According to a survey by BtoB Magazine, 59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. However, more than 60% of B2B marketers report that their greatest marketing challenge for 2012 was generating more leads. To efficiently boost revenue in 2013, focus on generating more leads by improving your landing pages.

1. Focus on Benefits, Not Features

I’ve created and tested many B2B landing pages—and I can you the absolute #1 most important element of your landing page is the message. Your headline and body copy must be clear, not clever, and focus on benefits, not features. I know you love your product (hey, I do too!), but strip your page of copy that focuses on features or company jargon. Instead, use the jargon that your target audience uses, and speak directly to them.

In this example below from one of our own campaigns, the headline and copy focus on clear and obvious benefits, and the page converts at over 60%.

The benefit-focused message of this page is clearly presented in the header, headline, and throughout the copy.

2. Match the Message of Your Ad to the Message of Your Landing Pages

Ensure that the message on your landing page clearly matches the message of the ad or offer that got the visitor to click. The more tightly aligned they are, the higher your conversion rate will be. If you’re managing a large scale or more sophisticated digital program, this means creating tens, if not hundreds, of unique landing pages.

3. Reduce Required Form Fields

After just 1 click, visitors are just not that into you (yet). Require the least amount of fields possible, and built a relationship with them over time through lead nurturing.

The less form fields you require on your landing pages, the higher your conversion rate will be. Lengthy forms with too many fields (example: state, revenue, industry) require visitors to reveal sensitive information about themselves before you’ve gained their trust and built a relationship with them. In addition, these fields take up valuable real estate on your landing page, and overwhelm visitors who just aren’t that into you (yet).

If the objective of you landing page is to generate leads for lead nurturing, I recommend only collecting first name, last name, and email address. This allows you to cast the widest net possible, and nurture cold leads to hot with a targeted lead nurturing program. In addition, you can begin to gather more information on your leads over time with progressive profiling.

Now, if your sales team or other members of the marketing team are hesitant to remove other fields, propose to A/B test the page. Once you can demonstrate the significant increase in lead quantity (and maybe even quality, because your best leads may be hesitant to share information), they’ll agree to collecting less information initially.

In this example below, I clicked on an ad after searching for “landing page testing tips”, and was taken to the below page that offers a white paper. There is a tremendous opportunity for the advertiser to generate a higher quantity of leads and increase revenue by reducing the number of required form fields and THEN nurturing those leads over time with a lead management program. Read more about lead management.

This lead generation landing page would convert significantly better if it only required 3-5 fields, instead of 12.

4. Keep Your Design Simple

As I explained above, the most important element of your landing page is an effective message with a clear and obvious value proposition for the user. It’s important that the design of your page supports, and not detracts, from that message. For B2B lead generation, I’ve found that simple, well-branded pages with strong call-to-action, short form, and image that represents the offer (ex: white paper cover) work well.

5. A/B Test Your Landing Pages

Now that you’ve got the message down, the best way to see a continuous improvement in your conversion rate and lead quantity is to A/B test your landing pages. If you’re not testing your pages already, it’s always best to begin by testing the element that you think will have the biggest influence on conversions.

My favorite elements to test and constantly improve are:

• The headline: David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” In my experience, simply testing your headline can result in a conversion increase of 100%.
• The call-to-action: Along with the overall message, your call-to-action is critical to the success of your landing page. The more specific the call-to-action, the better. Clearly state the intended goal of the page, and guide the visitor to complete the action that you want them to do.
• Design: Your design should enhance the message and support the goal of your page, not detract from it. A pretty page with a lousy message is far less effective than a boring page with a great message. But the real gold is when you combine a great message with an effective design. And the best way to find out which design supports your goal best is through testing. Start with high-contrast A/B tests, find champions, and go from there.

In the B2B landing page test below from ion interactive, A/B testing the design and adding an image of the white paper resulted in an increase of lead capture conversions of 17%, helping to save the advertiser over $100,000 per year and increase their ROI by 291% (including services costs). Read more about conversion optimization.

Version A won and resulted in $100,000 in savings.

If this advertiser was able to save $100,000 by running a simple A/B test, just imagine what YOU can achieve by allocating more time and effort to improving your landing pages. Exciting, right?

RELATED CLASS: B2B Landing Page Best Practices for Success

An effective landing page optimization program can have a profound impact on your organization’s bottom line. In fact, according to data from landing page optimization vendor ion interactive, 73% of their customers that create and test landing pages achieve 100% lift in their conversion rate. Amazing, right?

Data doesn’t lie, but I’ve also seen first-hand how simply creating and testing targeting landing pages can impact digital marketing performance, so I’m thrilled that Brian Massey, the
Conversion Scientist and author of Your Customer Creation Equation, is joining us next Thursday, February 22 for an interactive, online workshop on landing page success. I have seen Brian present many times (both in-person and online), and he is by far one of my favorite instructors on digital and conversion marketing. This will be an informative AND fun virtual workshop that you don’t want to miss.

To give you a sneak peek of next week’s workshop, I interviewed Brian and asked him for his best advice on landing page optimization. Here’s what he had to say:

1. What are some of the most common landing page mistakes marketers make?

The first and most damning is to start their landing page with the template of their corporate website. It typically adds a whole bunch of distractions and opportunities to abandon. Navigation, social media links, a logo that links to the home page, alternative offers and more columns than is needed all contribute to clutter and distraction.

I say start with a clean page.

2. What are the top 5 elements of an effective landing page?

Start with a landing page. Blank is preferred. Add an offer and some way to take action, a button or form is typical. To overcome the abandonment, slather on persuasive copy. Show the product with an image.

