Opening Keynote: Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor

Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

Can we actually move marketing from the cost line of the financials to the revenue line?

Peter Drucker states that the purpose of marketing is to get and keep a customer. That's the why, and it hasn't changed since...well...forever. But how do we get there? Most global organizations develop their marketing departments to maximize reach and frequency, and then describe the value of our products and services.

This is a failed model and needs to be killed. What if we could create a marketing function that creates so much value for our audiences and consumers that it actually begins to pay for itself?

In this entertaining presentation, Content Marketing Institute founder will detail how you can transform your marketing organization into a true profit center. You'll learn how to:

- Create valuable subscribers that opt-in to your content
- Develop a content destination as an asset for the organization
- Monetize the content asset and generate direct and indirect revenues
- Take the steps necessary to start this change in your company

Purna Virji, Sr. Manager, Global Engagement,
Microsoft

In this session, Purna will explore how today’s conversational world goes beyond just voice search. It is a world where a landing page may no longer be necessary for online conversions and all one needs is a chat app or a digital assistant. Bots are seeing a marked rise in use and audience adoption, so search marketers need to be prepared.

Key Takeaways
- Why chatbots are a fantastic tool for increasing audience engagement across multiple channels
-How to use bots across multiple stages in the consumer decision journey (esp. remarketing!)

Catherine McManus, Sr. Director, Content Marketing, Aetna

Aetna will share how its enterprise marketing team build a content strategy to support the rollout of the company’s new brand campaign – and how content played an integral role in increasing brand favorability by:

- Using search and consumer insights to create original content that engaged target audiences and could be atomized across multiple channels
- Amplifying content through paid, owned and earned strategies, leveraging media partners for co-creation to expand reach
- Making connections across an enterprise to maximize assets and reinforce brand consistency
- Consistently measuring and optimizing to ensure content is achieving desired business goals

Eric Enge, CEO, Stone Temple Consulting

While AMP was originally designed for media sites, it’s rapidly going mainstream, with major e-commerce sites, such as EBay adopting it and seeing great results. The original limitations of AMP as a platform are evaporating rapidly, as a large community of open source developers are making AMP increasingly flexible and powerful. This presentation will show you the potential power of AMP, discuss it’s remaining pitfall, and lay out for you just how powerful the benefits of AMP might be for you.

Chris Yeich
Sr. Director, Content Marketing & Editorial Strategy, Dun & Bradstreet

How Dun & Bradstreet Bridges Content Marketing with Product Marketing

Discuss D&B real-world strategic view of:
- How Content Marketing and Product teams can work collaboratively to achieve mutual business goals for our brand
- Creating objectives to meet goals without sacrificing the integrity of the messaging
- How to use data-driven insights derived from our Editorial Insights Engine to squarely align to specific audience needs along the continuum of the customer journey
- Understanding how to map our writing styles (tone/voice) to unique personas
- Ensuring content is delivered to the right audiences in the channels they already live within, when they need it, and how they want it

Todd Friesen,
Director of Digital Strategy & SEO, Salesforce

Do your digital disciplines work together? Does your product messaging align with SEO? Not every large multinational enterprise works the same way. Not every digital team is organized the same way. There are a host of challenges that can hinder your efforts just as there are host of efficiencies that can benefit you. Come and gain insight into how one company's digital teams approach these issues.

Pat Reinhart, Sr. Director, Professional Services,
Conductor

Louis Gray,
Analytics Advocate,
Google

World class marketers rely on a combination of data and emotion. Determining what data to measure and how to share that data, and optimize through the customer pipeline is critical. Capture the insights you want with the data your business needs.

Erin Everhart, Senior Manager, Media Strategy & Mobile, The Home Depot

We can’t go anywhere without our cell phones. There is even an actual clinical condition for it now: nomophobia, as in “no mobile phobia.” Cell phones are one of the most powerful tools available to better understand and reach our customers, but so often we have no idea how to use it. It’s time to rethink how we approach mobile marketing, and it starts with understanding how (and why) we’re so addicted to this little device and exactly what marketers can do about it to turn mobile into a revenue-generating medium.

Garth O'Brien, Director & Global Head, SEO, GoDaddy

Every conference you hear the need for more content, but how do you determine which content to produce? This session explores the process for identifying the content your business needs to gain an edge over your competition and expand your search engine visibility using Conductor Searchlight. We also will cover how to monitor and measure the success (or failure) of your content campaigns. By reviewing a few GoDaddy content campaigns from start to finish you will be able to develop a stronger content production machine.

Ryan Skinner,
Senior Analyst, Forrester

CMOs are falling like bowling pins; in many instances, they're just not being replaced. Marketing that doesn't start with and obsess over customers, customer experience and perceived customer value is marketing that gets sidelined. Customer obsession is an imperative that marketing must champion, and businesses like T-Mobile, Sephora, and PetSmart where this has happened, are reaping rewards. Forrester Senior Analyst Ryan Skinner will describe what customer obsession means for marketers, and what to expect through 2018:

- The case for customer obsession
- How to develop and act on customer obsession
- What we'll see in 2018

Forrester Research is a global research and advisory firm that helps technology and marketing leaders to win, serve and retain customers.

