CTA Conference by Unbounce - The Marketing Event Worth 15-Hour Travelling

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I left my 3-month old son at home and travelled 15 hours from Ukraine to Vancouver for a marketing event. Can you imagine how cool the event should be to meet so high expectations?! And it definitely was!

The Call To Action Conference was:

• 1,200+ marketers from all over the world
• 200+ organisers from Unbounce (yep, 1 organiser per 6 attendees)
• 20 outstanding speakers from Facebook, Moz and UnMarketing

Short summary:

• Discussed ninja tricks for content, high-quality copywriting, SEO, PPC and why buyer personas are not working as they used to
• The event was not about the Unbounce platform. Although the organisers could easily use their job position and make the Unbounce session every two sessions. But the event was indeed about all marketing aspects!
• The organisers made everything possible for the attendees. Amazing atmosphere, cool food, warm welcome and the corridor of applause when leaving the sessions. This is the event you will definitely come back.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make marketers superheroes

In 2016, I attended the Adobe Digital Marketing Conference, where only big players like IBM Watson and Adobe boasted of their work with Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, it is already a must have to survive among competitors.

The CTA Conference organisers offered us to play the Marketer vs. Machine game and to compete with the artificial intelligence. We had to guess the Conversion Rate of 200+ landing pages by screenshots - whether the percentage of conversion exceeded the average 4.3% fold. Marketers were right only in 50% of cases. The machine - in almost 80%!

This is how Unbounce was testing the AI-engine for its platform. In the nearest possible time, they plan to predict the conversion rate before the landing page is published. So the A/B testing will gradually fall into oblivion.

2. Influencer Marketing is the Fancy Name of Sponsorship?

Scott Stratten of UnMarketing believes that "influencer marketing" is the other name of sponsorship, and it should always be labeled as advertising. Although Tyler Farnsworth did not agree with him on the sponsorship part, but he confirms that Influencer Marketing is one of the most creative ways to advertise your product. People do not hate advertising. People hate boring advertising. The best example is the "Lego Movie". The audience paid around $470 mln to watch a two-hour ad.

3. Kill the pop-ups!

There are 189 million ad blocks installed worldwide. As most ads are a boring and intrusive invasion of our personal life.

Marketers should start to come up with better interaction with the brand. Previously, it was enough to reach your audience with a pop-up at the right time with the right message. Now we have to think of the right speaker, the right device, and the distribution channel.

Not sure about pop-ups? How often did you close Quote of the Day pop-up on forbes.com, without even reading it?

4. Facebook becomes your TV

And it will happen in 5 years, according to Mari Smith, Facebook's Marketing Expert.

She laments that most brands still do not use video in Facebook. 80% of Facebook posts by brands are links to their blogs, 19% - photos, and less than 1% work with video ads. This is really huge and unused opportunity to stand your brand of the crowd.

Promoting the video on Facebook today is like working with YouTube 10 years ago. Do not let your competitors bypass you on Facebook. Work with the video now.

5. Human-Centered Marketing

The key takeaway from the CTA Conference is "the humanity in marketing". Stop thinking about SEO as pieces of text with the right keywords. Stop considering your copy only as the tool to sell your product to a client. Always think about helping the buyer solve his problem.

"Sometimes it’s about being a good company and providing a good service" - Scott Stratten