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Mobile Marketing Tips from Google, ESPN & Medialets: Connect with Your Audience on the Go
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. Mobile Marketing Tips & Takeaways from Google, ESPN & Medialets:
Connecting with Your Mobile Audience: HighlightsDana Todd: What is the biggest challenge in mobile and what is the greatest opportunity? Brendon Kraham: ESPN reaches close to 60 million unique users monthly, 35 million of those on mobile. 20 million access them exclusively on mobile. They see the opportunity for partners who have succeeded on broadcast and print to succeed in mobile and digital, as well. Challenges are, the way that we measure, though that’s not anything we can’t overcome eventually. Michael Bayle: Marketers that dive in, do it early, test and develop a strategy are going to win. We see this time and again; those who embrace the opportunity have a chance to get in early and build brands for themselves. There is an opportunity for brand preference to change through the experience in mobile. Dana Todd: What are the challenges and opportunities for early adopters? Eric Litman: There are audience goals that need to be obtained across a number of channels, and the number of those channels is ever increasing. People are putting more and more time into consuming and even creating media via mobile as their attention spans grow shorter and shorter. The lack of components for global organizations go across the entire organization: ensuring consistency across the organization, proper budget allotment, etc. You have these thoughtful marketers who are trying to close the gaps who are up against technology that might not be ready for the space and time, or other organizational challenges. Dana Todd: We know people are using multiple screens, but we don’t know quite how they’re using them yet. Can you describe some best practices on the technical challenges in measurement? Brendon Kraham: One example is in search; when you’re looking to use a marketing campaign to effectively distribute a download, for example, you can measure that investment to see whether it was actually effective or not. In video, the display doesn’t really look all that much different on different devices. Where you do see the differences are in interactivity. It might not make sense to drive people to mobile if you’re actually getting interactions in the ad itself. Eric Litman: Reach and frequency are the fundamentals, yet they’re really not well done yet. People are measuring all these different things and what you end up with are these frustrated teams who want to do more, but are challenged constantly. Smart marketers need to push through this and overcome the measurement challenges. Audiences are moving to mobile faster than brands are able to fulfill their reach statistics on the platforms. Brendon Kraham: We generally see three types of concerns over mobile.
Do you track and measure the effect across these different paths? We have to consider cross-device tracking and sequential usage – where someone starts a transaction on one device and completes it on another. You also have transactions in physical stores that were influenced by mobile and some way. HowToGoMo/fullvaluemobile is a new Google initiative to help marketers make more informed marketing decisions. Dana Todd: In television, we’re okay with reach and frequency as metrics. Why are we all so uncomfortable in digital with a pretty good approximator that we model on? Eric Litman: There’s a tremendous amount more data available about people now. Think of how many cameras you passed on the way to work or here today. Think of your social activity, your credit card transactions. Dana Todd: How are media buyers approaching the media space? Michael Bayle: On weekends, during NFL, we might see upwards of 350,000 fans engaged at any given minute. Let’s think about it: we don’t even carry those games. Social media has made this engaged audience metric so compelling, because you can’t go watch a sports game anymore at a later time without already knowing the score. Those people who are tuned in, in real-time, are incredibly important. Dana Todd: How are companies thinking through convergence events such as live events, or in-store purchases? How are people planning for that as a crossover pathway? Michael Bayle: Mobile commerce emulates digital commerce; 10% of e-commerce transactions now happen on a mobile phone. Then you have the secondary issue of mobile payments. These are opportunities to remove friction in transactions, but what’s interesting is the ability to bridge the gap between the online world and the real world. The days of actually buying that magazine or tictacs at the checkout counter are long gone. Mobile commerce is the number one area of exploitation in mobile. Dana Todd: Google has made huge investments in Android and other areas; how is Google thinking of mobile and the connected experience? Brendon Kraham: Consumers are on four screens; the simplest version of that is making sure the experience flows across the four screens. Responsive design is your absolute basic, low-hanging fruit; you need to make sure your audience can see your content, that it renders for