Agenda

Registration

Opening + Morning Keynote | How Marketers Can Find Differentiating and Dominating Success

John Fimiani, Interact Conference Founder, Co-Founder + Brand/Strategy Director at Upward Brand Interactions

Keynote | Do Less. Slow Down: The Counter-Intuitive Approach to Strategic, Sane, Sustainable Content Marketing Success

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, Digital Marketing & Content Expert, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author

 

Modern marketing is fast-paced. Real-time. Right now. Always-on, transparent, honest conversations. Unprecedented access between people and organizations.

 

But is fast, always-on really the path to your organization’s marketing transformation? It turns out that the organizations seeing the most success with marketing and content today choose… wait for it... to: Slow. Down. Do less. And obsess in key areas.

 

In this non-boring, fun, relatable talk, Ann Handley is your Marketing 2021 Tour Guide, annotating your tour of how the smartest organizations are creating less. Slowing down. And sustaining REAL results.

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Breakout Sessions

Choose from multiple breakout sessions to attend during this hour.

 

BREAKOUT | Data That Drives Email Marketing Relevance… and Revenue

Jess Best, VP of Data-Driven Marketing at Barkley and Speaker

 

This session will explore the 6 steps to take to turn data into a useful tool for creating marketing, including the latest methodology and technology you need to gather customers' insights and transform that data into personalized emails at scale.

 

You'll learn how to:

• Choose data to use in email that impacts the bottom line, a.k.a. bolsters email ROI
• Acquire data so that it's ready to use in marketing and sales
• Use data to determine the content of your email marketing, through personalization or segmentation
• Use data to determine the timing of your email marketing, through automation
• Use data to determine the impact of your email marketing, through testing and analytics to optimize future campaigns

More Info

 

BREAKOUT | How To be Funny... Even if You’re Not

Lianna Patch, Owner & Conversion Copywriter of Punchline Conversion Copywriting

 

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Define a brand sense of humor that resonates with your readers
• Punch up your existing emails
• Write new, personable, funny emails that improve your retention and engagement metrics

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BREAKOUT | Increase Your Bottom line by aligning your Sales & Marketing teams

Chris Askew, Founder of TILT!, a Marketing & Branding Agency, Host of TAG!, a Sales and Marketing Podcast

 

This is what the TAG! Podcast, hosted by Chris Askew, is all about. All too often, organizations find that they have a marketing function inside Sales, and a sales function inside Marketing. In this talk Chris Askew will cover tangible ways on how to integrate these two teams. He covers causes of friction between the teams, how to overcome them and the four different relationships the two teams have together and tactics on how they can become truly aligned and integrated.

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BREAKOUT | How to Create a Digital Marketing RFP That Gets You The Right Agency

Maggie Babuder, Advertising Manager, Cleveland Clinic

Kristen Kaltenstein, Client Strategy Director, Upward Brand Interactions

David Kragel, Vice President of Search Marketing, Upward Brand Interactions

 

Going through a Request for Proposal process for a digital marketing agency can be tedious, time consuming and unsatisfying for both the client and the agencies participating. Join Maggie Babuder, Cleveland Clinic, and Kristen Kaltenstein and David Kragel, Upward Brand Interactions, to learn about making the most out of your agency RFP process, asking the right questions and ensuring you choose the right partner.

 

This session offers a unique perspective of both the client and the agency. You’ll walk away with these questions answered:

• What is an optimal timeline for this process?
• How many potential partners should you consider?
• How much information should you offer up front?
• What questions should you make sure to ask?
• What criteria should you consider when creating an agency scorecard?
• Who should be involved?

More Info

LUNCH BREAK

Breakout Sessions

Choose from multiple breakout sessions to attend during this hour.

 

BREAKOUT | LinkedIn Ads: The Lead Gen Marketer's Secret Weapon

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, The LinkedIn Advertising Agency

 

LinkedIn Ads feature the best business targeting on the planet, at near-infinite scale, but boy are they expensive! Join AJ Wilcox, certified LinkedIn partner and Ads expert, as he shows you how to get the most performance out of your investment. In this session, you’ll learn:

• Who should and shouldn't advertise on LinkedIn
• Which ad formats you should be using
• Advanced LinkedIn Ads targeting
• Which types of calls to action you should be using

More Info

 

BREAKOUT | The Future Of Customer Care: Human-Centered AI

Brooke Sellas, Founder & CEO of B Squared Media, Co-Host of the Marketing Companion Podcast

 

Join Brooke B. Sellas, Founder & CEO of B Squared Media, for a conversation on customer care and how your company can go above and beyond to create highly effective customer support experiences that elevate your brand and encourage customer loyalty.

 

Brooke will show you real-world examples of how to use high-tech tools – while still being high-touch – and together, you’ll discover how to create ideal, personalized experiences for your customers at every touchpoint.

More Info

 

BREAKOUT | Storytelling — Three Essentials to Crafting a Story That Engages Your Audience

Bryan Suddith, Client Strategist at Upward Brand Interactions

 

In this session, you will learn how to craft a story using these three key elements and understand recent marketing wins and misses looking through the lens of personal, transcendent and emotional stories. Stories that engage audiences have these three things in common:

• The story is personal
• The story transcends the medium in which they are presented
• The story is built on emotion

Afternoon Break

KEYNOTE | Mindstate Marketing: Using Behavioral Psychology to Increase Emotional Engagement With Your Content

Will Leach, Founder of TriggerPoint, a Behavioral Research & Design Consultancy and CEO of The Mindstate Group; Best-Selling Author; Keynote Speaker

 

Learn how “Mindstate Marketing” is being adopted by today’s largest brands to drive their marketing strategy and execution. Will Leach, author of the best-selling book “Marketing to Mindstates” has developed a science-based approach to content development proven to increase the psychological effectiveness of your marketing. In his keynote he will introduce us to the Mindstate Marketing Model and show how content built upon a customer’s subconscious “mindstate” can significantly increase visual breakthrough, emotional engagement and psychological persuasion.

