Online Marketing Blog

In Driving ROI Across B2B Marketing Strategies at SES New York yesterday, Maura Ginty from Autodesk aimed to teach marketers the context of B2B digital, alongside the principles of B2B marketing. In sharing her A to Z tips on B2B ROI improvements, Ginty gave marketers 26 great takeaways to help prove and build the value of their digital marketing strategy.

With host Laura Roth, Senior Conference Manager, SES Conference & Expo on hand to guide the conversation and Lauren Vaccarello, Senior Director of Online Marketing, Salesforce.com at our digital disposal (she was tweeting in to the session), there was a lot to be learned from these experienced marketers.

A- Audience. You have to be able to reach the right audience members with the right message, at the right time.

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.

Social media marketing for B2B brands requires creativity, scalability and buy-in across the organization. Just after the Tuesday morning keynote at SES New York, Adriel Sanchez, Senior Director of Demand Generation at SAP and Jasmine Sandler, CEO at Agent-cy, shared with attendees a framework for building a B2B social media machine in their session led by TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden.

Social media management changes constantly, Sandler reminded participants as she took the stage. The opportunity for B2B brands continues to grow; one-to-one conversations are happening across social platforms, blogs, forums, and elsewhere across the web.

Companies need to first understand the social media landscape – where are we today. where are we going, who is already here? If you’re into social media, you need to have a global perspective, Sandler said. Marketers must be thinking of social and its relationship with:

Recent changes to social ad platforms mean marketers may have a bit of catching up to do in the social advertising arena. Twitter recently launched their new advertising API, allowing marketers to work with Ads API Partners to manage Promoted Products and Accounts ads; eMarketer expects Twitter ad revenue to grow to over $800 million by 2014, to account for 12.7% of all social network ad revenues.

Meanwhile, Facebook doubled their mobile ad revenue YoY in Q4 2012. Their emphasis on mobile, added capability for targeting based on web browsing history and the debate over ROI have even seasoned marketers on the lookout for advanced ad optimization and performance advice. The opportunity for lead gen and customer acquisition through paid social is massive, with proper planning, quality content and great optimization.

Companies all over the social web are confronted with the need for  ROI in corporate blogging.

Despite blogs being named as more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, many marketers and communicators  are falling short.

Why? A focus on self-promotion has many brands running out of content  ideas and time to show a return on their blog content investment. Tolerance for quantity of content and superficial social engagement metrics as a basis for results is diminishing.

Despite these challenges, blogs provide an incredible content marketing platform for connecting directly with prospects, the media, customers, new employees, investors and the industry at large.

To offer companies a roadmap to realizing these business blogging and content marketing benefits, I will be giving a presentation at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego on Tuesday, April 9th.

SES New York is coming up in just a few weeks and I really can’t wait.  New York is easily one of my favorite cities in the world and I’m looking forward to joining thousands of marketers who feel the same March 25-28.

Today’s online marketing draws us in many directions and with the ever changing landscape of search, social media and technology, the demands on marketers to view their world from 360 degrees is more important now than ever.

At this year’s SES New York event, I’ll be giving a brand new presentation, Creative Content Marketing: Winning the Hearts, Minds and Wallets of Today’s Distracted Consumer on Thursday March 28th at 9:30am, which digs down into why, for who and how of tapping into ongoing creative ideas for content marketing that actually works.

Astronauts Tom Marshburn, Kevin Ford and Chris Hadfield chat live from the International Space Station with #NASASocial participants.

February 20th, NASA hosted a special event at their Washington headquarters in which a group of their social fans attended a day of tours, expert talks and even a livechat with astronauts on the International Space Station. My son and I are fortunate to have participated and on top of the insider look we had at NASA research, we learned a great deal about the power of social media advocacy, as well.

So what happens when an organization puts 150 of their loyal social media fans in one room for a fantastic, exclusive experience? Brand building and social reach magic, judging by the results of yesterday’s #NASASocial.

For the past 2 years we’ve been publishing a list of the top UK focused internet marketing blogs in advance of speaking at events. This year I’ll be presenting on Creative Content Marketing at SES London February 19th.

Since bloggers do more than just write posts, I’ve shifted the focus of this list from blogs to individuals. With the increasing importance of authorship and personal brands, I think it’s important to consider individual bloggers and the content they share whether its tweets, status updates, or other useful information created online.

As a result, the people on this list are recognized for their overall social sharing about “online marketing” related topics, not just blogging.

Thanks to nominations made from some really helpful UK bloggers and the folks at Traackr we’ve created the Top 50 UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers.

On a gray and snowy morning marketers from the healthcare, finance and government sectors headed to the Swedish American Institute in downtown Minneapolis for a MIMA event titled Interactive Innovation in Highly Regulated Industries.

Moderated by Melissa Berggren of Allina Health, the panel of experts included Marti Nyman, Director of Innovation and Strategy at UnitedHealth Group, Ward Tongen, Principal Digital Marketing Strategist at Medtronic and Kelli Carlson-Jagersma, Collaboration-Strategist VP, Wholesale Social Strategy at Wells Fargo.

Gaining approval on marketing strategies, content and tactics within highly regulated industries can be rife with challenges. Including regulation from governing bodies and documents (like HIPPA, the FDA and the SEC), resistance from your compliance and legal departments, and a ‘we can’t do that’ attitude when it comes to innovation.

Matt Ridings & Michael Brito Advocating For Employee Advocacy

Employee engagement is key in improving productivity in any industry.  A happy employee is much more likely to be more productive than their counterparts.

A recent study from the National Business Research Institute (NBRI) shares just how important it is to keep employees engaged.  Findings include:

• Engaged employees product twice as much work product in the time as unengaged employees
• The average adult spends a quarter to a third of their waking life at work
• 40% – 80% of customer satisfaction is affected by employee attitudes

Additionally NBRI identified the following six traits of engaged employees:

1. Believe in their organization
2. Have the desire to work to make things better

Historically, link building was critical for companies to appear in search results, as links have long been an important signal to search engines. However, the new link building is about mentions, social visibility, and building your company’s presence, says Alison Groves, Product Coordinator at Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Groves presented her three simple steps to link building for businesses in a presentation this morning at NMX Las Vegas. Her process, she says, revolves around relationship building and nurturing in order to earn mentions from relevant websites. We need to focus less on the technical and more on attracting targeted traffic by getting our sites in front of the people most likely to be interested in our product or service, she said.

With those goals in mind, here are Groves’ three simple steps for link building:

I am amazed at how much Debba Haupert (@girlfriendology) was able to cover in one short session at NMX Las Vegas.  Debba’s session on Pinterest proved to be very informational and provided practical advice and tools that marketers can use to better engage their followers.

Many brands are still struggling to determine if Pinterest is a platform that will work for their business.  Companies that have taken the leap may be unsure of how exactly to use Pinterest and what their strategy should be.

The numbers don’t lie.  Pinterest has proven that it has staying power.

• 10.4 million users
• 25 million uni visitors/month
• 1/3 use for shipping inspiration
• Average time spent: 1hr 17 min
• Draws more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and youtube combined