their device. Marketers need to be present in front of the devices of their audience and the system should work more seamlessly to ensure the flow of that interaction and experience. Understand the behavior that is happening, comes to terms with it, and plan around it. Build a strategy around the behaviors we all exhibit using connected devices. Dana Todd: Eric, talk to us about frictionless buying. Eric Litman: It’s a huge opportunity for marketers to get right in terms of complexity. Marketers need to figure out how to allocate budget between those different screens and channels and it’s incredibly complex. We’re not that far from a world where companies like Google and others start to think of data from different channels as an output rather than an input. We’re getting closer to more responsive ads. Yet we can’t even agree in digital right now what an impression is, so as excited as I get about building the technology to do this stuff, it’s going to take a while for the market to get there. If you have a really smart, forward-thinking media team, they should absolutely lead this process. Or maybe it’s your creative team, go with whoever can get the job done. Dana Todd: Mobile is unique; it’s where search was 15 years old. It’s completely different and requires a very specific technical set. Michael Bayle: Agencies and companies just don’t have the talent yet. You have a double-edged sword; we have search specialists, mobile specialists – they know the topic from a technical standpoint and need to work with others to achieve what we need to do. Dana Todd: Is there going to be something beyond HTML5? Are apps dying? Do we still continue to approach an apps strategy as well as responsive design for mobile? Michael Bayle: At ESPN, we’re 50% audience each on mobile web and apps. You’re never going to have convergence between apps and mobile web, so you build both. Look at the Starbucks app, where they’re actually pulling out their app to pay, rather than using a credit card or cash. Apps can do more than mobile web can; you almost have to invest in an app, like you had to invest in a website 10 years ago. Tune in to Online Marketing Blog and follow TopRank on Twitter for more tips, tricks and advice from SES New York 2013. Share your mobile marketing questions or comments below!
© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Mobile Marketing Tips from Google, ESPN & Medialets: Connect with Your Audience on the Go | http://www.toprankblog.com        Building the B2B Social Media Machine with Adriel Sanchez and Jasmine Sandler at #SESNY
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:
Your social strategy has to be integrated with search and Google has made sure of this by stressing authorship, she noted. Original content that is relevant to your brand is crucial; marketers must invest in contributors and writers who have your brand voice and story in hand. Optimized content, such as properly tagged videos or images, or optimized written blog posts, drive social signals back to search. Building a Scalable Social PresenceThe first critical step is a social audit, Sandler advises. Companies need to understand their current positioning and that of their competitors. What assets do you already have? Which properties are you employees and customers involved in? Next, companies need to align their social team. Having a plan and resources, then knowing where to put them and measure their success is critical. Organizations should have an editorial team and Social Media Manager, who get sales involved, ensure executive buy-in, and help hold all team members in the organization accountable for their involvement in social. Sandler recommends that marketers have a deep understanding of what they are trying to accomplish as a social brand. Engagement, data mining and market research all work together to help brands understand how effective their efforts are in servicing customers, acquiring leads, driving sales and improving targeting. You have to be able to measure your success, she reminded attendees. Many still struggle with this aspect of B2B social, but goal-setting and analysis is crucial. Once you have set goals and have a plan, content planning is the next big step. “No B2B brand will survive in social without a content plan,” said Sandler. Think about your content in terms of themes to plan content around interesting, engaging and fun topics. Use a calendar to track upcoming themes and specific pieces of content. Email marketing plays an important role and goes hand-in-hand with social, Sandler noted. At all points in social engagement, you want to think about email capture and opt-in. Companies need to look outside their own social presence to understand where they sit in the larger social ecosystem. Where do you sit amongst competitors? Who does your brand influence and who influences your brand? The SAP Experience in Building the Social Media MachineAdriel Sanchez heads up SAP’s Latin America demand generation in social and shared his team’s experience in building a scalable social presence across platforms. SAP has a vibrant, active online community with great engagement, but it wasn’t always this way. Just a year ago, they had no content framework, no centralized