Add some trust symbols, sprinkle in some proof, and, voila! You have a landing page.

I’ll be talking about these components in my workshop in more detail.

3. What makes a great landing page headline?

First, it should keep the promise made by the ad, link or email that brought the visitor to the page. If you offer 15% off in the ad, the landing page needs to restate the 15% off offer again. This is a great use of the headline.

Second, it should promote the offer with a payoff or promise. If you’re offering a white paper, don’t pick a headline that talks about your product or company. It should pimp the white paper. “The guide that shows you how to deliver great results” might be a good headline template for a white paper.

4. How many calls-to-action should you include on a landing page?

One and a half at most.

5. What makes a great call-to-action?

Tell the visitor they’re going to get something they want or need. Take as much space as you like.

6. How long should landing page copy be?

As long as is needed and no longer. Methodical visitors scroll, and can’t take action until they already know most of the answers. Give it to them.

For quick-deciding visitors, give them the summary at the top, above the fold. But don’t design just for them.

7. What is the most important piece of advice you can give to marketers that need to improve their conversion rate?

Check out Brian’s new book.

Make time. When a marketer is short on time, they either create messages that they like, or create messages that won’t get pushback from the boss. In both cases, the messages are targeted inwardly, not at the visitor.

Make time to be curious. Give yourself the time to write down the ten things that you think your visitors would prefer.

Make time to be deliberate. Budget for the extra time and creative to try two versions of your ads, pages, and informational offers.

Make time to review. Take the time to look at your analytics, test results, customer feedback, reviews and hate mail. Learn from the data you can and already are collecting.

Make time to educate. Be the “Cheerios Guy” of your company. Brag about your successes. Help your extended team understand the value of the extra work you’re doing. Be the expert.

Make time to learn. Have you read the books? Have you scanned the blogs? Have you taken that course? Have you been to the conferences? A career in marketing is a lifestyle. Choose your lifestyle and live it fully.

Make time.

8. Copy vs. design? What do you think is more important?

Both are important. Copy is the offer, proof, and call to action used on the page. It can be delivered by words, images and video.

Design is the way the placement, font, color, and whitespace guide the eye.

I’ve seen too many “ugly” pages win in tests to believe that a designer has enough tools to overcome a bad offer or copy. We’ve been able to find success with changes to words, headlines and copy.

So, I’m a copy-first kind of scientist. Get the messages right and a competent designer can turn them into a high-converting page or site.

9. What are your favorite elements to test?

My favorite element to test is Gold (commonly known as Revenue). I like to see how much of it we can generate from a given amount of Traffite (common name: Traffic).

Youranium is one of my favorites. It’s radioactive and infects everything on the page. It influences the copy and images you choose on the destination. It can be found by understanding your visitors. It eliminates Melium (an inert gas). It decays into Trustanium.

I also like testing Headlinum, commonly known as “Headline.” It’s a great predictor of who will read the site and who will not.

Formite is used to create forms. Understanding which form fields will scare away unqualified leads and which will scare away qualified leads is very important, and takes some experimentation.

Textosterone is another favorite, though it’s not technically an element. Copy will make or break an ad, landing page or microsite.

10. When starting a testing program, where do you begin?

We always start with what you know. Slap some analytics on the site and see what your visitors can tell you with their actions. Quiz the sales staff to see what triggers a customer to call or visit. Apply what we’ve learned from other’s tests to a site and see if there are opportunities to improve it.

All of this leads to a hypothesis list. When vetted and ranked, it provides a program for optimizing a site to high conversion rates and higher revenue per visit.

BONUS QUESTION! How did you get started in conversion optimization?

What else would a Computer Scientist with Sales and Marketing experience who ran his own company do?

I wrote my own analytics package in 1999-2001 (Open Source Online Marketing).

I learned when running my Web development company that traffic wasn’t enough.

My sales experience taught me how to listen to the customer, so it was natural to apply that to visitors.

My marketing experience didn’t hurt me enough to make a difference

I was heavily influenced by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who taught at a unique business school near Austin called The Wizard Academy.

Given all of this, there was no choice but to become a Conversion Scientist.

1. What is a brand advocate?

A Brand Advocate is a highly-satisfied customer or other person who recommends a company, brand, or product without pay or incentives.

Many people confuse Brand Advocates with Influencers like bloggers. The big difference between Advocates and Influencers is loyalty. Your Advocates will promote, support, and defend you for years. Bloggers, on the other hand, are loyal only to themselves.

2. Why should marketers engage with brand advocates?

Advocates are your company’s best marketers and salespeople. Here are three reasons why:

First, Advocates are highly trusted and influential. Ninety-two percent of people trust Word of Mouth. You may ignore or skip through ads. But when a friend or peer recommends a restaurant, hotel, car, fitness club, software, or just about anything, you’re very likely to buy.

Second, you can reach lots of prospects through your social media-powered Advocates. A company with 10,000 Advocates can reach about 6 million prospects, we estimate. And keep in mind: these are trusted impressions because they come from Advocates.

Third, there are lots of Advocates! One in four online adults in the US are Brand Advocates, says Synovate. And our research shows that about 50% of customers are potential Advocates. If you have 100,00 customers or end users, you may have 50,000 potential Advocates. That’s a massive virtual marketing force!

3. How can marketers identify brand advocates?

A simple way to identify Advocates is to ask the “Ultimate Question” for customer loyalty: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us?” Customers who say 9 or 10 are considered Advocates. We recommend asking this question everywhere. One of our customers has created an army of 250,000 Advocates!

