When it rains, it pours. Authority Rainmaker brought PR and marketing’s top thought leaders under one roof for a two-day affair bursting with insights on everything from content creation and SEO to pricing and DIY inspiration.
Speakers, such as Daniel Pink and Sally Hogshead, provided advice seemingly designed to deliver success today and well into the future.
Check out these tweetable insights from each Authority Rainmaker speaker in alphabetical order.
Scott Brinker
1. “Over time all marketing strategies have click through rates that drop.” Click to tweet!
2. “Content never dies, it just sort of fades away.” Click to tweet!
3. “The thing that’s finite is the amount of audience attention.” Click to tweet!
4. “We know as humans the process of education isn’t best done by passive means. If you want people to learn, you actually get them engaged.” Click to tweet!
5. “Interactive content converts better than passive content and gets shared more.” Click to tweet!
6. “You want to carve out budget and mindshare to experiment with new innovations.” Click to tweet!
7. Interactive content collects a very different kind of data. It provides a digital dialogue where the prospect gives us an incredible amount of information. Click to tweet!
Chris Brogan
8. “A list is the community you have the opportunity and pleasure to serve.” Click to tweet!
9. “Any day that you’re not feeding and growing your list is a day you’re hurting your list.” Click to tweet!
10. “People buy more on emotion than logic.” Click to tweet!
11. “Brevity sells…except in sales letters.” Click to tweet!
12. “We really all operate under fear and love.” Click to tweet!
13. “Repetition is key. Repetition is key.” Click to tweet!
14. “The more I sell in a straightforward way, the more I sell.” Click to tweet!
15. “Humor converts. People like it if it’s not always so buttoned down.” Click to tweet!
16. “Your most profitable button is the reply button.” Click to tweet!
Ryan Deiss
17. “What the data doesn’t tell you is opportunity cost. The data doesn’t tell you about all the people you ticked off by trying to get that extra 2 percent.” Click to tweet!
18. “There’s nothing more valuable today than attention.” Click to tweet!
19. “It’s difficult for someone to be truly committed to a brand unless they give money or time.” Click to tweet!
20. “How many emails is too many emails? It depends on what you’re sending people.” Click to tweet!
21. “Your subscribers don’t care about you. They have this pesky thing called life. If you stop emailing, you lose them.” Click to tweet!
22. “With a new subscriber, tell them what they can expect from you. Then, send them some of your best stuff, not just the newest.” Click to tweet!
Sean D’Souza
23. “Work is very important, but vacation is just as important.” Click to tweet!
24. “Reduce prices, see what happens to your life. Your income goes crazy, and you’re working twice as hard. You lose expertise.” Click to tweet!
25. “If you don’t have the expertise and are always working, you’re not going to be able to deliver.” Click to tweet!
26. “We are selling on price, but customers are buying on value.” Click to tweet!
27. “If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it on the Internet.” Click to tweet!
28. If there are similar products but one has a bonus, you look at the bonus. Click to tweet!
Ann Handley
29. “Writing is the heart of content marketing, and I also think it’s our liver, lungs and central nervous system.” Click to tweet!
30. “Brand voice is not just what you say, it’s how you say it.” Click to tweet!
31. “Voice reflects your culture, amplifies your story & communicates w/ empathy w/ people you want to reach.” Click to tweet!
32. Don’t just bring copywriters in at the end. Involve them through the entire process. Click to tweet!
33. Use brand voice to attract and repel. Sometimes, it’s not a great idea to cast a wide net. Ask if your audiences are the right fit for your business. Click to tweet!
34. “Content is a filter that can qualify your audience better.” Click to tweet!
Sally Hogshead
35. “Different is better than better.” Click to tweet!
36. “The thing about you that makes you different is why people love you and why they champion for you and befriend you.” Click to tweet!
37. “When you can give a brand the perfect words to describe itself, the brand becomes more loved, valuable and can charge more money.” Click to tweet!
38. “It’s better to avoid putting yourself in front of someone than to waste their time with lame communication.” Click to tweet!
39. “Every time you communicate, you’re either adding value or taking up space.” Click to tweet!
