DMN stopped by C3 yesterday, which was being held in a Broadway theater in midtown Manhattan, a lively location for a marketing event. I was there to speak to Conductor, the host of C3, a marketing technology company that creates digital marketing, SEO, and content marketing tools for businesses looking to increase web traffic, especially through organic search. They were recently acquired by WeWork, combining forces to weave together superior analytics and SEO traffic infrastructure with the future of shared office spaces.
Conductor has all the qualities of a lean, fast-moving startup, but marketers seem to be most impressed with consistent progress, not successful funding rounds. The two brands I spoke to, a marketing manager at Bitdefender and Solstice Sunglasses, told me a similar story: using Conductor takes a while to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it inserts neatly into high-level strategy decisions. Year on year, web traffic has increased for them both, and they’ve noticed more organic search results, which is great if you’re looking to simultaneously grow your audience and increase your brand awareness.
Ali Harris, worldwide head of digital marketing at Bitdefender, said that improved SEO capabilities through Conductor helps her find strategic priorities to pitch product teams and executives. “How do we reposition some of the existing content that’s already ranking so that we can have additional relationship content? How can we continue building out and extrapolating information we already have, and how do I make the arguments to our product team that they need to get out of their little tiny box?… that’s what I use Conductor for.”
Both customers brought up the long learning curve on being fully trained on the interface. I addressed this in my interview with Patrick Reinhart, VP of Digital Strategies for Conductor. He seemed unfazed by this question. “Was the product hard to use years ago? Yes. But something that we really spent a lot of time on is our UX and our UI, and it’s come a long way. But the product is much simpler to use. Is it the easiest thing on Earth to use? No, it’s not. But SEO is not the easiest profession.”
He’s right about that. SEO seems to be everywhere, and yet an elusive aspect of marketing that seems to slip through a marketer’s fingers despite an evolving marketing stack. Hubspot provides a good and comprehensive history of SEO here. But if you’re not a computer scientist and algorithms don’t come to you easily, you can feel a bit lost. Conductor aims to take the mystery out of SEO by presenting users with accurate reports on how pages of content performed over a given timeframe. So instead of wondering if the pages you’re slaving over makes a difference, especially within your own market, that information is available in real time, with the added benefit of being able to go deep in the weeds. “There are hundreds of levers that you can pull, but the art is knowing which levers to pull,” Reinhart said. “When you get into these projects, a lot of people don’t understand how many little things need to be done, but also that those little things are different for every type of site.”
For the most part, vendors focus on the 30,000 foot view: how can we make decisions easier for upper-level marketers? What’s the simplest interface we can use? But Conductor seems to take a dual approach of both granular and big picture that seems to deliver effective results. SEO is a complicated, ever-changing business, but it is crucial for marketers to understand what exactly people are looking for to be able to meet their needs. Keywords offer a valuable clue as to what a potential customer is searching for on the seemingly infinite internet. Conductor seems to offer the opportunity to help brands stand out like a beacon in a sea of white noise, directing the customer towards a frictionless buying experience that will build trust with a customer, establishing the consumer-brand relationship on good terms.