4. What is a common pitfall of brand advocate marketing?

The number one pitfall is paying or providing incentives to Advocates. Advocates recommend brands and products because they’ve had a great experience and want to help others, studies show. Giving people money or swag for recommendations is lame and doesn’t work. I’ve recommended the movie Lincoln to about 10 of my friends because it was fantastic. Steven Spielberg didn’t pay me for this. True advocacy can’t be manufactured or paid for. It can only be earned.

5. What kinds of results have your clients achieved with brand advocate marketing?

One client got a whopping 56% conversion rate on Black Friday when Advocates shared a promotional offer with their friends. A hotel client jumped 50 rungs on the TripAdvisor rankings ladder. And another client doubled their ratings and sales on Amazon.com by mobilizing Advocates. On average, our customers are getting a 25X ROI from advocacy programs, as measured by media and sales value.

One client of ours said it best: “Word of Mouth is the number one way we get leads. Why not invest in what’s working?”

Do you want to build and activate an army of advocates that will sell your product or service for you?

Join us Tuesday, February 5 at 12pm ET for the “Brand Influencers Crash Course” with Rob Fuggetta. Rob is the world’s leading expert on brand advocacy, and the author of the hot-selling book: “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force” (Wiley, 2012). He’s also the founder/CEO of Zuberance, a social marketing company that manages and powers ongoing Brand Advocate programs for B2C and B2B companies.

In advance of the online workshop I am teaching today, January 31 on Twitter marketing (learn more about the interactive workshop here), I put together 3 ways you can improve your Twitter marketing in 2013.

1. Interact and Engage with Your Audience

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy for marketers to fall into the trap of simply tweeting thought leadership content and promotions. Sharing content is helpful, to be sure, but the real value in using Twitter is the opportunity to develop relationships with your audience. So interact with people, reply to their tweets, ask questions, and start building new relationships.

Example: How Zappos Can Improve Their Efforts

Follow and engage with happy customers who Tweet about your product—these people are already promoting your product, for FREE.

For example, let’s say you are Zappos and one of your goals for marketing on Twitter is increase sales by strengthening relationships with your current customers. You can setup an alert for whenever someone Tweets with a combination of the keywords “received”, “Zappos”, and “order”. (SproutSocial is my personal favorite solution for monitoring conversations like this.) Then, you’ll see when your customers Tweet about your orders, and be able to thank and acknowledge them. See tip 2 below for advice on keyword monitoring.

Monitor Customer Tweets

To demonstrate this, I did a quick search on Twitter for those exact keywords, and came up with a reasonable number of Tweets, from both happy and dissatisfied customers. This is an incredible opportunity for Zappos to build deeper relationships with their satisfied customers, and also handle complaints from unhappy customers.

Engage with Satisfied Customers

Don’t ignore customer complaints on Twitter—use them to create a better relationship with your customers.

For the positive Tweets from happy customers, Zappos could reply with something simple like “We’re thrilled you received the order. Let us know how you like the shoes”, and add that customer to a list that they can engage with in the future. The more they acknowledge customers Tweeting about them, the more likely they those customers will be to Tweet about them in the future, as well. Make it easy for them to promote your brand.

Acknowledge Unhappy Customers (and Turn Them into Raving Fans)

As for the Tweets from unhappy customers, there is no better way to turn an unhappy customer into an evangelist than by acknowledging complaints publicly. Based on the activity in the Zappos Twitter accounts, I don’t see them spending too much time on it, but at the least, they could allocate 1 hour a day replying to customer Tweets. Even without the hard data, I know the ROI for engaging with and acknowledging your customers for 1 hour a day is there, especially if you are solving complaints from customers that would otherwise use customer service resources, or never purchase from you again.

2. Monitor Conversations and Relevant Keywords

Monitoring keywords is a great (and easy!) way to find targeted people to follow, offer timely advice, and stay on top of industry trends. Get started by monitoring the following types of keywords, in order of priority:

Brand Mentions

Monitor brand mentions, including Tweets with the domain of your website

Start by monitoring mentions of your company and brand, including @mentions and Tweets with your brand and product name(s). For example, Cisco would want to monitor mentions of the Cisco brand and Twitter handle, in addition to variations of individual products, such as “WebEx”. I consider monitoring brand mentions critical, regardless of resources and priorities.

If you are a larger organization with an unmanageable amount of mentions, tools such as Salesforce/Radian6 can help you filter through the noise and focus your efforts on the most important Tweets.

Links to Your Site

Make sure to monitor when people tweet links to your website, even if they don’t mention your brand name or Twitter handle—you can do this by simply setting up a search for the domain of your website. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet the keyword “onlinemarketinginstitute”, because that is the domain of our website.

Pain Points

Monitor conversations directly related to the solution your problem solves—use the jargon they use to describe your need. For example, if you are an email marketing vendor, you can monitor when people Tweet with keywords such as “improve open rates” or “improve deliverability”.

Related Businesses and Competitors

Expand your efforts by monitoring conversations related to complementary businesses and competitors. For example, at OMI, we monitor when people Tweet about Marketo and ExactTarget, because they are solutions that are target audience uses, and people we could potentially engage with.

You can also monitor people Tweet about your competitors, and follow them as well. This will provide great insight into your industry and business, and may even allow you to engage in a conversation when it is relevant (but not creepy).

Interests of Your Target Audience

Finally, once you’re successfully monitoring the above keywords and need to grow your efforts, start monitoring conversations about your industry and topics your target audience is interested in. For example, an email marketing vendor could monitor conversations related to events that their audience would attend such as the Online Marketing Summit, or publications that their audience reads, such as the OMI blog or ClickZ. They could also monitor conversations about social media or digital marketing in general, because a marketer that would purchase an email solution would likely be interested in those topics, as well.

