Online Marketing Blog

In the 1989, Greg LeMond overcame a 50 second deficit in the final stage to win the Tour de France by 8 seconds.  He clocked the second fastest time trial ever recorded in the Tour de France.  So how did LeMond secure a stunning victor after 3 weeks and 2025 miles?

Optimization.  The optimization of his equipment, including aerodynamic handle bars and helmet, allowed LeMond to shave crucial seconds from his time and ride to victory in front of his less well optimized competitors.

Optimization results had a big impact on this race and they can have a big impact on business as well. I recently attended a session by Mikel Chertudi, Senior Director of Marketing of Adobe on Conversion Optimization: From Strategy to Execution. He offered strategies for businesses to optimize their digital marketing, in order to move ahead of the pack and secure a victory.

London Calling: Mobility & The Olympic Games

Sadly the 2012 Olympics came to an end this past week.  These Olympic Games were by far the most socially shared to date.  This infographic from Acme Packet shared some very interesting information on everything from estimates for viewership and devices used, to predictions for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

Twitter Co-Founders Preview Medium, A New Publishing Tool
Evan Williams a co-founder of Twitter describes Medium as “re-imagining publishing in an attempt to make an evolutionary leap.”  Medium takes submitted content like photos or text and organizes items that are similar into collections that multiple users and view, and add to.  Via Cnet.

On the second day of SES San Francisco, I headed to Lee Odden’s session Optimize B2B Content Across the Sales Cycle. Lee kicked off the presentation by polling the audience on how engaged they were in SEO, social media and content marketing. Hands raised all over the room.  When he asked how many were focused on content marketing across the sales cycle, it was striking that there relatively few hands raised.  As focused as we all are on conversions and purchases, we are not all capitalizing on the opportunity to attract and engage with our customer at every point in the buying cycle, and as a result, customers can slip away.

Hot off the heels of Avinash’s SES opening keynote, day two of SES San Francisco 2012 included another famous Googler to start the day. Matt Cutts (@mattcutts), Distinguished Engineer for Google, is the head of the Web spam team. He and his spam fighters, as he refers to them, make up part of the Google Knowledge Group.  He was a last-minute addition to the SES schedule, interviewed by Mike Grehan, VP and Global Content Director for Incisive Media, as part of the day two kickoff.

Big data is definitely a buzz word within the industry right now, but as I headed to Bryan Eisenberg’s (@thegrok) session at SES San Francisco, I wondered how the average company would be able to leverage the complexity of big data in a way that is meaningful and profitable.

Target made headlines last year when it inadvertently announced to the father of a teenager that his daughter was pregnant, by sending her coupons targeted to her pregnancy. Target knew that this young woman was pregnant before her father did, through the collection and analysis of data related to her past purchases. Although Target would later refine their coupon targeting strategy, this is a powerful example of a company using data in order to speak to the needs of their consumer.

As one of the original and largest conferences with a focus on search engine marketing, SES content runs the gamut of strategies and tactics to help marketers improve their performance. This isn’t an easy task in a world where platforms like Google and Facebook can change the rules from one minute to the next.

SES may have had it’s roots in search marketing, but like the “best of the best” search engine marketers, SES has adapted to the changing marketplace and evolved content offerings including: mobile, social, content marketing and big trends like Big Data.

The notion of optimization is increasingly viewed as a holistic approach that can impact discovery of content to anyone that is looking.  That bigger picture view of marketing performance optimization is something you’ll find in the tracks, presentations and tactics at SES San Francisco. It’s a real 360 degree view of what it means to optimize digital marketing to achieve any kind of marketing goal with any audience on any platform.

Certainly one of the best cities in the U.S. for a conference is San Francisco and in a little over 2 weeks the famous ClickZ Connected Marketing Week returns with 5 days of deep dive online marketing education, networking and knowing SEOs, plenty of fun.  A big part of the week is the SES San Francisco conference.

I’ve been attending SES conferences since 2005 and while both the online marketing industry and the SES conference have changed quite a bit, that change has spurred continuous innovation to the benefit of attendees, sponsors and speakers. You’ll find many sessions at 90 minutes instead of 45 or 60, so speakers can really get in-depth with their topics. There are also a number of sessions completely programmed by specific advisory board members, an approach that is new to this SES. To Win a Free Pass to SES San Francisco, Read on!

Dave Roth works as Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. That means Dave is a Search Engine Marketer that works for a search engine. I’ve known Dave for several years and we finally decided to do a video interview. Watch the interview below to learn what a search marketer that works for a search engine does, especially the challenges and opportunities in communications on search marketing performance in a large company.

Of course, we couldn’t talk to someone like Dave at Yahoo without mentioning the transition of search results to Bing over on the Yahoo site. What does this mean for SEO? What does it mean for Paid Search?  What’s the fate of Site Explorer and where does it fit within Bing Webmaster Tools? Is SEO good or bad for search engines? How much of a signal does social media provide search engines? We discuss these topics and more.

QR code on the side of a building? Geek cool.

Last week the West Coast SES Conference and Expo moved from San Jose back to its roots in San Francisco. It was a well attended show (5,000+ in 2009 vs. 6,000 in 2010 registrations), despite the illusion created by the voluminous Moscone.

As part of Connected Marketing Week, SES included a great mix of sessions. In fact, there were quite a few new sessions and solo presentations such as the one by Andy Beal on Online Reputation Management and the one on Content Marketing Optimization by moi.

Thanks to Ray ‘Catfish’ Comstock for providing the title of this post with his opening remarks during the session.  Joining Comstock on this panel, moderated by Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor, Inc.:

• Crispin Sheridan, SES Advisory Board & Sr Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP
• Bill Hunt,  SES Advisory Board & President, Back Azimuth Consulting
• Guillaume Bouchard, Co-founder and CEO, NVI

As a good writer and analyst, I have to ask ‘why’ for even the most obvious problem posed.  So why is enterprise level Search Engine Optimization (SEO) not for the weak? The obvious answer: a lot of people, a lot of content.  Enterprise is difficult because management of a lot of content and people is difficult to scale.

What’s the quickest way to catch a fish? Offer the right bait.

What’s the quickest way to get a B2B marketer to an SES session? Title it ‘B2B Marketing Tips.’

What’s the quickest way to get you to read this post? By diving right in to the top 5 tips shared:

1. Your conversion goals must become more sophisticated**
   Yes, probably even yours.  For the simple reason that you should always be testing and always be experimenting with something new.  The keywords that convert today may transform into completely new derivations tomorrow.  Always be tracking and always be testing.

Let’s get this out of the way.  100% accuracy does not exist in website analytics.  Repeat. 100% accuracy does not exist in analytics.

What does exist in analytics is data – lots of it – and with this comes fear.

Fear of looking at the wrong data.  Fear of where to start.  Fear of analytics failure.

This fear will only dissipate with knowledge.  Knowing that analytics will never be perfect is a critical first step and a cornerstone shared during the session ‘Deep Dive Into Analytics’ at SES San Francisco.

Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NY Times bestselling author, moderated this session which included on its panel:

• Tami Dalley, Director, User Experience Optimization, ROI Labs
• Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear