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Below are some highlights from the Online Marketing Summit afternoon keynote. Major brands sit on a panel, while we ask questions for drinks – NICE!
Overview:
Get the inside scoop on how the world’s biggest brands are driving success on the web. We put these brand marketers on the hot seat with YOUR tough questions. This is your chance to understand how the big boys leverage tens of millions of dollars for online marketing and what they have learned along the way.
Panel recommends we think about things from beginning to end, consider social media marketing as part of the strategy, don’t overkill with the campaign by getting to complicated.
When you’re think about 2012, what are things we should be addressing?
One solution to communicate is having experts offer tips and strategies via a social media branding initiative with blogging (two votes). Empowerment of local branches is also something big brands are doing to help with the geo-engagement. An inner-circle group was created to get direct feedback on beta testing (Intuit).
SAP metrics program involves resources who site between the community and the business to play filter and to get an understanding of voice and feedback. Employees aren’t allowed to be involved in the communication, just SCM and the community. Intuit built the ability in TurboTax to connect with Facebook seeing great conversion from the links created through Facebook.
Having as much opportunity for customers to interact helps develop an understanding at a high level of the community need. IBM does a lot of polling. Tagging content to understand what users are doing. 50 percent of the marketing team is online, but most of the budget is offline (Caterpillar), and are ONE team as of March 1st.
What is integrated marketing? Intregrated marketing encompasses both the ability to coordinate multiple channels and activities to drive a consistent brand and campaign message as well as the ability to pull together data from multiple sources and manage your marketing as one coordinated operation. The end result is better execution and better efficiency.
Sean Shoffstall, Director of Product Marketing, Ozone Online
Sean spent the first few minutes of today’s presentation identifying the overload of data sources and analytics. He covered, budget planning, campaign management, campaign spending and so forth. Seems today’s theme is “pain points”, as this was the third session where pain points seem to be used more than once.
Identifying costs was part of a case study Sean recorded. The campaign included 24 countries, 80+ products, live and virtual events, single biggest spend for the year and best opportunity for testing. The previous year, every geo did their own thing, great email program but no integrated reporting, all costs were in separate systems, hard to reconcile, no scoring or pre-qualification of leads.
Previous year’s results: inconsistent brand and campaign execution, good response but poor follow through and very little longevity. By integrating data from multiple sources via API, Sean was able to create a central point of tracking for all campaigns, conversion elements and channels. The exercise took nearly 3 years, and the result was the tracking capability unlike no other. Essentially, campaigns can be be pre-planned and calendared with all the required tracking elements, so then the Marketing Manager could pretty much sit back and let it roll.
Alert: Analysis of New CAN-SPAM Rules
vs
CAN-SPAM – Must Know Updates
The latter performed better because the keywords of the subject line are moved to the front.
Subject lines are tested and messaging is A/B tested in batches. Campaign reporting is now “real-time” on marketing activities. The ability to be nimble with marketing spend was improved.
If you engage your customer with a specific message rather than a broad message, you’re likely to get a 18% higher response. Customers actions can actually now tell you how they preferred to be messaged. Mine the data for key learnings about your customers. Don’t forget social media.
Post-implementation showed that segmentation created a huge improvement.
Custom dashboard creation allows for any level to view custom reports. In a nutshell, Sean’s presentation gave us 30,000 foot view of what segmentation and robust tracking can do to ROI and provide the business with a better understanding of the results from every offline and online campaign, since every data source feeds into a central reporting system. Considering the technology requirements required nearly 3 years of development and the use of multiple (not so cost effective) web applications, for most businesses this level of granularity might actually produce data overload, unless of course you have a dedicated SMO Team, SEO Team, PPC Team, Email Team, Content/Blogging Team, Media Team and PR Team. If you can afford all of those resources and aren’t tracking data as described above – call Sean.
We’re live-blogging today from the Online Marketing Summit, just grabbed some coffee and am sitting at a table near the front. Keynote speaker is late, so we’re getting an opening from Aaron Kahlow, CEO, Online Marketing Connect. He’s got a whole slide about himself (I think he might be stalling for the late keynote speaker). Oh and a big thanks to Local Splash for sponsoring my trip; they are a Local SEO Services company based in Fountain Valley, CA. You earned the free link guys.
For those who are interested in OMS and want to keep up with all us Internet Marketers here, you can follow the Twitter hash tag: #oms10.
Aaron just took a show of hands of what people are interested in here. Interesting enough, most were here for Search and Social. Aaron recommended the Advanced track just following the keynote, it’s moderated by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org (so you know I’ll be there).
We’re also getting a few slides about the OMS Institute and Online Marketing Connect. On to the tracks, three to be exact. Fundamentals, Case Studies, and Advanced/Leadership. Hey, nice add-on for link bait, OMS is doing a “live” feature at OnlineMarketingSummit.com/live. I’ll have the give that a look after the show (apparently free tickets to future events are available).
Now taking the stage, John Battelle, CEO & Founder, Federated Media Publishing Inc. and Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa.com who recently launched WhichTestWon.com, a website on A/B and multi-variant testing.
Anne’s answer is was fairly general and involved asking questions and getting creating solutions. John points out the amount of tools that are available now to prevent all the distractions that typically happen day to day. Content syndication seems to be the answer, “starting the conversation” using content via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and so forth. Anne agreed and mentioned Burby (?), where a community of people who uploaded photos from the 1920′s and how they as a business “join the conversation” without being looked at as spam.
John’s best practice has been to follow where the voices seem to go (such as Twitter, etc). BoingBoing.net was where John started working with advertising within blogging platforms, had to include advertising in the platform as part of his role there. “Do it in a way that respects our community” was the business response. BoingBoing.net made a list of companies that would like to advertise on their website and solicited to those companies only (Apple, and other major brands).
Anne is talking about AngiesList.com, they hit a million members and is 140 cities. If you go to Facebook and lookup AngiesList, they only have 1k members. “I don’t think they’ve figured out how to turn social into their strategy. But their paid ad is all over the place, and plays as an answer to their search”. So AngiesList has a pain point of integrating social and their first answer was simply paid inclusion and CPC.
John says theirs a false dichotomy of internet marketing is that online advertising has the same or better engagement than traditional marketing. The audience and engagement in traditional channels actually dominates, but the online piece should be introduced and start the conversation for online marketing where the conversation should continue in a way that produces a great experience.
Anne says major brands struggle with the online marketing piece (such as “The Economist”) but still do well for their brand and brand searches just by being who they are. Get good brand awareness out there because CTR is higher, conversion is higher, and it makes expanding additional targeting that much easier. “The big brand wins. You’ll never do as good as big brand. Branding matters.”
John takes a different approach to creative. Beginning conversations with marketers at the early stage is important. “Marketers are publishers”. Think about what creative means and start at a very high level.
Anne advises not to ask the ad sales rep which ad performed best because they are likely to sell you on the biggest spender. Instead, talk to the marketing people and ask them which ad “rocked”. Try test ads across multiple websites instead of spending a large amount of money on one or two ads that have no data. Having your logo on any type of advertising will always increase conversion rate. Make sure that your welcome email is great (it gets the highest open rate), optimize the email to reference the publisher in the first sentence. “Thank you for signup with {company} to get {offers}”. This ties the media with the offer and will increase the probability of the reader opening future emails and not flagging them as spam.
Aaron asked, “when you look at new products, 2 years out, what are the things you’re keeping in your eyes on?” Anne says mobile (iphone, etc). Targeting lawyers, doctors, IT guys, it’s all about mobile/Blackberry. John says interface and platform will be the most important. A platform that is open and allows anyone to benefit from it and develop upon it. Apps are an early declaration of where we are going with interacting with machines and each other.
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