You’ve just attended a conference. Great! Now what?
How do you now implement all the great ideas and strategies you learned at the summit? How do you keep the same momentum?
Because when you leave the conference, the outside world is waiting for you, filled with its distractions.
During the closing ceremonies of Traffic & Conversion Summit, Ryan Deiss, DigitalMarketer’s Co-Founder and CEO, said to find success after the conference you have to do 1 thing.
Doing this will help ensure your success.
To learn what that 1 thing is, watch Ryan’s closing keynote from Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018:
(NOTE: Reserve your seat today for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 and SAVE 50% with Early Bird pricing. But hurry! This discount is for a limited time. Learn more here.)
Don’t have time to watch the presentation? Read the transcript below!
Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018: Final Thoughts and Closing Ceremonies Transcript
So what we want to do now, I really want to close this thing out the right way. I want to finish where we began. I want to go back 3 days ago. I know it seems like it’s been a very, very long time because when I came out here Monday morning, I lead with one word in particular that I felt summed up where things are today. And that word, if you recall, was crap. Crap. Do you remember that? Do you remember how we talked about how ad rates are on the rise? How impressions are down, ad rates are on the rise. Do you remember how we talked about how the bots are coming to take all of our jobs and fundamentally ruin humanity as we know it?
We revealed Jeff Bezos as the Bond villain that he has always been, as the plush toy serial killer that we should have seen coming. Right? And I encouraged all of you to panic. Did you all panic? Did we all spend enough time adequately panicking? I hope so. Because then what we all realize is that it’s going to be okay, and it’s going to be okay because you came to the right place. And I hope that you all agree now, maybe you didn’t believe me then, but I hope you agree now that you did, in fact, come to the right place.
And then we talked about how there were these three big shifts taking place and these shifts that are taking place aren’t just… They’re opportunities more than they are a threat, and there are people who aren’t here, hopefully, your competitors, who weren’t here. They don’t see these shifts coming and when they come, they’re going to just nail them. They’re not going to be ready for them, but you will.
We talked about how conversation is the new lead. Remember that? We talked about how conversation is the new lead and probably when I said this on Monday morning, a lot of you, I know I can tell from some of the faces I could see the front, some of you were like, “What the crap are you talking about? What do you mean by that?” And hopefully by the time you were done hearing David Cancel and even hearing Daymond John talking about how if you’re down, you’re down as low as you can possibly go, if I’m there, what do I do? I make 50 phone calls. I have 50 conversations.
This is where things are headed because yeah, automation’s great, but god dang it, doesn’t it seem like all this online stuff is replacing actual human conversation? And we talked about how there is going to be an overreaction. There is going to be a switch. It’s gonna come full circle. It only always does, but the interactions are not going to be taking place here anymore, right? They’re going to be taking place in these different locations.
And you heard Ezra talk about how to use email more effectively and you heard Molly and Anna Selby and others talk about how to really make Facebook Messenger work, right? The tools that are out there to facilitate the types of conversations that your customers want to have with you, that your competitors never will, but hopefully you will.
So you’re prepared. You’re ready, and we talked about how the future belongs to companies who are willing to invest in real one-to-one H2H interactions. If I’ve convinced you that this is really a thing, even if you don’t yet know what it means for you and your business, if I’ve convinced you that this really is a thing, that this is where it’s headed, then I feel like I’ve done you a great service, and I don’t say that egotistically. I just don’t see enough people talking about this.
Nobody’s really talking about this. Certainly, in the online marketing, the digital marketing space, nobody’s talking about this. Everybody wants to automate everything and remove the humans. This is where it’s headed and the companies that win in the future will be the companies that believe this too. They share in this belief and they take action because of it.
We also talked about how community is the new brand. Community is the new brand. I hope you felt that while you were here. I hope you felt that while you were here. I hope you now feel a little bit more connected to us at DigitalMarketer and the team. I hope you feel like you know us and you have a sense of who we are. I hope you feel like you’re a part of what’s happening here and you’re a part of this community.
But more than that, I hope you’re building communities of your own. You remember what Jeff Bezos said when he’s not being a bond villain, right? This idea that your brand is what other people say when you aren’t in the room. Your brand is what other people say when you aren’t in the room. That’s the essence of brand. What are people saying about you?
