Online Marketing Blog

Content marketing is all the rage, though brands still struggle to attract the right audience, engage readers and convert them to buyers. Simply publishing content is no guarantee anyone is going to see it – or that they’d even want to, if quantity is currently trumping quality.

Great content isn’t great until it’s discovered, consumed and shared, says Lee Odden, our CEO at TopRank Online Marketing and SES New York speaker. Lee gave his Creative Content Marketing: Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets presentation this morning to a room packed with marketers striving to improve their content strategy.

In advance of their SES New York session on social commerce, I wanted to see what tips and tricks moderator Mel Carson and speaker Deitra Mara could share with our readers. At 9:30 am March 28th, the two will join Tami Dalley from Salesforce to present Social Media Meet ROI: The Secrets to Driving Social Commerce.

Carson and Mara graciously participated in interviews prior to their session, to share their experience and advice with marketers looking to improve their social media channel awareness, content creation and social ROI.

Carson, formerly of Microsoft, is the founder of social, PR and personal branding consultancy Delightful Communications. As moderator, he’ll have his hands full with the two powerhouse speakers.  Carson told us, “I’d encourage anyone to come to see two very powerful women in the industry speak. Deitra and Tami bring a lot of insight into different tools and products, best practices and disciplines on how to prove the ROI in social media commerce exists and how to get more of it.”

“We’re moving from a world where we plan campaigns for the future, to one where we adapt campaigns to the moment.” – Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter’s VP of Global Brand Strategy and the keynote speaker this morning at SES New York.

Lunenfeld shared his vast experience and insight in real-time marketing in Optimizing Second Screen Engagement: Trends, Data & Insights. Mobile has certainly changed the way people find, consume and engage with information. Twitter came of age with the right tools, at just the right time, to answer the need for a real-time communication platform.

Now, said Lunenfeld, 85 percent of users say the phone is their primary way to access Twitter and the average mobile user follows 11 brands. Every 2.5 days, there are a billion tweets sent and over the past year, the amount of Twitter users has doubled.

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.

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.

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.

Phew! What a whirlwind week at SES Chicago.  While my TopRank Online Marketing teammates were taking SES Chicago by storm, I was holding down the homefront manning the blog, monitoring Twitter feeds, and helping in any way that I could.

We were fortunate to have an army of TopRank  staff speaking, attending, live blogging, and interacting for the entire conference including:

Lee Odden: CEO
Jolina Pettice:  Director of Client Accounts
Thom Craver: Senior Technical SEO Manager
Alexis Hall: Account Manager
Evan Prokop: Associate Account Manager
Miranda Miller: Content Marketing Manager

In this wrap up I’ve provided you with a 360 view of the conference which includes links to our live blogs, tweets, a video with keynote presenter Avinash Kaushik, and photos from the conference.  Enjoy!

95% of decisions are considered preconscious.  In fact, the majority of decisions we, as humans, make are automatic or based on “gut feel”, rather than conscious decision making.

So then why are so many businesses building websites for consumers who view and act based on their rational brain? This is the question Tim Ash (@tim_ash) posits during his SES Chicago session “Beyond the Click: Conversion in the Social World.”

The human brain, shaped by thousands of years of evolution, is highly influential on our online decision making. So marketers must look for opportunities to make the conversion process as intuitive, consistent and automatic as possible.

Taking the evolutionary approach, here are five strategies for increasing conversions in a social world, from Tim Ash.

It’s day 2 of SES Chicago, and the online marketing education is flowing full force.  I saw an excellent presentation about building a killer B2B social media strategy with Adriel Sanchez (@Adriel_S) of SAP.  With the sea of platforms, tactics, and schools of thought around B2B social media, it can be difficult to put together an actionable strategy that gets real results.

Follow the steps below to get your B2B social media strategy working for your business.

1. Forget Social Media, Think Content Marketing

Social media works best as a component of an overall content strategy.  The key is to think like a publisher, not a marketer.  This means avoiding the common pitfalls of being overly self-promotional or too sales oriented.