The Utah DMC Blog

Jana Francis, Founder and President of the Steals.com network of websites spoke on entreprenuership in the Big Leap Room. Jana openly admitted that she didn’t do presentations or speak publicly very often but we couldn’t tell.
Before founding Steals.com, Jana spent 12 years in Corporate America, specializing in advertising and marketing for tech and internet companies, including a 7 year stint in broadcast media for KSL in Utah. As she concluded maternity leave and prepared to head back to her corporate job, she was sparked with the motivation to succeed doing her own thing.  From that motivation, she launched BabySteals.com.  It only took her six months to leave here corporate career for good.
In looking at the growth and sales of the company, Jana saw a large spike when she decided to take it full-time and then another large spike when her partner decided to also work full-time.  She said it is difficult to split your time if you really want to make it work. “It comes down to grit, hard work, and passion.”
Here are a collection of the other notable things Jana stated about being an entrepreneur:

Rick Galan spoke to a crowded room about what he says is “universally terribly done”--reports. His presentation, titled “Measuring What Matters, Building Effective and Efficient Reporting” focused on the purpose of reports and how reports can be improved. Rick, Director of Digital Marketing at Blendtec, chose to talk about reporting because it “is a transferable skill between roles, jobs or even careers,” and pointed out that reporting is 100% about relationships.

Mike Templeman is the founder of Foxtail Marketing and spoke to us about demand gen strategies. Demand gen is marketing that drives awareness and interest in a company’s products and services. Consumers are a lot more aware and savvy and you need certain techniques to get them through the funnel. Most marketers obsess with bottom of the funnel, but you must think full-funnel and create content and strategies for every section. Here are Mike's best tips for each stage of the funnel.

Bryant Garvin is the
 CRO & Mobile Evangelist at Bryant Garvin Consulting. He is passionate about helping companies improve their mobile user experience & employing strategic conversion rate optimization tactics to make huge gains in revenue. In his presentation, he shared his tips for how to explode revenue with conversion rate optimization. Bryant started by asking the audience, "How many of you have ever said, 'I can send you all the qualified traffic in the world, it’s not my fault if it doesn’t convert'? I’ve said that before too. If the experience on the site sucks, they’re not going to convert and it’s not my fault." After going through this same cycle over and over again, he decided to do something about it. Bryant is very passionate mobile CRO. He'll have his laptop in front of him and still choose to tweet from his phone. But mobile experience is something even the big dogs don't get right. For example, even Sprint gets it wrong on their mobile site. How does a mobile company have a bad mobile experience? He said, "44% of the Fortune 500 are still not mobile friendly. To me, that smells like big opportunity." Bryant gave an example of just how big of an impact mobile CRO can have by sharing a client success story. In September 2014, only 19% of sales came from mobile and it had the highest CPA. In February, sales are up to 51% and it’s the best CPA. On top of that, there was a 924% increase in mobile conversions. A responsive site isn’t enough. You need to think about mobile a little differently. It just takes a little bit of code to have a dramatic change on user experience. People want to know, “What should buy, and why should I buy it from you?” Here, the KISS motto comes in handy. Don’t make users think! If there’s a ton of data to sort through, limit the options. Make it easy for them to decide. Bryant ended with these 3 parting thoughts:

Rob Johnson

The Top 5 Mistakes I Made Replatforming A Multimillion Dollar eCommerce Website
During one of our breakout sessions, we had the pleasure to hear from Rob Johnson at Deseret Book. Rob’s presentation was titled “The Top 5 Mistakes I Made Replatforming A Multimillion Dollar eCommerce Website.”
Rob was in charge of transitioning the 10+ year old Deseret Book eCommerce platform to a new one—one from this century. So far in 2015, they have had their hands full of different tasks to get this new platform up and running.
So far in 2015 they:

Jessie Mamey is the Vice President of Digital Acquisition at Revana Digital. In her presentation she talked about harnessing the power of omni-channel data for acquisition in SEM and display. Jessie spoke about how the customer experience has changed over the years, but it is still all about the customer. As you look at the customer journey, it is important to define your objective and understand what the customer is interested in. Focus on answering the questions they have (even ones they may not have asked yet). What you know about your customer is important only if you know how to turn that insight into action. Through gathering data about your customers, you can focus your vision on what you are trying to accomplish, decide what really matters, and which direction to go in to drive performance and better serve the customer. Targeted data can also help businesses identify high, mid, and low segments. This allows you to make better decisions about where to spend your budget and to create custom content tailored to specific customer bases.
In the end, as you move forward in developing a strong customer experience, you need to clarify your objectives, ask questions which result in action, centralize data and develop feedback loops.

Duane Forrester has over 15 years’ experience in the search, social and digital marketing fields, and is also the author of 
How To Make Money With Your Blog and
Turn Clicks Into Customers. He has a background in SEO, PR, and marketing. Duane spoke to us about the quickly changing ways that we interact with data and machines, and how we as marketers should pay attention.

For our final keynote of DMC 2015, we were honored to hear from Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. In addition to hearing from Lee, all of our attendees were given a copy of his book,
Optimize. Lee spoke to us on being the best answer through integrated marketing campaigns. Instead of optimizing to search, Lee has decided to be accountable to experiences. Things have become a lot more complex, and there’s a lot more data to consider than ever before. This is confusing not just for marketers, but also for customers. Here are Lee's best tips for creating great experiences online.