But we all know it’s difficult to influence what people say about us. It’s very difficult. People are going to have their own opinions, and if you try to put words in your customers’ mouths, they’re going to see it coming. They’re smart. They’ll see it coming. They’re not going to appreciate it. So you can’t necessarily influence what people are saying, but if you’re building community, you can absolutely influence who’s talking and who has the loudest voice.
You can influence that. You can influence that by building this community and by propping up those who are truly serving that community. So I talked about how the opportunity, what I really see as the biggest opportunity in business today, I don’t care if you’re B2B, I don’t care for B2C. The big opportunity is to build your own Amazon Prime in your market, to build your own verticalized Prime.
Look, Amazon got it. Amazon’s got it. They’ve only got like 50, 60, 70 percent of every US household, and I believe that they’re eventually going to go ahead and tackle the rest of planet Earth before too long. Right? They got it when it comes to just general retail, but just like if you really wanted to buy the best fishing lure out there, you didn’t necessarily want to go to Walmart. You wanted to go to Bass Pro Shop, right? That’s where you wanted to go.
Your market deserves to have the Bass Pro Shop. They deserve to walk into your community and to see other people who are like them, like-minded and have real professional conversations, not just walk into another Walmart of the internet. So give it to them. Give it to them and they’ll reward you for it. That’s what we’ve been trying to build this whole time at DigitalMarketer.
If you would’ve told me, if you were to ask me, “Ryan, pick,” because we ran a split test. We split test for months. We split tested at the top of the DigitalMarketer homepage a number of different headlines and the fact that this one, “Join the premier online community,” the fact that this one won, no specifics whatsoever about what people get. We didn’t go into the tactical things you’re going to get.
The one where we talked about how you get 38 plus trainings and execution plans for just a dollar, that one didn’t win. The stuff didn’t win. The features didn’t win. Heck, even we talked about the benefits, that didn’t win. When we said, “Join a community, that’s what won. I never would have guessed it, but it makes me so happy that it won. It makes me so happy that it won because it tells me that, as humans, we crave community and that hasn’t changed. And it’s real in this industry, it’s real in this market, and it’s really yours as well.
And then we closed with talking about how the customer is the new power broker. The customer is in charge. You heard from my friend, David Cancel. “Brands must now learn to compete in a world of infinite supply where the customer has all the power,” a world of infinite supply. What does that mean? It means you don’t want to be one of these companies bragging about the fact that you’ve got all the new releases of the latest and greatest movie on your shelves. No longer wins the day.
There was a time when Blockbuster had a reason to exist because they had all the new releases. They had all the supply, but in a world of infinite supply, in a world where no matter what you want, no matter what you want, it can pretty much be there the next day, supply does not win. Locking up, having all the logistics figured out, that doesn’t win anymore. What wins? Demand wins. Demand wins, and what do we do as marketers? We are generators of demand. We create demand from scratch. We’re as close to alchemists as the world has ever seen.
We can create demand from scratch in a world where demand is the only thing that has any value, in a world where demand is the only thing that has any value. That’s why when I was up here, right about here, talking to Daymond John and he said… I asked, “What does it mean to be a brand,” and talking about how everything’s moving to the back to the consumer. It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B. I’m like, “That means that the marketers are gonna win.” He’s like, “Yeah.”
The marketers are going to win. It means that you’re going to win. Means it’s a good day to be a marketer. We’re the cool kids again, but if you want to win at the demand side, again, back to Jeff, the single most important thing that you focus on is the customer. That’s what Amazon is focused on. So we talked about what does it mean to be obsessed with the customer? What does it mean to be truly customer-centric? It means you got to show up.
Remember that? It means you got to show up. It means you need to go where your customers are, even if it isn’t convenient. That’s why DigitalMarketer answers the phone. That’s why DigitalMarketer is on Facebook Messenger. It’s why when you hit us up on our page, we do our darnedest to respond. We don’t always get there as quickly as we’d like, but it’s why we had four new people start this week while we’re here to be better at serving you. And we’re going to add more.
We want to be wherever you are. It’s the reason I announced the DigitalMarketer’s going to Australia, a place that literally couldn’t be farther away from where we are and still be on land. Okay? It’s why we’re going to Australia and it’s why we’re going there first. We want to prove that we’re willing to go far away because that’s where you are.
