Today we are publishing the second part of the interviews, that we took from great internet marketing professionals at SEMcamp. We are sure everybody will find something useful from what they said.
Bas van den Beld, Founder and Owner at State of Digital
First of all thank you for giving your speech, it was really interesting. So, how do you like SEMcamp?
It’s brilliant actually. It’s my first time I’m in Ukraine so I am really excited to be here, and I think that it’s a really interesting market as well. I’ve heard a lot about Ukraine from friends of mine that it’s growing, and people are really eager to learn. And I think it is order in the room as well. It looks really nice and it is really well organized, and so I am really excited.
We are really pleased to hear that. Have you spotted any peculiarities of our audience and what interests them the most?
What I’ve heard at least is that they like links a lot, so it’s a lot about link building. I think that that’s not necessarily the best way of looking at things, but it’s an interesting way of looking at things, because in the end it’s all about getting somebody else to do something for you, namely in this case getting links.
What SEO and internet marketing topics would you like to see discussed at future SEMcamp conferences?
I would say go as broad as you can. Search is not just about optimizing anymore, and it’s not about title tags anymore. You have to do that as well, but it’s more than just that. So, what I was talking about looking at consumers, doing counter marketing, having to interact between all the different channels – I think that is really important to have on the conference.
So what would you advice our marketers to do, what are the tendencies, and what should they focus on?
First of all, they should focus the most on the target audience. So, it’s about getting understanding of why people are online, what they are doing, what makes them happy, what makes them click, and what makes them share things. I think that’s the first huge step, and that’s the big step to take. Do that first and then look at what type of content you can share, and not the other way round.
And the last question is if you didn’t end up in marketing what career would you choose?
It’s a good question. I studied history, so probably I would be teaching history.
I am sure you would be successful
Who knows 🙂
Thank you for coming, once again. It was a great pleasure to see you here.
Thank you for having me here.
Jose Truchado, Online Marketing Entrepreneur and Executive Coach at Expedia
From your speech I understood that you take your team very seriously and prefer creative team building. For example, while interviewing people for your team do you have any unusual questions, or unusual tests?
I don’t look at their experience so much, I look a lot more at how proactive they are, how interested they are. So, for example, I hired somebody last year, they had no experience what so ever in SEO to manage the Nordics, which is one of the most difficult arias that we work in. We’ve grown I think close to 70% in the Nordics this year with somebody who didn’t have even any experience. So for me it is quite important people wanting to thrive and to learn. That’s really important. I am not looking at people that I am used to doing things in a certain way and they just want to continue doing that. I also look at projects they do in their free time. If they are curious and they learn by experimenting and doing different things – that’s quite important for me, even more important than the places they worked at in the past.
That’s a great point. If to step away from human resources management what in your opinion will be the most effective methods of search engine marketing in the nearest future?
Marketing in social media is going to play more and more important part. It depends on how Google handles it. So the Google authorship is quite important I think. Google tries to put a lot of emphasis on Google plus. Moz.com released search engine factors 2013 and they put Google+ as the second ranking factor. We’ve been talking about social and social media marketing tactics for many years and this is now the time when social is really becoming important.
And the last question is how do you like SEMcamp?
I love it!
And what would you wish our audience, what should they do, how should they develop?
I think maybe to be a little bit more interactive with the speakers. It would make easier for the speakers if they are more interactive. Maybe I should have asked them first that they could have interrupted me at any point to ask the questions. Because sometimes you think of questions and by the end of the presentation you do not remember the questions any more. So maybe creating that kind of interactivity between the audience and the speaker would be great.
And in terms of the work they do, what would you wish them?
For SEM? It’s been perfect, I really enjoyed it. I can’t criticize it really, it’s been really good. I think the quality of the speakers is really good, I’ve enjoyed everything. The translation was really good. So I can’t really complain.
We are thankful to Bas and Jose for answering our questions!
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