Visiting Brighton SEO this year was a little different because for the first time, I saw it from both a delegate perspective and a speaker perspective. This year, I delivered my first training seminar on advanced PPC.
Once my nerves subsided and I started to relax, the content came quicker and easier and before I knew it, it was the end of the session. I did learn a lot myself from delivering a session.
My Key Learnings from Delivering Training Would Be:
1. Plan for the un-plannable
First and foremost, there really is no such thing as being over-prepared. If you are delivering a training course, it is likely that you have a deep knowledge and understanding of the subject area, and for me whilst I am confident in my ability to manage PPC campaigns, I have always found it more difficult to relay the information and techniques to others. My previous experience in running our own PPC training boot camps at Anicca Digital provided me with the grounding I needed, but it is the learning of combining an in-depth subject knowledge with the communication skills that can really set you up for success.
After all as Benjamin Franklin says, “If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail’.
2. Understand the delegates and their aims
If possible, get some background information on your delegates, or a questionnaire in advanced to find out their knowledge levels and expectations. This can help you to prepare and deliver content that is relevant and useful to all participants.
3. Have training outcomes and be ready to adapt them
I found it is important to give yourself something to measure the success and usefulness of the training course against, I also found that these goal posts may shift as you go through. The best way to develop training outcomes is to understand the knowledge that each delegate wants to take away with them. If you haven’t had this information from the delegates ahead of the session, it is certainly worthwhile to find out from them the key bit of information they would like to get, you can then adapt the training content as move through to ensure you cover this.
4. Logical organisation and delivery
In hindsight for me, having that insight into learning outcomes in advance of the session would have helped to better structure the training programme into a sequential order that delivered continuous lead generation content that flowed from setup to optimisation. For me it was a case of adapting this during the training session to ensure the logical flow based on the delegates in the room.
5. Use real life examples
By using relatable and real-life examples you give support to the theories you are putting across and delivering proof as to why scenarios do or don’t work. Depending on the environment you can also get delegates to share their own examples and talk them through with them which provides a level of engagement and interactivity to the session.
I still have a long way to go before truly mastering the art of training and there is always going to be room for improvement but for now I can keep trying and keep attending other training sessions and learn from other trainers.
As for BrightonSEO itself, it was a great mix of knowledge from a wide variety of digital marketing areas. I chose to focus on the Paid track this time to enhance and supplement my existing knowledge.
Key Take-Aways from the Conference:
Facebook is going local says David Whatley of @mishoplocal – If you have a multi-location business, you are better to have one main business page that is linked to business location pages, rather than having business pages for each location.
This way you can reap the benefits of setting up your brand pages in such a way, including:
- Control your brand content
- Centrally manage the location pages, if each location has its own business page you are unlikely to have access
- Google can tap into reviews left on the location pages and use these in your Google My Business profile
Facebook Locations for Multi-location Brands from David Whatley
Use Facebook groups as an organic method – @marie-page suggests these generally have better reach and higher engagement levels than your standard organic postings through a business page and Facebook favours these more in users’ news feed. There are many benefits to using groups including:
- Benefiting from customer to customer service with users answering questions themselves in a forum style taking the load off your own resources
- Discover your customers pain points and develop solutions to address these
- You can position you and your business as the experts and develop further brand awareness and consideration.
Harnessing the Power of Facebook Groups from Marie Page
Alexis Sanders from Merkle discussed how and why you should use structured data and schema.org to enhance your organic listings, these include:
- CTRs are generally seen to be high when rich snippets are pulled through
- Display additional business and product data
- Improve the relevance of your listing
- And music to my ears being of a paid background, the structured data can also be integrated into Google Merchant Centre feeds to help with data accuracy.
Advanced and Practical Structured Data from Alexis Sanders
There are plenty more useful takeouts, so keep an eye on and pop back to our blog to check out the summaries from the rest of our team.