SEO, social media, community building, branding and more.
Moz flies in the best digital marketers from around the world (SEER’s Wil Reynolds was a speaker this year) to give insight and advice on the digital marketing landscape. We were able to attend MozCon this year and want to share some of those insights and actionable next steps with our AmpliFound community. To do that, we have provided recaps of those presentations we feel would benefit our bloggers.
How To Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities
Speaker: Richard Millington
Speaker Bio: Richard is the founder of FeverBee, an organization which has figured out how to apply proven science to build powerful communities from any group of people.
Richard took a psychological approach to building community by explaining proven principles from community science. His presentation took a look at what makes a person want to be part of a community and how you can build your own.
Tip #1: Build Boundaries
According to Richard, people are more likely to want to join a community that has boundaries and isn’t open to just anyone. Richard used the example of how private member clubs and private communities drive people to want to join and engage. The higher the boundary, the more desirable.
Tip #2: Create Insider Groups
Richard notes that people typically join groups for three reasons: demographics, habits or psychographics. Demographics cover things like age, sex, and location. Habits include things like exercise, parenting, and cooking. Psychographics include things like values, opinions, and lifestyles. When choosing your community, figure out which group you are looking to attract.
Tip #3: Build Your Community Slowly
Building your community will take time. Richard suggests introducing rituals that support your community, having a designated place for your community (on your blog, on social platforms), creating an emotional connection, sharing experiences together, provoking vulnerability, and initiating deeper discussions. Building your community will require breaking down walls and bringing people together emotionally, even through the internet.
How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas
Speaker: Dr. Pete Meyers
Speaker Bio: Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past year building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast Project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History, a chronicle of Google updates back to 2003.
Coming up with fresh, original content can be difficult when creating your blog. Dr. Pete Meyers was able to give some tips and tricks for staying ahead of the game and creating compelling content:
- Get your ideas out there and measure their effectiveness. As you are learning about your audience, try out new ideas and see if they stick. It’s okay to fail but you need to get the content in front of your audience to know what works.
- Become an expert in your topic of interest. Pick a niche and excel in that niche. If you try to do too much, you won’t be able to do it well so pick one thing and be the expert.
- Learn to tell a story with every piece of content. Don’t just write something for the sake of writing it. Speak to your readers emotions and interests with every piece of content.
- Practice your craft! Doing this will allow you to become a better writer and could spark new ideas.
Building a Community in Google+
Speaker: Mark Traphagen
Speaker Bio: Mark Traphagen is Senior Director of Online Marketing for Stone Temple Consulting and a sought-after speaker and writer on Google+ marketing and Google Authorship. He runs the largest Google Authorship community on the web, and offline, he competes in story slams, but never, ever slams a good story.
Google+ is an untapped social platform that allows you to build a community and become a leader in your topic of choice. During his presentation, Mark provided a strategy showing how brands and bloggers can increase their authority, build engagement and visibility, and create a community on Google+.
Like every social platform, creating a community on Google+ takes time and patience. Mark provided a strategy that you can start implementing on Google+:
- Establish Your Homebase: Creating your Google+ profile and optimizing it is going to be key in this strategy. It is imperative that the profile is set up in a way that makes it easy for users to find it. Include your story, links to your site and any other important pages, as well as your topics and interests.
- Post Regularly and Engage: Creating your profile sets the table but now it is time to serve something up to your guests. Posting regularly and engaging with your users will create an experience that will keep your followers coming back for more.
- Identify Other Thought Leaders: Find other Google+ users in your area of interest and reach out to them. You can utilize their community to grow your own and could build a strong partnership with other leaders and bloggers.
- Promote Your Page: Be sure to add information about your Google+ page on your blog and other social outlets. This will allow you to bring in your community from other platforms and build that out on Google+.
The Psychology of Persuasive Content
Speaker: Nathalie Nahai
Speaker Bio: Nathalie Nahai, also known as The Web Psychologist, is a best-selling author, consultant, and international speaker who specialises on the psychology of online persuasion. With a background in psychology, web design, and digital strategy, Nathalie coined the term ‘web psychology’ in 2011, defining it as “the empirical study of how our online environments influence our attitudes and behaviours.”
Nathalie took a look at the psychology behind content and how it goes viral. Her presentation was full of content examples (good and bad) that show how we react to content and how we can create something that connects to our readers.
Tip #1: Understand Your Audience
If you want to create persuasive content, you need to understand your audience. Adapting your content to fit your audience will allow your readers to connect with your story and your blog more. Nathalie talked about the differences between extroverts, introverts, and other personalities that affects how your content should be produced. What is the age of your audience? What is their gender? Their values? Their lifestyle choices? All of these insights will allow you to create content that aligns with your readers.
Tip #2: Write Headlines and Content That Make Your Readers Want to Read
It is imperative that your headlines and beginnings of your articles portray something that will connect with your readers.
- Include trigger words in your headline (strange, incredible, secret, free, etc.)
- Test out your headlines – which work and which don’t?
- Don’t be afraid to write strange headlines. It just might work.
Tip #3: Boost Your Shareability
Create content that makes your readers want to share the blog post and your site to their friends. Nathalie recommends aiming for the following:
- Create a sense of nostalgia
- Mirror your audience and talk about the things that they do/are interested in
- Make it funny
- Make it compelling
- Make it emotional and move them
Takeaways
The big takeaways from this year’s MozCon was that the focus is on creating great content and building a community of people who will read it and share it. These 4 speakers did a great job of providing insight and advice on how you can get started but you can see all of the presentations from MozCon here.
