Some of us from Best Online Universities, LLC were lucky enough to attend LeadsCon at the Mirage in Las Vegas earlier this week. For those not in the industry, LeadsCon is the pioneering conference and expo dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation industry. The audience of about 2,600 people consisted of representatives from a variety of verticals from B2C and B2B lead generation, including online education, insurance, credit cards, mortgage, home improvement, senior housing, health care, and others.
Some of our favorite presentations came from Carol B. Aslanian, SVP of Aslanian Market Research who outlined the demographic profile of online learners today, Michael Norton, Behavioral Scientist at Harvard Business School who discussed the co-creation continuum and Nathan Labenz and Jay Gierak of Stik who made a case for the importance of social proof in search.
Operating in the online education space, we’re back from LeadsCon excited to implement some of the many ideas discussed, in order to make our web properties even more useful for potential students. If we had to come up with a list of 3 key takeaways for our industry, they would be as follows:
- Personalization is rewriting the rules of paid and organic search. Social search is going to become important for all online marketers and businesses in the coming year – social annotations such as Google +1 provided a 20-200% increase in CTR (click through rate) in one study.
- The lead generation industry is seeing a shift from a sole focus on monetization to a more consumer-centric view.
- Despite the growth and chatter around for-profit institutions in recent years, a majority of students (62% in one study) don’t recognize a difference between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions.
What did you find to be your key takeaways, LeadsCon attendees?