The 19th and 20th of June saw the European leg of the A4U conference series touch down in Barcelona.
If you aren’t already familiar with A4U and its conference series, it is a trade show aimed at the affiliate or performance marketing sector with a multi day, multi track series of seminars on related topics. There aren’t many conferences aimed specifically at the affiliate sector in Europe, but this is one of the biggest with typical crowds between 1,000 and 1,500 attendees.
This years Europe leg took place in an unusually dull Barcelona, but the sessions at least were full of action packed hints and tips for affiliate marketers.
Particular highlights for me included a great presentation by Bas Van Den Beld from State of Search discussing the psychology of sales from an affiliates perspective, comparing offline marketing efforts in forward thinking retailers to online parallels. Word of mouth and peer pressure are among the most powerful forms of viral marketing, and affiliates (infact, everyone involved in marketing at any level) need to sit up and think about how they can use these psychological cues on their sites to positively influence their conversion rates. You can see his entire presentation here on slideshare.
Another highlight was watching a completely different type of presentation, this time from Kev Gibbons from content marketing agency Quaturo.com – who’s presentation was literally stuffed with breakdowns and hints on no less than fifty (yes, 50!) individual marketing tools and how they can be used to improve your marketing, efficiency, and ultimately bottom lines. There was far too much to go into in this post, but you can download the entire deck right here.
I was lucky enough to speak as well on the first day, on the topic of “the new rules for affiliate site architecture” which despite the drab sounding moniker, was actually quite a fun thing to present. You can read a write up over on State of Search: Martin MacDonald A4U Presentation.
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Martin is Inbound Marketing Director at Expedia EAN. In his career he has executed organic campaigns in industries from Gambling to Entertainment before moving to Travel. He is a regular speaker at conferences worldwide about inbound marketing, and regular writer and contributor to respected publications on the topic.