3. Grow Your Audience

Unfortunately, fake Twitter accounts usually don’t have budget for your product or service (or know anyone that does, either).

Now that you’re engaging with people and monitoring conversations, start to find new and interesting people to follow to increase your reach. Focus on building a community of potential customers, partners, influencers, and evangelists. Don’t pay for followers or automate the process of growing your audience unless fake Twitter accounts actually buy your product or service (or know someone that will).

Find New People to Follow

To start growing your audience, find and target new and influential people to follow. You can find these users by 1) monitoring keywords and conversations 2) reviewing the followers of people and businesses in your industry and 3) reviewing lists that other related Twitter accounts have created. Don’t worry about only following people that are potential customers—what you want to do is focusing on building a relevant Twitter community. This includes social media partners, related businesses, evangelists, influencers, and of course, your target audience. Even if many of these people may never buy your product or service, they can still help you amplify your message and achieve your marketing goals.

Add These Twitter Users to Lists

Once you start finding new people to follow, I recommend adding those accounts to a segmented list within your social media management tool. For instance, if you identify 20 key influencers or 20 potential customers and add them to a list, you can easily focus on consistently engaging with just those users over a certain period of time.

More Activity Leads to More Followers

As a general rule, the more you Tweet, the more followers you’ll have, the more you engage with the people you follow, the more likely they will be to follow you back. Effective Twitter marketing takes time—you can’t automate it. And you won’t achieve your goals by simply Tweeting once a day or once a week (in fact, inactivity can do more damage than good). But with a solid plan and effort, Twitter may prove to be on of your most effective marketing channels.

Join me Thursday, January 31 at 2pm ET for a virtual workshop on effective Twitter marketing. I will share proven ways to improve the ROI of your Twitter marketing, and will conduct live reviews of submitted campaigns as well. If Twitter is part of your 2013 digital marketing plan, you can’t afford to miss this event. Register now.

This ‘Top 40′ list is compromised of OMI educators, authors, digital strategists and speakers, known for:

1. Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologies
2. Advancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teaching
3. Driving game-changing results for their clients and organizations

As marketers continue to shift offline budget to online channels, its critical that they stay on top of the latest changes, proven best practices, and newest opportunities. Through their speaking, blogging, and teaching, the leaders below are enabling marketers to do just that.

In conjunction with this announcement, we asked the top 40 strategists to share their best advice for driving digital marketing ROI in 2013. You can see their advice in these 3 blog posts: Part 1—Social Media Insights, Part 2—B2B Marketing Insights, Part 3—Digital Marketing Insights.

Here is our annual list of ‘Top 40 Digital Strategists in Marketing’, in alphabetical order:

1. Kim Albee

Founder & CEO, Genoo | @kimalbee

Kim Albee is the founder of Genoo, a provider of marketing automation and integrated online marketing tools. With over 23 years of software experience including 15 years of corporate and entrepreneurial management, Kim works closely with customers to ensure that marketing and sales are able to sustain and improve their alignment.  Kim frequently shares her expertise in B2B digital marketing at events such as MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit and Online Marketing Summit, and has authored a quick-read booklet, “Effective Online Marketing In A Nutshell.”

2. Tim Ash

CEO, SiteTuners | @Tim_Ash

Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing.

Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates. He regularly conducts live landing page critiques at in-person conferences—these sessions are informative and entertaining, and usually standing room only, too.

3. Laurie B. Beasley

Co-Founder, Beasley Direct Marketing

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct Marketing, a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly a hundred companies. Laurie is an instructor of online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension, and teaches in the Level 2 Demand Generation Certification program for the Online Marketing Institute. She is able to efficiently improve her clients’ return on digital investment by applying her experience in classic direct-response marketing to the web. And her classes on email marketing are proof—Laurie not only focuses on how to get your messages delivered, but more importantly, how to get them acted upon.

4. Rohit Bhargava

Founder, Influential Marketing Group| @RohitBhargava

Rohit Bhargava is Founder of the Influential Marketing Group, and an expert focused on helping companies bring more humanity back to their businesses. Rohit helped found the world’s largest team of social media strategists at Ogilvy, where led marketing strategy for clients including Intel, Pepsi, Lenovo, Seiko, and Unilever. He’s also the bestselling author of two books including the recent global marketing best seller LIKEONOMICS.

Rohit has written over 900 pieces of marketing advice on his personal blog, Influential Marketing, and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and NPR. Rohit teaches marketing at Georgetown University, and presents keynote speeches not only on digital marketing and social media, but also on authenticity, creativity, and storytelling—because that’s what great marketing is about.

5. LaSandra Brill

Senior Manager of Global Social Media Marketing, Cisco | @LaSandraBrill

LaSandra Brill is a change agent, social media enthusiast and marketing visionary who was named ‘2012: 25 Women Who Rock Social Media’ by TopRank Marketing Blog. As Senior Manager of Global Social Media Marketing, LaSandra Brill shapes Cisco’s marketing strategy to include a mix of innovative digital, mobile and social media techniques. She’s known for building and executing the social media strategy of one of the top 5 product launches in Cisco history, and for driving social innovation across the organization. Based on her success at Cisco, LaSandra demonstrates how social CRM gives businesses a more complete view of their customers in the class, Social Intelligence Drives Social CRM.

