Online Marketing Blog

As a long time and trusted marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing gets to work with some amazing B2B technology and SaaS companies. One of those companies is StrongMail.  Today Kristin Hersant, VP of Corporate Marketing joins an esteemed group of marketers and thought leaders ranging from Guy Kawasaki to David Meerman Scott interviewed here at Online Marketing Blog.

Kristin is a firecracker of smarts and energy towards online marketing. Her company StrongMail is the leader in an array of email marketing and social media marketing services. Read on to learn more about the future of Email Marketing and its intersection with Social Media:

Please share a bit about your marketing background and StrongMail. What types of companies do you serve?

The last session of the day on the last day of SES London was on Social Media in the Marketing Mix with Kristjan Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing in Iceland and Mel Carson of Microsoft in London.

Kristjan started things off: What happens when a volcano goes wrong?  He recounted the situation last year when Eyjafjallajokul erupted (say that 3 times fast – I dare you) and so much ash spread into the atmosphere that hundreds of planes were grounded from flying.  This, you can imagine, had a dulling effect on Icelandic tourism. Iceland regularly has more tourists than there are people who live there.

Understand that everything we do in broadcast and digital needs to take advantage of all channels available.

The first session of the day for me here at SES London is a topic I’ve been interested in for a very long time: video marketing and optimization. It’s a great panel featuring Jonathan Allen from Incisive Media, Paul Carff from Google and Will Critchlow from Distilled. All three speakers offered plenty of interesting tips.

First up is Paul Carff from Google who is a Developer Advocate that helps people learn about and use APIs.

YouTube is the #1 online video site with 2 billion streams per day. 70% of all online video viewing happens on YouTube. Online video is the fastest growing medium in history. 52% of people took action as a result of watching video online. 77% of Americans online watched a video last month. The amount of time people spend watching online video is growing. Their attention and engagement is higher than traditional broadcast.

Over the past 7 years of blogging, one could say I’ve become quite familiar. Online Marketing Blog has received a lot of kudos recently but more importantly, our experience with reviewing others’ blogs has been a learning experience to say the least. I’ve looked at over 1,000 blogs to create the BIGLIST and recently reviewed the top UK Online Marketing Blogs as well.

Here are a few key characteristics I’ve found that represent a highly productive blog in terms of branding, community, SEO, PR, recruiting and taking mindshare away from the competition:

1. URL - Pick something short and easy to remember.  blog.domainname.com works great, so does domainname.com/blog or even, companynamblog.com. Try to avoid obscure or long URLs like www.domainname.com/files/about/blog?home or worse, companyname.blogspot.com. If you’re a business, then act professionally and use a domain name you control for your blog URL.

Either as a consumer that loves different brands or a B2B marketer who’s looking to connect with prospects, Facebook Fan pages offer an easy way to engage with others that have similar interests.  It’s easy enough to find the brand names you know, but when looking using other criteria, it can be tough. There’s a lot of room for improvement in the way Facebook Fan pages are organized but here are several ways to find the business pages you might be looking for:

Fan Page List - This site aggregates information on Facebook Pages for Brands & Products, top Users as well as for Celebrities, Athletes, Politicians and other categories. Additionally, there are listings for top Twitter users and brands on FourSquare. It’s a cornucopia of social searching. It also has numerous sorting options for each category.

Online Marketers world-wide are looking towards content marketing as a way to educate, connect with and influence prospects to become customers. Content can also play a big part in lead nurturing and engagement with existing customers.

With 9 out of 10 B2B marketers using content in their mix and predictions from the likes of Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer, “Content Marketing is Critical in 2011” and Ashley Friedlein of Econsultancy, “Content strategy & content marketing: the King is back” there’s much cause for optimism.

But like many increasingly trendy marketing topics, marketers often rush in without experience, expertise or realistic expectations.  Marketing with content has been the core of our own strategy at TopRank Online Marketing for many years. I personally read and research the topic daily and our team implements content marketing strategies and tactics with just about all of our clients, many of which are formidable content marketers themselves.

The widespread use of social media has fundamentally changed how people communicate and share information. According to recent data from comScore, Facebook now accounts for 12.3 percent of the time spent online in the U.S. versus 7.2 percent just a year ago. Twitter now counts approximately 200 million accounts and over 110 million tweets per day.

This downright addiction to social media has made an impact in virtually every industry as companies seek to create strategies to engage on the social web. Public relations is certainly no exception as practitioners seek to communicate with, and hear from consumers, as well as using social channels to share information with key audiences.

Social Media Marketing has taken a firmer position within the marketing mix of most companies in one way or another. For some, social web participation is a natural fit. For many others, being more social isn’t in the management DNA.  Regardless, marketers are held accountable for improving the bottom line and with that comes a number of common “headaches”.

Yesterday I did a webinar with a client of ours, NewsUSA, on social media headaches. As part of the prep for that, I wrote out answers to some of the questions and thought it would be of interest to our Online Marketing Blog readers as well.

Getting Approval From the C-Suite

What is the most important piece of information you need to get approval for a social media campaign?

Thank you to all who participated in our little poll seeking votes for the best UK Online Marketing Blog last week. That link will take you to the full list as well as the voting results.

The purpose was to create awareness of UK centric blogs that share as much of a passion for Online Marketing topics as we do here at Online Marketing Blog. 35 blogs were listed and many put effort into promoting themselves via blog post, Twitter, email, Facebook and other channels of communication. That combined promotion effort plus our own drove thousands of visits to the post and subsequently back out to the individual UK Online Marketing blogs that were listed.

While at OMS and SES Accelerator this week, I bumped into (literally) my friend Jay Baer who has just published a new book with co-author Amber Naslund called The Now Revolution. I am reading it now and may do a full review, but I asked Jay about a few core principles or shifts from the book that I think are essential for helping organizations transform.

The first deals with the notion of companies “doing social” vs. “being social”.  Having personally provided social media marketing advice to a variety of companies ranging from startups to a $100 billion corporation, questions often center around “How do we do social media right?”. In other words, social media and the social web are viewed as a tactic.

Google sites handle about 88 billion searches each month. YouTube is the second most popular search engine second only to Google. Facebook is now over 600 million users. Twitter has nearly 200 million accounts. LinkedIn is at 101 million users and FourSquare grew 3,400% in 2010.

The variety of options for customer marketing and engagement ranging from social media to SEO to email marketing to online advertising can be overwhelming. As a result, some of the most common online marketing questions I hear from client side marketers revolve around, “How to decide which tactics are best?”

Answering that question starts with a clear understanding of goals, customers and a flexible online marketing strategy that assembles the right mix of tactics and measurement practices. Most companies are looking for more customers and to retain those they have, but the question is,

At a reported $3 million per 30 second spot, Super Bowl advertising is big business. For a multimillion dollar investment, brands should be maximizing every opportunity to reach potential customers. Which advertisers took advantage of a customer base actively engaged in the big game to extend the conversation? Not too many.

In the much-hyped ads airing during the Super Bowl, big brands primarily went with small printed web addresses at the end of the commercials as a next step for viewers. They lacked direct calls to action and didn’t leverage the fact that many viewers are online while watching television. A well executed ad with a specific call to action to send a tweet with a particular branded tag would be a logical fit.