40. “Creating highly polarizing marketing messaging will turn off the people who already aren’t going to work with you but will inspire the best ones.” Click to tweet!
41. “Don’t try to outdo someone else at their own game. Competition is a brutal way to make a living.” Click to tweet!
42. “The greatest way to empower someone is to show them their highest value.” Click to tweet!
43. “High performers have a specialty of some kind. They’re not trying to be all things to all people.” Click to tweet!
44. “Clients don’t hire you because you’re balanced. They hire you because you’re extraordinary in some way.” Click to tweet!
45. “The world isn’t changed by people who sort of care. The world isn’t changed by content that is sort of creative.” Click to tweet!
46. “If you position yourself as a commodity, you charge a lower price. If you position yourself as a specialist, you can charge a higher price. The question is what’s your speciality.” Click to tweet!
47. “If you can take your competitor’s copy and put it with your brand, you havent differentiated yourself enough.” Click to tweet!
48. “You don’t learn how to be fascinating, you unlearn how to be boring.” Click to tweet!
Bernadette Jiwa
49. “We spent $500 billion in 2013. We’re spending more money to interrupt people with things they don’t care about and don’t pay attention to.” Click to tweet!
50. You’re more likely to summit Mount Everest than click a banner ad. Click to tweet!
51. “There is no shortcut to mattering to our customers.” Click to tweet!
52. “Marketing is the story of how you create difference for your customers. We only succeed when we matter to people.” Click to tweet!
53. “When you focus on the truth about your customer and what motivates them, you’re more likely to create content they love.” Click to tweet!
54. “Whoever gets closest to the audience wins – great content doesn’t interrupt people. It educates, it inspires, it challenges them to grow. It connects them with humanity.” Click to tweet!
55. “If we want to get inside our customers’ wallets, we have to get into their heads and, more importantly, their hearts.” Click to tweet!
Michael King
56. “(Content) audits help identify the holes in your funnel and find where you’re leaking link equity.” Click to tweet!
57. “Ultimately what you’re trying to do is match your content to need states and certain KPIs.” Click to tweet!
58. “Make sure sample-based audits use quantitative and qualitative metrics to get a representative sample.” Click to tweet!
59. Questions to ask yourself: “What are the barriers to conversion for this page? What should we do with this content?” Click to tweet!
60. “Audits give frameworks for brainstorming to make your content more successful.” Click to tweet!
Joanna Lord
61. “What is growth? Creating an unnatural curve.” Click to tweet!
62. “We need to think of testing as a cultural process.” Click to tweet!
63. “Sixty-one percent of companies carry out less than five tests every month.” Click to tweet!
64. “It’s impossible to have a testing culture if employees feel they will be fired if they’re wrong.” Click to tweet!
65. “Don’t let wouldn’t-it-be-great ideas get killed off on the whiteboard.” Click to tweet!
Jerod Morris
66. “Authenticity is probably the most misused term because a lot of times people use authenticity when they mean transparent.” Click to tweet!
67. “To be authentic, you don’t have to reveal everything about yourself.” Click to tweet!
68. “To create really good content that can engage an audience, you have to choose a topic you have a passion for.” Click to tweet!
69. “It’s great that you want to talk about it, but it has to matter to your audience.” Click to tweet!
70. “Understand your podcast’s primary purpose. If your goal is to educate, you can’t overwhelm with entertainment.” Click to tweet!
71. “If you don’t give people what they came for, they will go somewhere else.” Click to tweet!
Daniel Pink
72. “Selling—your product, your service, your content, your idea, yourself—has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 100.” Click to tweet!
73. “Do we live in a world of information asymmetry? Less and less and less. It’s happened in every market for everything, empowering customers.” Click to tweet!
74. “We live in a world of seller beware. Sellers are on notice.” Click to tweet!
75. ‘Always be closing’ is not a bad idea in a world where buyers don’t have choices information or ways to talk back. ‘Always be closing’ is a terrible strategy in this world. Click to tweet!
76. “When the facts are on your side, use questions instead of statements. When the facts are not clearly on your side, don’t do this.” Click to tweet!
77. A long list of positives followed by small negatives sells more. The small negative shines light on long list of positives. Click to tweet!