6. Sarah Bundy

Founder, All Inclusive Marketing | @svbundy

Sarah is the founder and CEO of All Inclusive Marketing, Affiliate Management Trainers, and Affiligate.org. Her passion lies in teaching advertisers how to get more out of their affiliate marketing programs through innovation, increased profits and high value affiliate relationships. Sarah leads the affiliate marketing department at the Online Marketing Institute where she educates students on performance marketing. Her blog, SarahBundy.com has been nominated for this year’s Pinnacle Award and is ranked in the Top 25 Affiliate Marketing Blogs of 2012. In her class, Affiliate Marketing 101, Sarah shares how marketers can get started in affiliate marketing, and use it to build their business.

7. Lisa Buyer

CEO, The Buyer Group | @lisabuyer

When it comes to relationships, Lisa Buyer believes the connection between social media, search, and public relations is exponential. As the founder of three media companies and CEO of The Buyer Group, Lisa is ambitious about the influence of public relations on social media, SEO, and SEM, and she continues to share her innovative approach with clients, peers, and associates. Lisa contributes to leading publications such as Search Engine Watch, and speaks frequently at events including Search Engine Strategies and Online Marketing Summit. With experience both in-the-trenches and at a more strategic level—Lisa knows how to help marketers efficiently boost business results. In fact, she explains how B2B marketers can harness the visual web to increase brand awareness in the class, B2B Visual Storytelling.

8. Kelly Cutler

CEO, Marcel Media

Kelly is the CEO of Marcel Media, a Chicago-based digital marketing firm specializing in search, social and analytics. Kelly has applied her knowledge and expertise to clients ranging from eCommerce to healthcare to financial services. Kelly shares her insights at conferences and events around the country, including the American Marketing Association, Search Engine Strategies, Healthcare Internet Conference and many more. She has also taught at DePaul University and University of Chicago. Kelly began her career in the online media space in 1997 with companies including Classified Ventures and AOL.

9. Tami Dalley

Sr. Director of Analytics and Insights, Salesforce Marketing Cloud | @DataDivaDalley

Tami Dalley oversees the analytics and insights team at  Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A self-proclaimed “fanatical explorer,” Tami has more than a decade of industry experience in deep-dive web analytics, usability consulting, competitive intelligence, landing page design and multivariate testing. Tami’s work has been honored with the Search Engine Strategies Award for “Most Effective Use of Web Analytics” as well as the HSMAI Gold Arian Award for “Outstanding Search Marketing Strategy.” Tami explains how to effectively measure attribution and digital success in her class, Changing the Way We Measure Success.

10. Matt Dombrow

Founding Partner, Clixio | @mattdombrow

Upon entering the internet marketing industry in 2004, Upon entering the Internet marketing industry in 2004, Matt Dombrow quickly realized that everyone was chasing traffic but only a handful of people were working to convert all of those top search rankings into customers. Matt’s passion and focus has always been on increasing his clients’ website conversion rates and driving bottom line results.  Founding partner and head of business development at Clixo, a Denver based, boutique agency that specializes in paid online advertising combined with conversation rate optimization, Matt’s eclectic work history and holistic approach to Internet marketing routinely produce conversion gains of 30% – 250%.

11. Leslie Drate

Social Media Team Lead, Cisco

Leslie Drate oversees the planning and operations of Cisco social media channels focused on serving the needs of the global Cisco community. Leslie is a 20+ year marketing veteran with a background in website development, ecommerce, and content strategy. In addition, Leslie is an expert on the Cisco video landscape and building effective videos for the BtoB audience. Leslie shares advice for B2B content in the class, Best Practices for Business to Business Video.

12. Janet Driscoll Miller

President & CEO, Search Mojo | @JanetDMiller

Janet Driscoll Miller brings over ten years of search engine marketing experience to Search Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine conferences including SMX Advanced, Search Engine Strategies and Pubcon, has published articles in B2B Magazine, Visibility Magazine and others, and contributes to several blogs, including Search Marketing Sage, Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Journal.

13. Emeric Ernoult

Co-Founder, AgoraPulse | @eernoult

Emeric Ernoult is the co-founder of AgoraPulse, a Paris and San Francisco based Facebook Marketing Technology launched in 2011. He is considered one of the European pioneers in the field of social medifa marketing. The first company he co-founded in 2000 was a technology allowing brands to create their own white label social network—four years before Ning or Facebook launched. Emeric has advised French and international brands such as Virgin Megastores, FIA and Microsoft. He is a member of the Board of the Social Media Club in Paris, France and is a regular speaker at European conferences such as iStrategy, Digital Paris and eMarketing. He shares best practices for successful Facebook Marketing in his class, Facebook’s Best Kept Marketing Secret.

14. Rand Fishkin

CEO | SEOmoz, @RandFish

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEO software company; SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media, co-founded Inbound.org, and was named on PSBJ’s 40 Under 40 List and BusinessWeek’s 30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand has keynoted conferences on search around the world, and shares his insights on SEO and digital marketing in his popular video blog, Whiteboard Friday. He’s particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. Rand is an addict of all things content & social on the web, from his blog on entrepreneurship to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

15. Aaron Goldman

CMO, Kenshoo | @AaronGoldman

Aaron Goldman is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Freestyle Rap at Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company that engineers global technology solutions for search marketing, social media and online advertising. Goldman has been running the digital marketing rap game for more than 12 years, and is the author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google (McGraw-Hill 2010). Aaron reveals proven advice for effective search and social strategy in the class, Successful Execution of Search & Social.

