Our team soaked up a few rays and a load of great content at this year’s Brighton SEO conference and Paid Social Show, a new fringe event focused purely on paid social media advertising – at last!
Here’s a round up of our best bits…

The last happy place on the Internet?

User-intent is at the forefront on Pinterest with 96% of its users using the platform to research a potential purchase. Rebecca Meekings and Duane Brown’s talks on Pinterest both provided great insights into the possibilities this channel offers brands.

Embracing the idea of ‘moments’ the best content is tailored towards daily, seasonal and life moments. By targeting users based on emotion over rationality, Pinterest is a unique social network, described by co-founder Evan Sharp as “the last happy place on the Internet.”

Many of the talks we attended last week echoed the idea that ‘creative drives conversions’. With Pinterest being such a visual platform, we look forward to delving deeper into the opportunities it presents for our clients. 

View Rebecca’s slide deck from the Paid Social Show

View Duane’s slide deck from the Paid Social Show

Using Google PPC to win business from your competitors

Tanesha Stafford, Founder of @WeAreArmchair suggested targeting competitor brands and demonstrating why you’re better. Tactics included looking at your competitor’s ad visibility and scheduling your ads when theirs stop showing.

And our favourite suggestion…“Use Naughty Keywords.” No need to reach for the swear box just yet. Whilst targeting competitor brand keywords is not a new concept, Tanesha suggested targeting longer tail terms such as ‘cancel <competitor> membership’ or ‘<competitor> customer service is not working’ and tailoring your ad copy to see if you are able to win over those customers.

Does Quora present an opportunity for UK advertisers?

Self-confessed Quora Evangelist JD Prater showed us how this two year old Q&A based platform provides a completely different channel to target potential customers. With 300+ million active monthly users already (the US and India currently making up over half their user base) the platform is growing fast and has just added 16 new languages.

Quora allows you to target particular questions, create remarketing audiences and upload your email list, as well as using traditional keyword targeting. And, Hallelujah, they have different ad sets for mobile and desktop along with CPC, CPM and CPA bidding options. We are excited to begin using this and hope to trial some campaigns for clients in the coming months.  

If you didn’t make it to the Brighton SEO conference this year, or like us don’t have superhuman powers that allow you to be in more than one place at a time, you can access most of the slide decks here courtesy of the nice folks at Site Visibility.

The next Brighton SEO conference is on September 13th 2019.

Super Early Bird Tickets are on sale now.