What You Missed at Wednesday’s Google Partners Connect Live Stream
Yesterday, Strathcom was pleased to organize the first of our Google Partners Connect live stream events, hosted here in our homeland of Edmonton, Alberta.
Soon we will be taking the show on the road to many other large Canadian cities, with dates soon to be announced for Halifax, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg.
But yesterday we gathered with many of the 780 area code’s biggest dealers at the Hilton Garden Inn, letting everyone put names to faces and email signatures. Prior to show time, we sat down to a hot meal of salmon, beet salad, and fried bannock bread before hunkering down for an hour of ideas and AdWords.
The Day’s Main Lesson
Of all people, marketers—like all who attended our live stream event—should understand that it isn’t enough to tell someone something once and expect them to carry that in mind forever, using it to guide their behaviour.
We get distracted. We forget.
You need to keep hammering home the important lessons.
We might know that something we routinely do is important, yet we often forget why it is important. And it’s helpful to occasionally remind ourselves of these things. That seemed to be a theme for the day.
The Day’s Speakers
Scott Christopher, an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google, lead us through the presentation which featured two of Google’s experts on AdWords offerings: Allan Thygesen, Vice President of Global Small Business Sales, and Frederick Vallaeys, the AdWords Evangelist.
Allan Thygesen presented the room with some statistics that neatly demonstrated a few of those important truths of online advertising that we sometimes lose track of in our chase for the next big thing. For instance, the all-important element of trust: more than half of all consumers don’t trust businesses that lack a website as much as they trust businesses that do. How’s your credibility sitting these days? Apparently the same rules about having pictures of yourself in your online dating profile also apply to your company website.
Frederick Vallaeys nicely complemented the clarity of Allan’s hard-hitting statistics with his presentation. He spoke on many of the options AdWords users can apply to their ads to make them more appealing to the consumers. Through the use of even one of the eleven ad extensions available through AdWords, businesses can increase their Click-Thru Rate by 20%. Again, this talk forced everyone to stop and perform their own online health check. What was one takeaway? Stressing the importance of the sometimes confusing new company listing platform, Google My Business, customers can easily and quickly find the phone number and driving directions to your location, even if they’re using voice search.
The presentation was capped off with a few major insights from Google, including this heads up: Mobile will be bigger than desktop. People aren’t carrying around laptops 24 hours of the day but they are lugging around those laptop-equivalent devices called smartphones in their pockets. And that’s what businesses need to build for.
One additional fun fact for any hygienic individual: more people in the world own a smartphone than a tooth brush. So consider that next time you are thinking about what impulse items to include in your exotic prize giveaways. (Also, dental insurance might be a good thing to add to your financial products list. Just an idea.)
We’re Just Getting Started
Honestly, even we were surprised at how much fun we ended up having (dealers are not a boring group), and how well our inaugural Google Partners Connect event turned out. We’d like to once again thank everyone who managed to come out and join us yesterday!
Want to make sure you don’t miss out on hearing the news and announcements on our upcoming events? Contact any one of our Online Marketing Managers and we’ll keep you in the know.