Adam Neumann, Co-Founder & CEO, WeWork
Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder, Conductor

Wil Reynolds,
Founder, Seer Interactive

How to use Google's shift to more PPC showing up to your advantage in SEO. While you are losing real estate you are gaining intelligence, if you just know where to go look.
This presentation will cover how to use data from PPC to help make stronger business cases for keyword prioritization, SEO, and content.

Alison Levine, Everest Expedition Team Leader & New York Times Bestselling Author

Mike Grehan, CMO, Acronym

Google declares that we’re “Marketing in the Age of Assistance” and we surely are. The smartphone is now the primary device for accessing the internet. And we’ve learned to expect so much more from it, and from our information providers. Note I said “information providers” not Google, or search engines. The notion of relevancy is still at the core of search results. But the bar has been lifted so much higher. To be relevant “and useful in the moment” is what end users now expect, indeed, demand. We need to “reframe” and often “rethink” some of our earlier learnings in search, and modern marketing generally. Peek behind the curtain with SEO pioneer Mike Grehan to find out how Google uses machine learning, deep neural networks and cognitive science as the principal drivers in search. And how digital assistants are creating a new predictive, concierge style search-and-service content experience.

Matt Crowley, Sr. Director of Optimized Services,MoreVisibility | Lisa Morris Bonsall, Clinical Editor, Lippincott Nursing Center

Any organization that publishes content has likely faced the challenge of balancing the need to grow traffic organically with the need to monetize their content. There are often competing needs; do you put content behind a gate and risk losing organic traffic or offer unrestricted access but risk losing conversions? We would all love to run the same paywall tests as publications such as The New York Times, but that’s not always accessible to every brand. We would also all love to think that organic traffic growth cures all when it comes to business goal growth, but that’s not always the case. Join NursingCenter and MoreVisibility in a discussion of key lessons learned from running content gating experiments, dealing with duplicate content issues, and supplementing legacy content types with new formats.

Simon Lesser, CEO, Dragon Metrics

o It's a big world out there, and the US is only less than 10% of the world's total internet users. A killer global SEO strategy is crucial for success in the global marketplace, but international SEO brings its own set of unique challenges.We'll dive deep into the top regional search engines like Baidu, Yandex, and Naver, learning about differences in the algorithm, SERP, and how to optimize for each one. Then, we'll focus on the top tips and considerations for optimizing your site for international audiences and non-Google search engines.

James Patterson,
Senior Manager, SEO,
American Eagle

While SEO is typically viewed as one channel within a larger digital marketing portfolio, the research that we do can drive content and technical decisions that impact all digital marketing channels. Identifying useful SEO data and using it to educate key functional teams is a core competency of an in-house SEO. Whether you are involved in early Ideation or tactical Implementation, SEO data should feed your decision making.

Cheryl Snapp Conner, Snapp Conner PR & Forbes Contributor

Moderator: Danny Goodwin, Editor-in-Chief,Search Engine Journal

Speakers:
• Ren Lacerda, Senior Manager, SEO, Wayfair
• Ali Harris, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Bitdefender
• Thom Craver, Senior SEO Analyst, CBS Interactive
• Patricia Atrian, SEO Sr. Director, Ticketmaster

Monica Woodley, Global Head of Content & International Head of PR, Legg Mason

Monica will share how she built the global content strategy at Legg Mason Global Asset Management, based on corporate values, long-term business strategy, medium-term marketing goals and short-term, tactical market reaction – all finetuned by SEO. Learn how to balance the competing demands for content and maintain a consistent, effective strategy.

Jennifer Anderson, Executive Director, Digital & Social Media
Sealed Air

How a traditional industrial manufacturing company is evolving its approach to digital content marketing -- transforming processes and platforms to drive visibility, engagement and customer conversion.

Kenyon Adei-Manu, Product Manager, Amazon | Stephan Bajaio, VP Professional Services, Conductor |
Bill Sebald, Founder,
Greenlane Search Marketing

Duane Forrester, VP Insights, Yext

Jeremiah Andrick,
Executive Director, Ecommerce VR, HTC

We all like to say our marketing is customer-centric, but how do we know for sure. The power of Customer Journey maps is the lens they provide into how customers engage with brands in pursuit of a goal. Learn to take branded interactions, data and empathy to build better content and create better repeatable workflows to bring growth and change your organization.

Dan Sherman, CMO, Ski.com

Ski.com, the largest provider of ski vacation packages in North America, will recap the journey they took to find content marketing success while balancing SEO opportunities, company goals and the bottom line with a small team and limited resources.

Moderator: Mike Grehan
Lou Cohen, CMO, Wolters Kluwer
Kelly Watkins, Head of Global Marketing, Slack
Louis Gray, Analytics Advocate, Google
Lisa Kalscheur, SVP Marketing, Newscred
Duane Forester,VP Insights, Yext
Christoph C. Kemper, Founder & CEO of LinkResearchTools