Happy Holidays from SLC|SEM! We had a wonderful time celebrating with everyone at our holiday lunch and mixer, hosted at Club at 50 West. We joined with several other Utah marketing groups to network and participate in a food drive for the Utah Food Drive. A special thanks to the following groups for joining us:

For November's event, we enjoyed an encore of some of our favorite speakers from
DMC 2015. The event was held at the Salt Lake City's
Church & State, a nonprofit community-managed entrepreneurship center housed in a historic renovated church.
We heard from Bryant Garvin at CRO & Mobile Evangelist at Bryant Garvin Consulting, who focused on how to explode your revenue through conversion rate optimization. We also heard from Rick Galán, Director of Digital Marketing, Blendtec, who spoke to us about building reports that are valuable, efficient and effective. Check out the following recaps to read more about their presentations:

This month we got to hear from the #PPCChat experts, who emphasized two areas that we often overlook in our agencies. Melissa Mackey is the Search Supervisor at Gyro, the largest independent B2B agency in the world. She spoke about what your clients want to know about PPC strategy. And Susan Wenograd, who has made a name for herself in the Fortune 500 club, shared what she focuses on with her clients.

Luciano Pesci, CEO at Emperitas and Professor at the University of Utah brought his A game as the first speaker for the Big Leap Room breakout session. Luciano teaches a variety of economics and statistics classes which explains his heavy emphasis on data and data analysis in his presentations.
Luciano emphasized that nowadays everything is connected and that the layperson has no idea how much data currently influences and will influence our lives in the future.
The purpose of his presentation was to show that there is a personal step that can be taken when doing product development and marketing in general; a qualitative step to gathering data that makes it so you don’t have to guess.
Here are some of the research and data collecting steps Luciano outlined:

We kicked off the day with Cyrus Shepard, Director of Audience Development at Moz. His presentation reminded us all that SEO should always be focused on the end result for our users, not the end result for search engines. Moz has had a pretty good run the last few years. 600% growth in 5 years. This is not that great, anyone can achieve this. When you say you work at Moz, people think you know things that you don’t know. This is the myth of advanced SEO—that there are tricks out there that will do things that regular SEO can't.

Matt Siltala is the president and founder of Avalaunch Media. His presentation was called "The Super Power of Interactive Video," which focused on the creative side of interactive content. Matt started his presentation with a staggering fact: 183 million Americans watched more than 48 billion videos in January 2014.

Jordan Kasteler is the
Director of SEO at MWI. In his presentation, Jordan talked about pushing your content to the next level, the difference between creating and promoting content, and some of the best ways to share content.
In his presentation, Jordan spoke about the importance of putting equal time into content creation and content promotion. Too many times content creation efforts fall short by not creating an effective distribution plan.
As you develop your strategy for sharing content, it’s important to focus on getting your content in front of influencers. If they enjoy the content, you have a much better chance of them sharing it with their followers. Remember though, when promoting your content, it isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the engagement.
As you look for ways to promote your content, here are some excellent sites worth checking out for engaging with others:
Link Sharing sites:

While David Locke isn't your traditional digital marketer, he offered a lively presentation that was definitely an audience favorite. David is the play-by-play radio reporter for the Utah Jazz, as well as the founder of his own daily podcast, Locked On Jazz. In his presentation, he shared how he produces creative content while ignoring the fears of failure. You can have all the tech in the world, but you need content. David is a professional content person that has gone above and beyond his reporting job to create his own fresh content. His job was to call the radio games for the Utah Jazz 90 times a year. His first contract, that was the only thing he did. But in this day and age, he figured it wasn't enough. The core of his digital marketing is his daily podcast.   He started off his presentation by saying "I try to fail and fail often." As he put it, if he waited until he know how to use every platform, his opportunity will be gone. He said about his presentation, "Everything I’m going to show you is raw, has mistakes, is showing a mistake, or is showing something else that everyone thinks is a mistake."   But in digital marketing, showing up is far more important than a perfectly polished product. In fact, it's the only way to stay relevant. He shared an example of his wife, who enjoys reading food blogs. Every food blog that she reads produces content daily. The ones that don't get left behind. Your content has to be consistent. People need to know what to expect when they go to your site. Here are some of David's insights he shared on creating successful content in a digital age.

Scott Baird is the CEO & Founder of Griffin Hill. Scott's focus is in human and organizational performance. Rather than focusing his presentation on creativity or tools for digital marketers, he instead focused on how to become the most effective digital marketers in the world. As Scott shared, it’s not always the most creative or most intelligent in the top spot, but rather those who are driven to find success. Scott started his presentation with a discussion of the 80/20 rule, created by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In Italy in the 1700s, 80% of the wealth and privately held land was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto thought this was strange, so he started to do some more research. He then discovered that 20% of the peapods in his garden were responsible for 80% of the yield. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later when management experts turned it into the 80/20 rule. The same rule holds true in marketing. The top 20% of digital marketers control 80% of the efficacy of digital marketing. Scott shared his tips for how to become one of the elite 20%.

Site Speed 101: How to Get Your Site to Load in 1 Second or Less

Dustin Nay from Eighty and Eight was the final speaker in the Big Leap room breakout session.  He quickly warned us that he is an enormous fan of memes and that his slidedeck would be littered with them...little did we know.
According to a
post on the Google Analytics blog
, the average site speed globally is 6.2 seconds on Desktop and 10.2 seconds on Mobile.  In the same blog post Google Recommends that your site load in 1 second on all devices.  Dustin outline three reasons that site speed is crucial for: