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.

“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.

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.

YouTube Gen C Stats Show Cross-Device Connectivity as Video Giant Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Users

YouTube made two interesting announcements this week, one each on the YouTube Global and Google Agency blogs. In a study of  Generation C multiscreen behavior, Google researchers found:

• 47% of Gen C users interact with YouTube as a destination site by actively searching for videos.
• The amount of time Gen C spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from last year, when the number of Gen C viewers who regularly watch YouTube on smartphones caught up to the number of viewers tuning in on their PCs.
• 67% of Gen C watch YouTube on two devices or more, compared to 53% of the general population.

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.