Digital Summit Minneapolis Recap

Digital Summit season is in full swing! Last week, the team traveled to Minneapolis to meet and mingle with marketers from the heart of the midwest.

Who We Met

Customers

Minneapolis is home to some really big brands, many of whom also happen to be BL.INK customers! We enjoyed meeting in real life with our friends at Target, Best Buy, United Healthcare Group, and Optum Health.

Attendees

Attendees of the Summit hailed from SMBs and large corporations alike. We chatted with many small businesses about the importance of growing their brand with links. In contrast, in speaking with marketers from large, global companies such as 3M and Thomas Reuters, the topics of security and scalability were top concerns.

Fellow Sponsors

We were thrilled to chat with our fellow marketers from MailChimp, Sprout Social, Marketo, IBM, Email on Acid, and Genius Monkey at the summit. Sponsors bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise that supports the key ideas being shared at Digital Summit, so it’s great to share the floor with such amazing brands.

What we learned

Speakers

Brian Massey, Conversion Sciences, BL.INK advisor

Brian Massey calls himself a Conversion Scientist™ and he has the lab coat to prove it. The company he founded in 2007, Conversion Sciences, was one of the first agencies focused exclusively on website optimization. Brian has learned what works on the web through thousands of website tests.

We were thrilled to attend Brian Massey’s session since Brian is also a BL.INK Advisor. Some top takeaways from his session included using data to manage “helicopter executives” (yes, you guessed it, very similar to helicopter moms), stealing ideas that work, and driving design decisions with data to improve conversion rates.

Liza Dunning, Airbnb, BL.INK Customer

Liza is a creative lead at Airbnb where she’s helped shape the brand’s voice— starting with its rebrand, to its more recent mission-driven, community-led content.

Airbnb is a BL.INK customer, so it was great to see Liza on stage sharing thought-provoking experiences with the Digital Summit community. Liza talked about how millennials are shaping the marketing landscape, and how brands can shift their thinking to align with customer values.

90% of millennials trust recommendations, even from strangers, more than “marketing” per #DSMPLS (why ugc and #InfluencerMarketing matter) pic.twitter.com/7SJcWEeNoF

— Tom Pick (@TomPick) August 22, 2018

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Interesting Conversations with Attendees

We had lots of interesting discussions with event attendees. People are smart, thoughtful, and eager to learn. Here’s a quick sample of our interactions:

Q: I am a small business using Bitly to shorten URLs. Why should I use BL.INK?

A: As a small business, BL.INK is an affordable (hello: free plan!) and scalable option that allows you to brand your links without paying a premium. And when your brand grows, BL.INK is ready to grow with you, at your own pace.

Q: I’ve heard we shouldn’t use short links in email because they could get flagged as spam. Is that true?

A: Legacy short link providers can trigger a marketing email to be flagged as spam because they have a history of being used for nefarious purposes. Spammers have used legacy short links to obscure information about the link’s true destination. This is not the case with BL.INK, however. Our links DO NOT get flagged as spam, because our short URLs contain your trusted brand and/or real words.

Q: We’re an agency, so we use different tools for every client. Would BL.INK work for us?

A: BL.INK is a great tool for agencies because you can add multiple domains to use for branded links, and easily manage all of your clients in one platform without paying for individual accounts. In addition to being cost-effective, BL.INK enables you to track your clients’ links, which in turn gives you insights into the impact of your work for them. Easily gather data that tells a story about your work, and clients will be impressed.

See you at the next Digital Summit!

BL.INK is headed to a city near you! We’ll be in

• Chicago, IL: September 26th & 27th
• Raleigh, NC: November 14th & 15th, 2018
• Dallas, TX: December 4th & 5th, 2018

Find tickets today at digitalsummit.com!