governance, and no clear strategy on community management. SAP first thought a lot about their objectives and what, exactly, they wanted to accomplish with their social presence. Their social objectives had to tie directly to what they wanted to accomplish as a business. When it came time to hire someone to head up their social strategy, they looked for a journalist. Sanchez said it’s critical that organizations hire a content person, not a social person. Social tools and platforms can be learned. The mission that informs their content and social media marketing strategies dictates that their marketers not think of social in terms of a tool that helps salespeople sell. Rather, social is meant to help customers buy. This is a critical distinction, said Sanchez. SAP established guidelines to help ensure a good content mix without overt self-promotion. They use:
On measurement, Sanchez notes that metrics must vary by funnel stage. No one has quite figured out ROI in B2B social media yet, he noted, but marketers need to try. This doesn’t mean attaching a dollar value to a social channel. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” A company as large as SAP needed a workable infrastructure in place in order to scale their social presence. They worked with an agency on monitoring, content, reporting and community management. Internal subject matter experts are still critical. Social is a paradigm shift in the organization and belongs to everyone, but you need clear processes and guidelines in order to be successful, Sanchez said. Governance, transparence and processes are key. >Once your organization has a scalable social plan in place, it’s time to listen, learn and adapt, said Sanchez. Tool RecommendationsSocial monitoring and management tools will enable brands not only to see what is happening around them, but to take action in real-time. A few of the recommended tools from today’s session included:
One audience member asked a question of the panel: how can non-profits possibly keep up with the amount of work required to do social at scale, given their limited time and budget? Sanchez and Sandler pointed out that many tools have a free version or a very inexpensive monthly fee. The more expensive paid tools are fantastic, but may not make sense for non-profits. There are still solutions within their reach. What challenges have you faced in your organization as you’ve tried to scale your social efforts? Share your tips or questions in the comments!
© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | Building the B2B Social Media Machine with Adriel Sanchez and Jasmine Sandler at #SESNY | http://www.toprankblog.com   5 Online Marketing Essentials for Small Business MarketersAs new businesses are started every day across the U.S., many of those entrepreneurs are grappling with the realities of how to market their ideas, products and services. Limited resources and an overabundance of options requires filtering and prioritization when it comes to where marketing investments are made, whether it’s content, blogging, social media, or SEO. Common questions include: What to measure? What if it fails? What should we outsource? Here are a few answers to those questions that I was asked as prep for an interview: What advice do you have for business owners or entrepreneurs who are staying out of blogging and/or social because they don’t feel they can produce enough content on a regular basis to keep things interesting? I often reply to that by saying, “If a company doesn’t have anything interesting to say, they have bigger problems to solve than where their next blog post is coming from.” That’s a bit of a jibe, but it does reflect the need for a change in perspective. Many companies see themselves as a vessel, with a finite number of ideas and pieces of information. In other words, their view of content is fairly static and self-centered. Once they’ve said all there is to say about their own products and services, the well goes dry. This is in contrast to what many successful business owners and entrepreneurs are doing with blogging and content creation. They create a blogging plan with topics and ideas to write about that customers would actually be interested in. They look at blogging as a byproduct of the ongoing listening and engagement that occurs between brand and customers, between brand and prospects and the community at large. A change in perspective that allows the brand to see things from their customer’s perspective with empathy can reveal many opportunities for making observations, answering questions and interacting with the community through blog content. Just checking for commonly asked questions that customer service and sales people hear can be a rich source of blogging ideas. In addition to a customer perspective and leveraging ideas that come from prospect and customer interactions, social media and web analytics data can provide ongoing information to inspire blog content. Social media monitoring tools can suggest topics related to areas of interest around products and services being tracked. Web analytics can reveal questions people most often use on Google that send them to the company website. Blog posts can be planned to answer those questions.
The key to persistent blogging in a productive way, and I’ve been at it myself as a business owner, is to have a plan, be adaptable and use blogging as a platform to share useful information that provides value to readers but also reinforces sales, referrals and social shares. When it comes to optimizing websites that have been neglected in terms of adding content and ongoing optimization, where should SMBs even begin? A site evaluation through audits can help determine how much of an asset the website is currently and can be in the future. A SEO audit will cover keywords, technical/code, SEO copywriting, the linking footprint and social presence. Through the audit a sort of GAP analysis can be conducted to identify where the site needs attention for most impact. This is an area where we’ve developed a lot of expertise at TopRank Online Marketing and it speeds up the time to see results when there are good processes in place for auditing and benchmarking. As an example, a site that has thousands of pages with a simple SEO error of duplicate title tags might be updated using basic programming to extract content off the page (like product names) to dynamically populate title tags. If the site has many, many articles that are frequently found through search and have a good number of social referrals, then embedding social share functionality can increase social distribution of those articles just by making it easy/ In most cases, the low hanging fruit identification comes from having an evaluation of the website and expertise to determine where to apply resources in order to reach business goals. What do you recommend for an SMB that has tried a particular social network out and discovered that it just wasn’t working for them? Is it better to delete the account, continue without much of a presence, or is there another alternative? I’d approach that answer a little differently according to what the goal was and what social platform was being used. For example, if it’s Twitter then I might just discontinue manually posting to the account and determine it to be a source of news information. I’d do a relevant query on Google news, take the RSS feed of the search results for that query and run it through Twitter feed and populate the account with news stories once or twice a day. I’d still check the account once a day for engagement opportunities, but I’d probably not kill it if it can continue to provide some value. If it cannot provide value and there is no chance of it being used again, only then would I consider deleting it. Now if you’re talking about a blog, then I might absorb the past posts into a resource center format with out comments but still organized by category. It would not look like a blog but more like a collection of articles on topics that would be useful to prospects and customers. Daily or weekly blogging would be discontinued but new articles could be added from time to time and incorporated into a company newsletter or bylined articles in industry media. What advice do you have for SMBs who may be unsure of what they should be measuring with social media or which outcome is the most realistico or beneficial for them? The first step in understanding social KPIs and business objectives is to establish what the goals are. In many cases, goals might emphasize customer acquisition or revenue. There are other revenue oriented goals that can be affected by integrated SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing like the length of sales cycle, order volume, order frequency, per transaction profitability and referrals. Other goals covered in the book deal with increasing the effectiveness of PR objectives like awareness and building thought leadership. Yet others my augment content reach and effectiveness for customer service or talent acquisition. The social KPIs worth measuring should help you track progress towards your goal. For example, if you think better search ranking of optimized content will result in more qualified visitors and sales, then the things that affect ranking are KPIs worth tracking such as inbound links, social shares and other SEO metrics. If your premise is that the number of unsolicited media pickups will increase if the brand can become present in the social streams and news feeds of key journalists and bloggers that cover the industry, then you’d work social engagement and content into your social media tactics. The objective of being visible as an authority on topics of interest to the media that are also of importance to your customers would guide tactics and measurement of progress. Social KPIs might be the number of retweets and shares of your targeted stories, the direct interactions with bloggers and media through comments, shared content and direct messages. Ultimately, the success measurement would be the number of times bloggers and industry media mention your company, products or staff on topics being promoted. What should SMBs be looking for in SEO, SMM, SEM or other online marketing professionals if they need to outsource tasks they don’t have the capacity to handle in-house? The industry is mature enough that outside consultants should be able to show that they have experience implementing solutions and solving difficult problems using an intentional approach vs. social or SEO guesswork. In many cases, it makes sense for a SMB to engage a consultant at a strategic level who can provide assistance with overall approach and oversight of implementation. For others, the need for niche expertise is what’s needed. Either way, marketing professionals should be able to listen and understand the nature of the SMBs business problem and offer a thoughtful approach and tactics to solve it. Some things can be done by the SMB and some by the consultant. The online marketing world is competitive and consultants need to be more than mechanics of marketing. They need to be architects as well.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2013. | 5 Online Marketing Essentials for Small Business Marketers | http://www.toprankblog.com   More Recent Articles
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