78. “Rhyming, alliteration and repetition increase processing fluency, bettering retention and believability.” Click to tweet!
79. “Make it easy for people to act. You can spend a lot less time and resources if you make it easy for people to act.” Click to tweet!
Joe Pulizzi
80. “Build your audience first. Then, monetize it.” Click to tweet!
81. “You have to take your sweet spot and look at it in the way your audience is going to look at it.” Click to tweet!
82. “What do all media companies do that you don’t? Create an editorial mission. That’s part of what makes us different.” Click to tweet!
83. “Pick one major content type, one major platform, deliver consistently and do it for a long period of time.” Click to tweet!
84. “I can’t control anything that Facebook does. People have invested so much (in Facebook), but now organic reach is around 1 percent. You don’t know when another platform will do the same thing.” Click to tweet!
Henry Rollins
85. “Turn fear into inspiration. You’ll never know what you can achieve.” Click to tweet!
86. “You need a fan. You need someone to believe in you to get it going.” Click to tweet!
87. “We didn’t see anyone helping us, so we were DIY because we had no other thought in our head.” Click to tweet!
88. “I refuse to put any distance from anything I output.” Click to tweet!
89. “I hope that you never put any distance between anything you’re doing and anything you output.” Click to tweet!
Sonia Simone
90. “The point of content marketing is to make audiences smarter about what they want to move forward with.” Click to tweet!
91. “If (prospects) can understand about the space and how you can help, they’re more able to make an informed decision about working with you.” Click to tweet!
92. “Get em good and warmed up and smart before they get to you.” Click to tweet!
93. “Headlines are important because you have this much time to let people know they’re in the right place, that you can help with the transformation they want to make, and grab attention to get them to the lead.” Click to tweet!
94. “Quit being so freaking clever. It doesn’t work well for landing pages because it doesn’t turn attention into behavior.” Click to tweet!
95. “Don’t make things cheaper, make them more valuable.” Click to tweet!
96. “When trying to persuade someone to take action, their easiest alternative and your toughest competition is not doing anything.” Click to tweet!
97. “You have to sell why moving forward is a good idea.” Click to tweet!
98. “If you jump to the benefit without explaining how to get there, that’s hype. Prospects don’t want that.” Click to tweet!
99. Be insanely clear and concrete about what people need to do to move forward in the process. Click to tweet!
100. “People are afraid of buying something and feeling stupid. Reverse that risk. Make your audience smarter so they feel safe enough to move forward.” Click to tweet!
101. “Innovation is generally a horrible idea with site design. Look normal.” Click to tweet!
102. “(Having) different landing pages to sell the same thing is a good idea. It’s not about what you sell, it’s about the transformation.” Click to tweet!
Scott Stratten
103. “The best way to get future sales is to get customers ecstatic about the current sale.” Click to tweet!
104. “Go through the process of becoming your own customer or own subscriber. You may find the process is painful.” Click to tweet!
105. “Nobody in this room sits and says, ‘I need more email.’ We need to respect inboxes.” Click to tweet!
Danny Sullivan
106. Think about audience building, not link building. Once you build audience, hopefully they will start naturally linking. Click to tweet!
107. “Direct answers went big in 2014, and they will get bigger.” Click to tweet!
108. You need to understand how people act when they come to your site from mobile and desktop. Click to tweet!
109. “The mobile world isn’t just on the phone. It’s moving to the watch and other devices.” Click to tweet!
110. “The more you adjust for SEO, the less effective your SEO may be.” Click to tweet!
111. “Everything a search engine does has a human role at its heart. It’s trying to imitate what a human being likes.” Click to tweet!
112. “You’re not doing this (SEO) stuff for a search engine, you’re doing it for human beings.” Click to tweet!
Pamela Wilson
113. “Users are data points. Customers are people we want to build long-term relationships with.” Click to tweet!
114. Your home page needs to be like a welcome mat. Click to tweet!
115. Blanket offers to your entire list don’t work. Segment your list and provide targeted offers to their interests. Click to tweet!
116. Three touch points help build deep, personal connections: home page, content and commerce experience. Click to tweet!