Are you willing to do the same thing for your customers? Are you? Ask yourself, are you willing to do that? If not, you got to wonder if a competitor is because if they are and you’re not, they’re going to win and they’re going to win because they deserve to win. Look, I don’t mind losing. I don’t mind losing if somebody comes along and they’re better than me, but god dang it. I want to give myself a shot. I want to know that I at least deserve to win. I want to know that I prepared well enough, that I wanted it badly, and I want to know that I did everything that I could to win. Can you say the same thing?
Step two, we talked about the importance of redefining. Redefining? Redefining what? Redefining what your business stands for, redefining what defines your business. In other words, stop defining your business by what you sell. I don’t know where the gentleman is, if he’s in the room, but when I had my AMA, he told me I had a hard time deciding what my core offer should be because I’ve got this product in this market, and this one over here, and this one over here, and this one over here.
I don’t know what my core offer should be. He said, “Of course you don’t know what your core offer should be because you don’t know who you’re selling to.” You cannot figure out what you should sell until you first know who you serve. There are three critical questions that every single business on planet Earth must answer. Who am I serving? What value do I deliver to them? And how do I articulate that value such that when people hear about it, they say, “I want it.” Most of you are here because you want to get good at number three. You’re here because you want to get good at number three.
You absolutely deliver value, but you don’t know how to best articulate it. You don’t know how to best amplify it. You want to get good at number three, but many of you are here, you want to get good at number three and you still don’t know number one. You still don’t know who. Make sure, before you leave here, that you’ve at least committed to no longer defining your business by what you sell or how you sell it, but instead, you start defining your business by who you serve. It is impossible to be customer-centric if you don’t know who it is that you serve.
So decide. Be crystal clear. Seriously, I don’t care if you’re sitting here an hour from now. Eventually, the hotel is going to kick you out. They’re going to start picking up all the chairs. But if you sit there, they’ll pick up the ones around you, right? It’ll be weird. You’ll make it weird for people. But don’t leave this room until you’re crystal clear on this. Don’t leave this room until you’re crystal clear on who you serve.
And then finally, step three, know your role in the process. I see so many marketers, I see so many speakers, so many authors. It’s so terrible in the speaker, author, expert space. Speaker, author, expert space, they want to get up and they want to talk about how amazing they are, talk about how great they are. I’ve got a rule. When I go and speak at another event, I give my bio at the end because I know for a fact you don’t give a crap who I am until I’ve first given you something of value.
When do you start talking about yourself? At the beginning when nobody cares or at the end, after you’ve delivered value in advance? Know your role. Recognize that your customer is the hero. You’re the guide. Again, credit to Donald Miller for teaching me this, for articulating it in such a way that I completely understood this. Alright? So these were the big themes, right? Let’s review.
Invest in conversations, invest in community, and finally, invest in your customers. I firmly believe, guys, if you do these three things, and my hope … That’s why I wanted to open up with these things. If you do these things and over the course of the time that we had together, you got the tactical details of, okay, that’s great. How do I do it? That’s what the rest of our time that we’ve had together, and we’re going to review some of this in just a moment. You’re going to get a very quick snapshot.
We’re going to watch a video and you’re going to get to see and get reminders, and when you watch the video, I want you to be reminded of different sessions that you were in and ask yourself, “What did I learn and how did it relate to one of these major themes?” What did I learn and how did it relate to one of these major themes? Use this as a moment to recall that because the big question that I have for you and what I want to leave you with is, what are you gonna do now? What are you gonna do?
You just invested three days of your life. Now, I hope you had a good time. I really do. I hope you made a new friend, right? I hope you got to cut loose a little bit. I hope you got to use words like chat bot and autoresponder and not have people look at you sideways like you’re crazy. But I’m telling you, if you don’t leave here having done something, then all that I did was give you a whole bunch of new, bright, shiny objects to chase around for the next 6 months, for the next 12 months.
And that sucks. I don’t want to do that. I want to know that you leave here and you implement what you’ve learned and you grow your business because that’s what we’re in the mission of doing here at DigitalMarketer. We’re in the mission of doubling businesses, and that doesn’t happen if we just teach you things. Your business is not going to double just because you leave with a real big fat notebook with fancy things written in it. And you’ve done this before, right? You’ve been to events like this before.