16. Dax Hamman

Chief Revenue Officer, Chango | @DaxHamman

Dax Hamman is the Chief Revenue Officer at Chango, the leading company in Search Retargeting, and is based in Chicago and Toronto. Prior, Dax founded and led the global iCrossing media group, developing the concept of ‘performance display’, an innovative planning strategy that drove significant ROI from display advertising for some of the world’s largest and coolest brands. He has 13+ years in the digital space with experience in just about everything online, including media, usability, creative, technical management and affiliate marketing. He writes and speaks extensively, particularly on new and emerging techniques within the digital media space.

17. Simon Heseltine

Director of SEO, AOL | @SimonHeseltine

Simon Heseltine is in charge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at AOL Inc. Simon and his team are responsible for organic search and training across all AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties. Simon writes a regular column for SearchEngineWatch.com on a variety of topics within the marketing industry, and has previously written for other industry sites, such as SearchEngineLand.com (for their in-house marketing column). He is a frequent speaker at conferences in the US & UK on topics ranging from SEO to social search to reputation management. He also teaches SEO at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. as part of their Digital Media Management program.

18. James Hickey

Founder, JMH Marketing Group | @sdentrepreneur

James Hickey is a top leader in the internet marketing industry. He provides his clients and students with a proven internet marketing business model for retail businesses. He is an expert in all aspects of internet marketing , including Google Adwords, video marketing, blogging, article marketing and social media marketing, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, mobile application download strategy and more.

19. Kris Jones

Founder, ReferLocal | @krisjonescom

Kris Jones is a prominent and respected internet marketing expert and award winning entrepreneur. He brings with him expert knowledge of affiliate and search engine marketing and has been featured as keynote, panel member, and moderator at prominent national and international industry conferences and events. In addition to speaking to business owners, marketers, and fellow technology buffs, Kris has delivered dozens of inspirational speeches to thousands of college students at colleges and universities around the United States.

20. Sundeep Kapur

Director of Strategic Marketing – Ecommerce, NCR | @emailyogi

Sundeep Kapur has been assisting organizations with their converged channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, personalize and speak to consumers more effectively. Sundeep is also an avid user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, & video into a conversational blog. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he wrote his 1,000th article on February 17, 2011. Sundeep shares how to effectively integrate your social and email strategy in his OMI class, 5 Ways to Leverage Social Media to Improve Email Marketing.

21. Warren Lee

SEO Manager, ADOBE | @SEOCUBED

Warren Lee is responsible for over ~48 million monthly visits from SEO to ADOBE. Warren manages SEO for Adobe.com, Photoshop.com and the many web properties owned by ADOBE. Prior to ADOBE Warren worked for MOVE inc. where Warren was also an in house SEO manager responsible for keeping Realtor.com the #1 most visited website in the real estate industry as reported by Comscore. Warren frequently shares his experience and insights on SEO at events such as Online Marketing Summit and Search Engine Strategies.

22. David Lewis

Founder, Demand International, Inc. | @demandgendave

David Lewis is an early pioneer in Internet marketing, marketing automation, and CRM systems with over 22 years experience marketing and selling technology solutions through direct sales channels, online, and distribution channels. In 2007, he founded Demand International, Inc. a global consulting firm helping companies deploy and utilize marketing automation and CRM systems. DemandGen has become the trusted advisor to the world’s leading marketing and sales teams combining superior service, business process, and technology expertise.

23. Kent Lewis

President, Anvil Media | @kentlewis

With a background in integrated marketing, Kent Lewis left a public relations agency in 1996 to start his career in search engine marketing. Since then, he’s helped grow businesses by connecting his clients with their constituents via the Internet. In 2000, Lewis founded Anvil Media, Inc., a digital marketing agency specializing in search engine and social media marketing for Fortune 2000 companies. Under his leadership, Anvil has received recognition from Portland Business Journal and Inc. Magazine as a Fastest Growing and Most Philanthropic Company. Kent reveals best practices for social media analytics in this OMI class, What to Measure in Social and Why.

24. Mike Lewis

VP Sales and Marketing, Awareness, Inc. | @BostonMike

Mike Lewis is an international speaker, author of “Stand Out Social Marketing”, active blogger and Twitter personality. He is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Awareness, Inc, a social media marketing software provider.  Mike helps companies like Sony Pictures, Major League Baseball,  American Cancer Society, FOX Broadcasting, and many others, realize the benefits of social media marketing and how to align social technology with practical business benefits.

25. Brian Massey

Conversion Sciences | @bmassey

Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and he has the lab coat to prove it. He’s helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. Brian’s workshops have been characterized as “memorable” and can be attended virtually here at OMI. In addition, he’s spoken at the Direct Marketing Association conference, PubCon, Innotech, Destination Design Management, OMMA and almost anywhere else people will listen. He “gets them early” by speaking at major universities and is available for corporate workshops. His OMI class, The Blog Volcano, is a perfect example of his engaging, memorable teaching style.

26. Jon Miller

VP Marketing, Marketo | @jonmiller

Jon Miller leads strategy and execution for all aspects of Marketo’s thought leadership and content marketing programs. He is the executive editor of the popular Marketo blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and author of the comprehensive handbook, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

27. Josh Ochs

Founder, MediaLeaders | @JoshOchs

Josh Ochs is the Author of “Light, Bright And Polite,” and the founder of MediaLeaders: The Marketing Team that Advises 36+ Brands On Social Media.

With background in marketing at Disney and a love for all things technology, Josh Ochs combines both to advise businesses on how to use social media to find new customers, nurture existing relationships and tie each campaign back to the bottom line. As the grassroots founder of MediaLeaders, the team that manages Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn for over 36 brands, Josh is leading the industry with innovative and creative campaigns that blend traditional sales methods with new technology. Josh outlines many of his counter-intuitive techniques in his latest book: “Light, Bright and Polite” which shares many of his tips with businesses of all types.

