Online Marketing Blog

Sometimes it feels like I spend more time on the road than in Minnesota, but the Twin Cities has a fine digital marketing community that includes advertising, direct marketing, interactive, B2B, search, PR and communications groups that serve the needs of marketing and communications professionals in the region.

Networking locally can be incredibly important if you’re new to the area, want to connect with other professionals in your field or are in search of professional development and job opportunities. Below are a list of Minnesota (primarily Minneapolis & St. Paul) marketing and communications organizations that offer a range of opportunities for networking, education and industry involvement.

Picturesque view of Lake Minnetonka from the TopRank Online Marketing office

Today marks my 4 month anniversary at TopRank Online Marketing and almost 5 years in the online marketing industry.  It has been a goal of mine to learn as much as I possibly can from those who know the industry best.  In this seemingly short amount of time I have received, and continue to receive a top notch education at an unbeatable price.

I would like to share some of my experience to give other marketers interested in breaking into Internet marketing or continuing their online marketing education an idea of what it looks like from one person’s perspective.

Is your internet marketing strategy putting customers to sleep?

Compared to B2B companies, businesses that serve consumer audiences are typically focused on a much shorter sales cycle due to the cost and nature of the purchase.  They are searching for a one stop sale.  B2C companies typically target a single decision maker or customer segment instead of multiple decision makers and influencers.  As a result, the approach and internet marketing tactics mix needs to be more relevant to the consumer vs. the business buying experience.

The Holiday season gives B2C marketers plenty of reasons to improve their focus on best practices in internet marketing. Competition is tough for online buyers, so what should B2C marketers keep in mind with their Internet marketing strategy? Here are 5 essential tips for B2C marketers to get more sales online:

Michael DeHaven’s presentation at SES Chicago on “User Generated SEO” started with some actual user generated content from the audience. Before the session DeHaven gave 5 volunteers a bite sized Ghirardelli chocolate bar. In exchange for the treat he asked that each of the volunteers write a review of the chocolate and then share it with the rest of the audience.

What Was the Response?
The chocolate was called everything from waxy, to too sweet, messy, and melt in your mouth goodness. In contrast the packaging created by the Ghirardelli marketers was quite different, “take time to slow down and feel yourself melt with each bite.” As you can see the professional marketers took a much different approach than the consumers.

As part of my November cross country efforts to share search, social media and content marketing insights, I’ve switched from BlogWorld Los Angeles last week to ad:tech New York this week. I’m really looking forward to a great group of Search Marketing sessions at one of the the largest Interactive Marketing conferences in the world. In the past year I’ve been to London, San Francisco, Barcelona and many other great cities (even Cleveland!) but New York is by far one of my favorite places for a conference.

Earlier this year the amazing Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search at Digitas, was serving as a conference Marketing Master for the Search Engine Marketing track and she asked me to speak at my first ad:tech in San Francisco.  When I was asked to perform those same SEM track programming duties for the ad:tech New York show, I had to say yes!

A social media panel at a bowling alley? Yes, that’s how I started my Thursday morning this week, thanks to WCCO Radio (Minneapolis/St, Paul) which was host to a panel on Social Media for Business at Pinstripes in Edina.

Esteemed panelists included several familiar faces and brands including MIMA Board members: Brent Shiely (@brentshiely), Technology Director at General Mills; Ryan Arnholt (@arbenangstrom), Director of Interactive Marketing at OptumHealth; Jill Gutterman (@gigutterman), Director of Interactive Marketing at Rasmussen College; Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle), CEO of Hello Viking. Bryan C. Del Monte of the Del Monte Agency (a sponsor) was also on the panel.

An informal poll of the audience revealed that just about everyone in the audience of 250 or so was on Facebook and LinkedIn had even better participation. There were far fewer people on Twitter and only a handful had “checked in” on Foursquare.

SES San Francisco is coming up fast and when I discovered that Susan Bratton was giving the opening keynote presentation and on a topic that I have been interested in for years, I wanted to make sure we did a pre-conference interview. For backstory, I met Susan the first time at an ad:tech conference in Chicago while she was the conference chair. That was the same conference where I first met Frank Gruber and David Berkowitz so it was a great networking experience. Since then Susan and I have crossed paths a number of times at events like SXSW and online.

Susan is a real pioneer when it comes to Online Marketing and media. She’s the CEO at Personal Life Media and hosted the famous DishyMix podcast since 2005 interviewing numerous digital marketing industry leaders. Besides serving on the board of several technology companies, Susan is the founder of two industry associations, the IAB and the ADM. At SES San Francisco, Susan will be talking about Conversion Triggers and Persuasion Strategies for Digital Marketers.

The power of persuasion and the role it takes within online content marketing is really a key aspect of online marketing and something that has had a lot more play in the advertising world than SEO or PPC. In this excerpt of our recent interview, Susan gives a preview of her SES keynote and talks about how she’s learned from experience the value and best practices of “getting into the psyche of your customer” to improve online marketing results.

QR Code on Moscone Center San Francisco during SES 2010

QR codes are getting quite a bit of buzz lately and as a self-professed marketing nerd, I find them to be a clever way to connect mobile consumers with online digital content. There have been some pretty creative implementations of QR codes for promotions and mobile marketing too. You can put them anywhere printing is possible and even places it’s not.

A few interesting places I’ve seen them besides normal print advertising include: side of a building, t-shirts, tattoos and turning Central Park in NYC into a huge board game.

But as creative and interesting QR codes are, I’m a bit skeptical in terms of mass adoption. For some reason, I can’t imagine consumer behavior changing to start scanning codes for things when they could just search or enter a URL. There’s also the technology that needs to be adopted by more devices.

Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer.

How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online video in a given month. YouTube’s fact sheet states every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the network and 2 billion videos are being watched per day.

All this popularity has of course been driving a trend with marketers: the desire to create video as part of their digital marketing mix. Except sadly, it’s almost never approached strategically.

Agency-side marketing/PR/digital pros: how many times have you had a client approach you after creating a web video and said “hey, we made this video, now make it go viral!”

Think branding only falls in the B2C court? Think again.

In fact, three of the top 10 brands in 2009, as ranked by Interbrand, generate a sizable amount of revenue from their B2B customers: IBM, Microsoft and GE.

As a B2B marketer your brand is your most valuable asset.

B2B branding is less about cool, hip monikers (the Apples and Starbucks of the world) – and more about thought leadership.

Particularly in down economies, B2B prospects and customers conduct significant research leading up to purchases. That means you as a marketer have to educate them early on, and establish your brand as a trusted resource that gets their problems and has the solution.

To help your organization be seen as the thought leader it is, we’ve identified five B2B branding tips:

Our team works hard to stay on top of current best practices and as a result, we’re asked to speak at a variety of conferences, workshops and webinars. One of the goals at TopRank Online Marketing is to help companies better understand the current landscape of the digital marketing & PR environment. That includes strategies that can be executed more efficiently and marketing programs that can adjust to persistent change. Hopefully you’ll find an event below that fits your needs.

Feb 9, 2010
Webinar: Secrets to B2B Marketing Success
TopRank, along with our client Marketo and Ion Interactive will be collaborating to educate B2B marketers on best practices before and after lead generation with an upcoming webinar focused on pre-click, post-click, and post-conversion optimization.