Online Marketing Blog

The afternoon of Day One at SES New York featured a high-level mobile marketing panel  hosted byDana Todd, SVP of Global Marketing at Performics.  Michael Bayle, Senior VP and General Manager at ESPN Mobile, Eric Litman, Chairman & CEO at Medialets and Brendon Kraham, Head of Global Mobile Sales and Product Strategy at Google shared the stage and their extensive knowledge on the current and coming states of mobile marketing.

The following is a collection of mobile marketing tips and takeaways based on today’s presentation, plus liveblog selection from the panel. Note that this is not a verbatim transcript, but the highlights from the panel discussion.

Staying up to date with your website’s analytics can seem like a full-time job. If you use Google Analytics, this past summer you were forced to adopt the newest version. Google Analytics version 5 brought a new interface and new reports. For some, that meant learning where all the reports moved. Aside from the obvious learning curve, many people had to spend more time to accessing simple metrics.

Today’s fast-moving business sometimes requires you to do a lot more while you are on-the go. Unfortunately, like most Web-based analytics graphs, the graphs in Google Analytics require Flash to render properly. Adobe Flash doesn’t fare so well on mobile browsers, especially those mobile browsers running on Apple mobile devices. So how do you stay connected to your Web analytics while on the go?

As a disclaimer before his session Jason Falls (@jasonfalls) admitted that there were probably 5-10 more qualified individuals in the room for the presentation.   But he was the one chosen for the job!  One of the reasons being that he could distill (similar to his favorite bourbon) mobile down into easy to consume information.

What we learned in the session was what we should be paying attention to, and what is the “star trek” B.S. that we shouldn’t be paying attention to yet.  Jason’s presentation was flush with factoids, his take on mobile, and a no B.S. approach to optimizing mobile for customer experience.

Spit-Balling Some Mobile Stats

Another disclaimer – Jason didn’t include his statistics on his presentation slides but did note that the majority of his information came from Tom Webster, comScore, Nielsen, and mobithinking.com.  Did you know:

This afternoon I attended the panel presentation titled ” Local Myth Busters – Local Optimization Facts Proven or Debunked” which featured four very knowledgable panelists who provided a great mix of instruction and high level tactics.  This session was very focused on Google Places and finding a way to stand out from your competition.

If you are responsible for local marketing or would like to begin implementing a local/mobile marketing strategy these are some tips you don’t want to miss.  Below I have included what I considered to be highlights from the presentations.

Traditional SEO & Citations: Andrew Beckman (@Andrew_Beckman)

When implementing traditional SEO you’re on the hunt for backlinks.  When deploying a local search strategy you want to populate your “place” data among different channels in a cohesive way.  Citations (or mentions of your business) are key for ranking algorithms from search engines like Google.  How can you determine the value of a particular citation?

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego.  He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing.  Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy.  The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

The New Year will soon be here and we are looking forward to continuing to learn from some of the top marketing minds on the web about the strategies and tactics that will shape  online marketing efforts in 2012 and beyond. To help you get a jump start, I have compiled a list of books coming out in 2012 that cover a range of online marketing topics including:  mobile, social media, content and search engine marketing. Enjoy.

[Note from Lee: We didn't include second editions, re-releases in paperback or books that didn't have cover images uploaded yet.]

Mobile, Local, Location Based Marketing

Mobilized Marketing: Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Marketing (Wiley) by Jeff Hasen

Local and mobile search is being used more frequently by customers on their smart phones and other devices now more than ever.  As local search becomes more and more prevalent, marketers must ask themselves what can they do to incorporate this marketing strategy into their arsenal.

According to a recent release by ComScore, nearly 3 billion search queries contain local terms each month.  For companies that have a local presence, top visibility on local search is essential or that traffic will simply go to competitors.  Google Maps is one of the most frequently used local search destinations and even comes standard on many devices including the iPhone.  Google Places provides a great opportunity to begin marketing on a local level to your potential customers.

Photo from our interview with Avinash at SES Hong Kong

The morning keynote speaker for the 2011 MIMA Summit was none other than Avinash Kaushik co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google.  Avinash was a very funny and engaging speaker.  Nothing was off limits during his keynote.  Caught in the crosshairs of Avinash’s presentations were what he called “small” local companies (General Mills, 3M, etc) that dared to provide a “less than ideal” user experience.

Innovation was the topic of the morning’s keynote, ranging from which companies are a good (and bad) example of implementing innovation to proper metrics to show success.

What Are the 3 Definitions of Innovation?

The web is flush with change and innovation. Gone are the days of linear information flow and incremental growth. Content flows in every direction through a variety of platforms, formats and devices.  The mass adoption of the social and mobile web have facilitated a revolution of information access, sharing and publishing at a scale never before experienced.

Access to information for discovery has traditionally been most associated with search. According to comScore, Google handles over 11 billion queries a month. But did you know, Twitter delivers over 350 billion tweets each day? Facebook is now over 800 million users and Google Plus has had a flood of new users as well, with estimates now approaching over 50 million. Social media is ripe for discovery as well as engagement.

Need to learn more about smartphone and mobile SEO best practices? Let’s start with a few statistics:

According to an infographic from Microsoft Tag, 51% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from a retailer with a mobile specific web site, however: only 4.8% of retailers have a mobile web site.

A recent study by Google, “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users” reports 77% of smartphone users visit search engine websites followed by social networks. And nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.). Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions, with YouTube seeing 200 million mobile playbacks a day, according to Eric Schmidt.

The “Smart Mobile Marketing” session was a panel discussion, moderated by TopRank CEO Lee Odden. To begin the discussion, Lee opened with a question for the room of 80+, “How many people in the room have developed a mobile version of a site?” 3-4 hands slowly raise. And with that, the stage is set: There is a lot of learning to do surrounding mobile marketing.

The session panel consisted of 2 leaders and veterans of the mobile marketing industry, Deborah Hall and Michael J. O’Farrell.

Deborah Hall

Hall founded web2mobile 3 years ago, frustrated with the user experience when trying to access a site via a smart phone. One of the greatest challenges she noticed was the upload speed, or lack thereof, of sites.

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.