28. Lee Odden

CEO, TopRank Online Marketing | @LeeOdden

Lee Odden is the author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. He is also the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and online PR agency that specializes in a 360 degree approach to growing new business and community engagement online. Lee has over 15 years experience in online marketing consulting, and is an active international speaker and publishes one of the most popular marketing blogs on the web.

It’s hard to sum up Lee’s extensive list of accomplishments in speaking, writing, and teaching, so we’ll stick to this: Lee has written for top industry publications such as Mashable, MarketingProfs, and ClickZ; has keynoted Online Marketing Summit, Social Media Junction and Search Exchange, and is a long time speaker at Search Engine Strategies, PRSA Annual conference, BlogWorld Expo and WebmasterWorld Pubcon.

29. Jason Patterson

Industry Advisor, comScore

Jason Patterson joined comScore to help advertisers get the most out of their digital media investment using comScore’s end-to-end suite of digital measurement solutions. For 12 years, Jason has produced research solutions and analytics yielding actionable insights into media usage and consumer trends for a variety of the world’s largest advertisers. Jason teaches students how to increase the effectiveness of campaign messages in the class, Validating Campaign Delivery: How to Thrive In Our Evolving Digital Economy.

30. Brent Payne

CEO, Loud Interactive | @BrentDPayne

Brent D. Payne, of Loud Interactive, started doing ‘SEO’ before it was even called ‘SEO’. He’s an internet marketer with over a decade of experience and proven success. He cut his teeth in online marketing as a vendor for Amazon.com where he became Amazon’s second largest electronics vendor by driving demand to Amazon from search engines. Brent is esteemed as one of the top SEOs in the world. He speaks around the world (just Google ‘SEO presentations’ to find them) at online conferences and has held online marketing roles at prestigious companies such as Tribune Company, where he grew Tribune’s search engine traffic from 500,000 visits per day to 1,700,000 visits per day in just 3 years.

31. Ryan Phelan

Vice President of Strategy, Acxiom/Digital Impact | @ryanpphelan

Ryan Phelan is the Vice President of Strategy for Acxiom/Digital Impact with over 13 years of online marketing experience to help clients realize the potential within their email programs. Prior to Acxiom, Ryan served as VP, Strategy for BlueHornet and Director of email marketing and acquisition for Sears.com and Kmart.com.  Prior to his tenure at Sears Holdings, Ryan managed the east coast professional services division at Responsys and was director of internet marketing and advertising at InfoUSA. Ryan is a frequent speaker on digital marketing, and he reveals the latest techniques for successful social integration in his class, 5 Fundamentals of Integrating Social into all Digital Efforts.

32. Ben Pickering

CEO, Strutta | @bpicks

Ben Pickering is the CEO of Strutta, a leading social marketing platform and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer. Prior to Strutta, Ben worked at Yahoo! where he held a variety of strategic roles within the company’s display advertising business. He started his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers, providing transaction support to the firm’s global high tech client base on their M&A activity. As a writer, Ben has appeared on Mashable and Huffington Post Tech, and is a featured contributor to Social Media Examiner. He has spoken on the topic of social media promotions and marketing at events such as the AllFacebook Marketing Conference, Likeable Media’s #Likeable U Summit and as an instructor for the Online Marketing Institute.

33. Adam Proehl

Managing Partner, NordicClick Interactive | @adamproehl

Adam Proehl, Managing Partner of Minneapolis based NordicClick Interactive, is a seasoned online marketing executive who has a passion for helping clients use online channels to grow their business. As a practical marketer, his ability to get at the heart of the core business issues, establish measurable goals, and map the appropriate online tactics to further those objectives has served his clients well. He presents frequently at industry events, including Search Engine Strategies and Online Marketing Summit. In his class, Building the Ultimate Dashboard, Adam explains how to focus on the right metrics, and create an actionable dashboard.

34. Jasmine Sandler

CEO, Agent-cy Online Marketing | @jasmine_sandler

Jasmine Sandler is a veteran in online marketing. She has over 15 years of client experience in helping companies, both large and small, use the web to develop and grow business. She is a published author of Branding & Sales: The LinkedIn Way, and has expertise in the areas of using LinkedIn to grow business; B2B social media marketing strategy, and search marketing strategies for sustainable online visibility. Jasmine reveals how to develop an effective LinkedIn strategy in her OMI class, LinkedIn for Personal Branding.

35. Russell Sparkman

Co-Founder, FusionSpark Media | @FusionSpark

Russell Sparkman is a new media craftsman with more than 25 years of visual communications experience. Sparkman has been a content marketing evangelist since 2008, the year he first wrote a blog post about the topic. Sparkman’s experience with what’s now called “Content Marketing” dates back to 1999, when he co-founded FusionSpark Media, a new media production and marketing communications firm that inspires, informs and influences through online content in support of corporate, non-profit and government communications initiatives. Russell speaks frequently at industry events, and shares his advice for content marketing success in Content Marketing Crash Course.

36. Michael Stelzner

Founder and CEO, Social Media Examiner | @mike_stelzner

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers, and the man behind large events, such as Social Media Marketing World and Social Media Success Summit. He is also host of the Social Media Marketing podcast show. Michael frequently shares his insights on social media and digital success through writing and speaking. He dives deeper into best practices for content marketing in his OMI class, How to leverage business blogging for more traffic, leads and sales.

