The Tools of Pubcon SFIMA Summit 2017

Are presentations where you discover a new Marketing Tool / SaaS application better than those where you do not?

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) March 9, 2017

I was once told when I was just starting out that a conference is worth the price of admission if you discover just one new tool, tip, strategy, or tactic that improves your digital marketing prowess. That has statement has stuck with me though the years and when I attend conferences I make sure to pay attention to the tools being discussed by the speakers.

It has also occurred to me that this might be useful information for others to have and might be indicative of what the needs are of digital marketers as a whole at the current time. I’m not sure I’ll do this much analysis at all future conferences, but I wanted to take a peek at the tools mentioned by speakers at the Pubcon SFIMA Summit 2017 in their slide decks. Since I can’t sit in on all sessions, instead I waited for Pubcon to email out the slides. I then read over all of them looking for mentions of tools, screenshots, URLS, or logos of tool brands. I then counted them up per speaker, per tool, and per brand to come up with some idea of the marketing tool landscape as represented by the elite among us asked to speak at this event.

The Top Tools

There were 102 different tools that were mentioned by a speaker at the event. Out of those 102 only 6 were mentioned more than twice and 86 tools were only mentioned 1 time. When we look at the top 6 tools the first thing we’ll notice is that Google owns 3 of them. The only non-Google owned tools to be mentioned in the top five were AnswerThePublic.com, BuzzSumo, & SEMRush. SEMRush was the most mentioned tool not owned by Google.

There were a total of 16 tools that were mentioned at least twice in slide decks. Here there is a much larger variety of tools and of brands that own them.

Top Influencers

Out of the 52 speakers at the summit 6 of them mentioned more than 5 tools in their slide deck. 17 speakers mentioned 2 or more tools in their slide deck. I’ve chose to only chart the top 6 instead of showing how many tools speakers mentioned.

Top Brands

This is where things get interesting. Digital Marketing tools are a big business and getting more mentions at great shows like the SFIMA Summit 2017, Produced by Pubcon is a good way to increase sales and drive interest in a tool brand. These are the brands that scored the total mentions of their tools at the summit.

Google dominates this list with mentions of their paid advertising and keyword tools, their analytics tools, their social media tools, and their browser tools. No other platform appears in the top five except for Facebook and Snap Inc has two mentions due to their Spectacles product/tool.

Out of all of the tools mentioned only 5 brands were mentioned 3 or more times. There were a lot of well known SEO and Digital Marketing brands mentioned less than 3 times, that list includes; Moz, Raven Tools, WordStream, Acquisio, Adobe, and Hubspot.