The Online Marketing Summit’s 23-city tour made a stop in Denver this year. 90octane’s Brooke Caesar spoke at the conference and various staff members attended sessions that covered topics such as social media, search, email, demand generation, usability and integrated marketing efforts. Keep reading for some key takeaways from the June 23rd conference.

Social media marketing is a hot topic. Many companies are feeling internal and external pressures to launch a social program and the overall message at OMS Denver was if you aren’t ready, don’t have a strong strategy or don’t have the resources, don’t be afraid to hold off until the time is right. In addition, here some of the latest social statistics shared from various sessions:

• 1 billion items (links, photos, status, notes, etc.) are added to Facebook each week.
• 74% of people say one of the values of social media is the ability to increase traffic to websites
• Social tactics are influencing SEO more and more. In real-time search, which is becoming increasingly popular on the engines, social media content is indexed by engines up to five times faster than traditional content.

A consistent theme throughout many sessions at the OMS conference was the importance of testing. Small changes in a site’s usability can have a large effect on conversion statistics.

• What should you be testing? Test everything. Try testing text, copy (font, color, size), images and buttons. Even try an A/B test where you strip the landing page of navigation.
• Pay-per-click is a great place to start with A/B testing because there is less noise and it is a consistent source of traffic.
• Why is testing important? The average online user sees more than 1,800 online ads a day. Yours needs to be fully optimized or users won’t bother to click on them.

Below are some interesting facts and tips from OMS about email marketing:

• 73% of subscribers click “report spam” or “report junk” based on the “from” name of an incoming email, therefore make sure the name is easily recognizable.
• Over 50% of preview panes have images disabled by default. Make sure to optimize your emails so they have a clear and persuasive message even when images are not visible.
• Only 11% of those who open an email will scroll below the fold, so use enticing creative and copy to encourage users to make their way down the page.

Getting involved in mobile marketing is on the forefront of marketers’ minds right now. At OMS Denver, mobile marketing was often discussed in relation to social. Both can work together as part of your marketing strategy.

• Keep in mind you can leverage social infrastructure that already exists as part of your mobile strategy, instead of having to pay an SMS text message provider.
• When used together, mobile and social marketing make the real world digitally interactive.