SMARTSkills: Digital Marketing and Social Media Conference

Description

In this all-day conference, you will learn how to engage your customers and prospects online through your website and social media and track your activities so that you know what is working and what needs to be adjusted. Join us to build your marketing toolkit and take a time-out to learn more!

8:30 am – 10:30 am Finding Your People: How to Identify and Attract Your Ideal Audience (presented by: Justine Kessler)
“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.” – Meredith Hill

Defining and understanding your target audience can help you create more effective sales and marketing strategies, build stronger customer relationships, and ultimately achieve greater success. This session will feature practical exercises and real-world examples to help you learn how to create effective marketing strategies that resonate with your customers. We’ll go inside one well-known local brand to understand the insights that drove them to redefine their target audience, explore how this change influenced their business decisions, and evaluate the resulting business impact – and then we’ll apply these principles to help you define or refine your own audience profile.

Session objectives:

Understand how target audience identification can help guide and focus your business decisions
Learn how to define your target audience and create detailed customer personas to inform sales and marketing strategies
Feel confident using practical audience research techniques like surveys, social media insights, and listening sessions to further enhance your understanding of your target audience
10:30 am-10:45 am Break
10:45 am – 12:15 pm Harnessing AI: Strategies to Supercharge Your Business Development and Marketing (presented by: Garth Beyer)
Start scratching the surface of artificial intelligence, and discover the transformative power of AI tools in business development and marketing. In this session, we will explore practical strategies to leverage artificial intelligence for optimizing the launch of a business, accelerating growth, and enhancing customer engagement. Whether you’re a startup or looking to modernize your approach to an existing business, this presentation will provide actionable insights and real-world examples to help you integrate AI effectively. Tools we plan to share (knowing this stuff changes all the time!) include: Jasper AI, Rytr, Perplexity, DALL-E, Fireflies, Canva, and ChatGPT.

In this engaging presentation, we’ll discuss lessons learned from experienced marketers and demonstrate first-hand how AI can benefit your business.

12:15 pm – 1:15 pm Lunch
1:15 pm – 2:30 pm Master the Facebook Ads Manager (presented by: Josh Klemons)
Do you know how well your ads are performing? You should! If you’re NOT running ads in the Facebook Ads Manager, you’re leaving money on the table​.

The Facebook Ads Manager is where ads should be built, tested and monitored. It provides you tools and insights far beyond what you can find in the Ads Center.

In this session, we’ll cover building audiences, how to develop and A/B test creative, navigating your analytics to ensure you’re getting the most for your money and much more.​

Here are some of the things we’ll cover in this comprehensive training:

Setting up your Business and Ads Manager accounts
Building custom audiences, allowing you to target (and retarget!) your email list, people who visit your site, people who engage with your accounts and more
Building lookalike audiences off of your high-performing custom audiences
Building saved audiences of people based off of interest, location and demographics
The difference between a campaign, an ad set and an ad (and why it matters!)
How to build and A/B test powerful creative
Different types of ad objectives, what they all mean and when to use which one​​
​…and much much more!

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm Minimal Effort, Maximum Impact: Digital Marketing Basics for Busy Entrepreneurs (presented by: Emily Ruyle)
Enter the fast-paced world of digital marketing with “Minimal Effort, Maximum Impact: Digital Marketing Basics for Busy Entrepreneurs.”

This session is designed to show you how to make a big impact with minimal effort. We’ll cover essential tactics like email marketing and social proof that can drive significant growth for your business, even when time and experience are limited.

You’ll walk away with actionable strategies and examples that demonstrate how these simple yet powerful tools can be integrated into your busy schedule. Get ready to maximize your marketing efforts with strategies designed specifically for small business owners on the go.

4:15 pm – 4:30 pm Complete session evaluation & wrap-up for the day!