You bring back the notes like they’re a souvenir, like they’re a lot, like hard work. You know, you go to a city and you get like the mug. Milwaukee. I don’t know why you went to Milwaukee or why you felt like you needed to get a mug while you were there, but you did it. You want to commemorate your trip to Milwaukee and so you come back with the mug. I don’t want your notes to just be a mug, right? I want your notes to be the basis that you’re going to use to double your business.
So what are you going to do right now? So this is your action item. This is your action item. Pick one big thing. I gave you 3 general themes. I gave you three general themes. Pick one thing that you can do that’s gonna move you in a positive direction with investing in conversation, investing in community, and investing in your customer. You learned a lot of things, seriously. Scan through your notes, look at them. Scan through your notes and look at them and think about all the things.
Pick one, make a commitment picking one. And you know what? You could go out tonight and you can party. You’re all adults. If you want to eat dessert first, you can do that, but I would encourage you instead of that, spend this evening working towards this one big thing. Start making some progress. You don’t have to finish it. I had a friend who, he authored a bunch of books. I said, “What’s the secret to writing a lot of books?” He said, “It’s simple. Never end a writing session with a period.”
What do you mean? When you’re writing, I always finish a writing session in the middle of a sentence so that when I pick up the next day, I finish that sentence and I go. So I’m not saying you have to finish anything but start. You don’t have to put a period on the end, but start. Begin to move towards that. So this is my kind of first big message for you, my first big hope for you. And the second one is let’s do this again. This was fun. If you had a good time … I know it’s hard to imagine like when you’ve been doing this for three days, you’re like, who wants to do another three days? You’re like, I’m full.
Right? I’m full. It’s like eating 17 slices of chocolate cake, right? Chocolate cake is good. 17 pieces of chocolate cake? Uh, right? And that’s… We’re kind of at the 17 pieces of chocolate cake stage, but I can assure you in about 12 months, you’re going to be ready for some more chocolate cake. All right? So here are the dates. February 25th, 26th, 27th right here in this hotel. You know where it is, you know the dates, and I can tell you guys, I don’t know how you felt, but I feel like we kind of maxed this thing out. Right?
Which tells me that we ain’t going to be able to add a whole lot more people next year. We’re not gonna be able to add a lot more people. This is one of the perks slash not perks of signing long-term hotel contracts. Okay? So next year… Yeah, exactly. Bah dah boo. You want me to be your contract attorney, let me know.
So I got a feeling this event’s going to sell out pretty quickly next year, and I know for a fact that the ticket price is going to go up. So I want to make sure that you’re here. I want to make sure that you don’t forget. So go ahead, come by the DigitalMarketer booth. You can also get out the app and you can, while we’re here, pick up your tickets for next year, and I really hope that you do. I really hope that you do. Once we’re a couple months out from the event, if we’re still a couple months out and you find out that you can’t make those dates, that’s cool. Let us know and we’ll give you a refund. It’s fine, but make sure that you least have them.
You don’t wanna forget. I had some friends that are like, “Hey, I want to come out to T&C.” I was like, “Dude, we’re sold out.” You can come hang out in the lobby. I don’t want you to be a lobby attendee. So come on out because right now, this is the absolute lowest price the tickets will ever be. Okay? The absolute lowest price the tickets will ever be. So now what I want to do, yes. Yes, and VIP. Yes, exactly.
So now what I want to do, just to kind of close this thing out, I want to take a little walk down memory road, the last three days. I want to do this one because my guess is you made some pretty sweet memories over the last couple of days, but also as you’re watching this, I want you to remember those sessions, right? Remember back to those moments and allow it to inform what should your one big thing be. So yeah, this is going to be fun. I’m excited to watch the video. I’m excited to relive some of these moments, but I’m also going to ask you to work during it. Okay?
So as we watch it be thinking, what can I do from that session, or that one, or that one? Okay? All right, let’s bring down the lights, play the video, and close this thing up the right way:
(NOTE: Reserve your seat today for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 and SAVE 50% with Early Bird pricing. But hurry! This discount is for a limited time. Learn more here.)