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KEYNOTE: 3 Big Ideas From Over 275 Marketing & Sales Books Every Modern Marketer Needs to Know

Douglas Burdett, Principal and Founder of Artillery; Host of the Marketing Book Podcast

 

Would you like to be the kind of marketer that every CEO wants to hire and can’t afford to lose? You can. In this talk, Douglass Burdett will share 3 big ideas that he has gleaned from over 275 marketing and sales books he’s reviewed on his Marketing Book Podcast.

More Info

CLOSING NOTES

Strategy

John Fimiani, Co-Founder + Brand/Strategy Director at Upward Brand Interactions

 

How to Build a Customer-Centric Brand Strategy

 

If you’re going to build a customer-centric brand strategy, you need to start with a documented plan and proven methodology. Ready to get started? Learn from experts who have spent years researching, testing and perfecting the techniques needed to build successful brands. In this hands-on workshop, we use real-world business cases to develop comprehensive marketing strategies and brand platforms. You’ll learn how to ...

• Research your target audiences
• Build detailed personas
• Craft journey maps
• Identify brand archetypes
• Define target audience mind-states
• Determine brand attributes and differentiators

Social Media

Nicole Spears, Senior Content Strategist at Upward Brand Interactions

 

How to Convert, Test and Learn with Social Media Marketing

 

At the dawn of social media, brands saw the distinct advantage of gaining two-way engagement with their customers. But as the platforms have changed and ad budgets have grown, this aspect may no longer be the key to brand success. So, what is? This workshop will bring you up-to-date in the realm of social media marketing by covering:

• The State of Social 2021: platform demographics, strengths + weaknesses, broad trends in SMM
• Optimizing your social presence and strategy for lead generation
• Creating a test and learn framework for your social advertising program
• Cross-industry case studies on brands that are doing it right

 

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, The LinkedIn Advertising Agency

 

LinkedIn Ads Advanced Workshop

 

You've got the LinkedIn Ads basics on Day 1 of the conference, and now you're ready to take it to the next level. Join AJ Wilcox, certified LinkedIn partner and Ads expert, as he walks you through the advanced concepts for how to generate the best quality of leads at the lowest possible costs. He'll workshop through building your audiences and ads, as well as writing ad copy.

• Advanced LinkedIn Ads bidding/budgeting
• Account Structure
• Account-based Marketing strategy
• Workshopping through your account
• Tackling hard Q&A

Behavioral Design

Will Leach, Founder of TriggerPoint, a Behavioral Research & Design Consultancy and CEO of The Mindstate Group; Best-Selling Author; Keynote Speaker

 

Create Effective Marketing by Activating Mindstates: A practical workshop on how to apply Mindstate Marketing principles to creative strategy and execution

 

This will be an applied workshop that takes participants step-by-step through the Mindstate Model and how to apply it to marketing. In this workshop, Will will teach participants how to uncover the four key behavioral factors driving emotional arousal and how to apply these factors directly to marketing strategy and content. Attendees will learn:

1. The importance of using behavioral psychology to increase persuasion and choice in an attention-deficit world
2. Understand the four subconscious drivers of behavior and how to use these to identify the subconscious Mindstates influencing brand consideration and choice
3. How to directly apply Mindstates Marketing techniques, via Behavioral Activation Briefsâ„¢, to brand building and creative challenges, through an interactive case-study

Email & Analytics

Lianna Patch, Owner & Conversion Copywriter of Punchline Conversion Copywriting

 

All About Email Copy – Plus Live Email Flow Teardowns!

 

This workshop combines actionable email copywriting and design takeaways to help you squeeze more juice out of your list in 2021.

 

Together, we’ll:

• Review email copy and design best practices – So your emails get opened, read and loved by more subscribers
• Walk through how to structure your welcome email flow around your most important goals (segmentation, sales, and more) – Why welcome emails? Because EVERYONE needs to be sending them
• Talk through your biggest challenges with email – And come up with ways to solve them

 

Jordan Link, Manager, Sales Optimization at IGS Energy

 

Part 1. Email Reporting and Analysis Workshop
Email marketing is the most measurable and trackable tactic in our arsenal: every step from the deployment to conversion and every interaction by the customer can be tracked, tested and optimized. Whether you have analysis paralysis or you are just dipping your toe into Email, this workshop is here to help you expand and improve the impact your Emails have for your brand. Come on in, the water's great.

 

Part 2. Digital Testing and Targeting Workshop
This section is a blitz through a series of the kinds of Email, Search and Website tests that are available to the Digital marketer. The goal is to empower and inspire you to go back to your Brand armed with some actionable ideas for optimizing your Digital tactics.

 

Part 3. Closing Thoughts: A Seat at the Table
Even if you have a relatively immature Digital marketing shop, Digital is uniquely positioned to be able to provide insights and learnings to the rest of your organization. This workshop is a collection of some of the capabilities that Digital marketers have (whether you know it or not) that can provide value to the rest of Sales and Marketing. Earn (and keep) a seat at the boardroom table!