I attended the Minneapolis stop of the Online Marketing Summit tour yesterday and wanted to share my takeaways and highlights from the event.

Overall the Minneapolis OMS was well coordinated and featured some quality local and national speakers for the audience.

The wide range of attendee experience from newbie to online marketing experts always creates a challenge for the presenters, but most handled it well.  With three different breakout sessions going at one time, I could only hit five sessions for the day, but here are my takeaways from them.

How To Convert More Visitors To Customers

Matt Dombrow’s session was my favorite of the day.  He outlined the importance of anticipating the conversation with a consumer online to take them from search to landing page to conversion.

The conversion conversation outlined by Matt consists of making sure you help the user get answers:

1. Where did I land?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it here and not elsewhere?

No doubt the importance of conversion in your search marketing should hit these basics and some of the other ideas Matt presented.

Advance Settings For Results From PPC & Display Ads

Jamie Smith walked through a few different approaches and settings to make sure you are getting the most from your paid search marketing.  He put an emphasis on reverse engineering geo-targeting to exclude areas as a useful approach.

Jamie offered some great advice when he discussed the use of negative keywords to outwork your competition.

Lastly from Jamie, was the recommendation to study the design and content of organic results and factor them into your landing page creation.  Since many top organic results hold and convert users, they must be doing something right!  Determine what those elements are and put them to work for you.

Driving An Engaged Consumer With Email, Mobile & Social Success

Email guru Sundeep Kapur put together a great session focused on email marketing. His vast experience and passion delivered some great insight.  While he offered 12 absolutes you need to engage in, these quotes really impacted me.

“Ask yourself, are you really doing everything your consumers expect online?”

” You must capture data to drive personalization. Get to know them at every step!”

Sundeep shared many of his segmentation and engagement strategies that can be applied to any email marketing campaign for greater success.

Google Remarketing

Lisa Raehsler presented on Remarketing with Google and outlined both steps and settings to generate success with this feature.  This underutilized approach can help you get back in front of customers who have already visited your website.  Her preso is up on SlideShare.

One great Remarketing use Lisa pointed out was to apply it to those who abandon your shopping cart with targeted ads that will motivate them to return and buy.

10 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People

Susan Weinschenk, Ph. D has written a few books on web design and the human mind.  Her session drove home the fact that most people make decisions unconsciously, can only focus on 3 to 4 things max at a time and that peripheral vision is more important than central vision.

While the audience took part in some fun exercises to prove these statements, my biggest takeway hit upon trust in design.  People evaluate the trust of your website by taking in the “look and feel” and this happens in under one second.  Design matters, a lot.

Great People

All of this online marketing information was great to learn, be reminded of and take in, but as usual it was the people I sat by, talked with and met that made the day great.  From connecting with new peers in the industry to catching up with old friends to meeting new prospects, it’s better with solid people.

Hopefully you followed my tweets from the day as I shared many tips and pieces of information along with some occasional humor.

If you attended #OMSmin, let me know your thoughts on the day.