37. Scott Vaughan

Chief Marketing Officer, UBM Tech | @ScottAVaughan

Scott Vaughan is a 20-year passionate practitioner and student of marketing and the technology market.  As a sought-after thought leader, his experience spans B2B marketing and sales strategy, revenue and demand generation, database analytics, media, and content, product, event and digital marketing. His views and observations on all things marketing, technology and business can be found on CreateYourNextCustomer.com.

38. Ekaterina Walter

Social Media Strategist, Intel | @Ekaterina

Ekaterina Walter is a social innovator at Intel. A recognized business and marketing thought leader, she is a speaker and a regular contributor to Mashable, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and other leading-edge print and online publications. She is an author of the book Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

39 .Todd Wilms

Sr. Director, Social Media Marketing, SAP | @toddmwilms

Todd Wilms is founding member of the SAP Social Media Audience Team, helping SAP’s 47 solutions and 20 industries reach their appropriate audiences through social media marketing. The team is responsible for developing the strategy, helping to execute the program, and then developing repeatable processes to help other teams be more successful. A 20 year marketer, he has held executive product and marketing leadership roles with some of the world’s best known brands like eBay/PayPal, Citrix, PeopleSoft, and agency George P. Johnson. He is an avid writer and blogs on Forbes, his team blog socialb2p.com, and Social Media Examiner. Todd shares competitive tips for social media marketing in his class, Social Media Marketing Landscape: Competitive Strategies for 2013.

40. Joseph Zuccaro

Founder, Allinio | @joezuc

Joseph Zuccaro is the Founder and President of Allinio LLC, a marketing automation professional services firm helping organizations plan and implement web-based technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data that maximizes marketing ROI and drives higher revenue. He has over 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, and business development with B2B product and service companies, including angel-funded, pre-IPO and post-IPO technology companies. He is a fervent believer in properly measuring marketing and the need to relentlessly make marketing provide calculable value to sales and management.

And a few others…

As you can imagine, we had a difficult time narrowing down the list to just 40, so we didn’t, and added a few additional leaders below. Equally as as influential, these leaders are making the industry a better place through their speaking, blogging, and instruction.

If there is anyone else you think should have made the cut, please let us know in the comments below. While we won’t be able to add them to the list this year, we’d love to learn more and get to know them in 2013.

Scott Brinker

Co-founder & CTO, ion interactive | @chiefmartec

Scott Brinker leads product development and technical operations at ion interactive, the leading provider of landing page solutions for global marketing teams, including those at DHL, Dell, and WellPoint. With a keep understanding of the intersection of business, marketing, and technology, Scott has incredible insight into the unique challenges and opportunities in digital marketing. Whether he’s wearing his technology hat, marketer hat, or both at the same time, he is able to effectively present these new (and sometimes complex) opportunities to both tactical marketers and business leaders.

Scott contributes regularly to publications such as Advertising Age, Search Engine Land, and MediaPost, and speaks frequently at events including PivotCon, Online Marketing Summit, and Search Engine Strategies. He shares his insights on digital marketing at ion interactive’s Post-Click Marketing Blog, and writes about marketing technology on his personal blog, Chief Marketing Technologist. His OMI class on B2B Landing Pages is a great example of Scott’s presentation style—informative, succinct, but engaging, too.

Michael Brenner

Sr. Director of Global Marketing, SAP | @brennermichael

Michael Brenner is the Senior Director of Global Integrated Marketing for SAP. He started his career nearly 20 years ago in sales, followed by field, product and corporate marketing positions at the Nielsen Company. Michael is author of the popular blog, B2B Marketing Insider, and a co-founder of the social news site Business 2 Community. He shares his B2B marketing success stories at industry events such as Content Marketing World, ConFab, and MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum. Attend one of his sessions or webinars, and you may get a glimpse of his 4 kids and beautiful wife, too.

Thad Kahlow

CEO, BusinessOnline | @tkahlow

Thad Kahlow is the CEO of BusinessOnline and is responsible for the entrepreneurial leadership of all operations. His visionary leadership style has helped propel the company into the online marketing spotlight; making BusinessOnline one of the nation’s leading digital agencies. He focuses on the alignment of business goals and customer needs so clients can make business decisions guided by information that matters. Thad has presented at numerous industry and executive conferences including the DMA, HTMA, AMT and Online Marketing Summit, and is published in leading trade and business publications like iMedia, ERA and B2B Magazine, and was one of the original founding members of the SEMPO institute.

Heather Lutze

CEO & Founder, Findability Group | @HeatherLutze

Heather Lutze is the widely acclaimed speaker, trainer, and consultant who literally wrote the book on search engine marketing. Two books, in fact—The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing and the brand new Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing. Her writing and in-demand keynotes are delivered with the same witty, “no-geek-speak” style that has managed to demystify internet marketing for countless business owners.

Joe Pulizzi

Founder, Content Marketing Institute | @JuntaJoe

Joe Pulizzi is a leading author, speaker and strategist for content marketing. Joe is first and foremost a content marketing evangelist, and founded the Content Marketing Institute (a division of Z Squared Media, a 2012 Inc 500 Company), which includes the largest in-person content marketing event, Content Marketing World. Joe is also co-author of  Get Content Get Customers (McGraw-Hill), recognized as THE handbook for content marketing, as well as Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand.

Joe travels around North America and Europe  speaking to marketers and business owners about how they are indeed publishers, and what they need to do about it. If you can’t catch Joe on the road, watch his popular OMI class, Opportunities in Content Marketing.

Morgan Vawter

Director of Optimization and Analytics, Piston Agency

Some say Morgan Vawter ’s first word was “Internet.” Since then, she’s demonstrated an uncanny knack for deciphering the complexities of the web. After graduating from Oglethorpe University, she spent years as a web analyst and Internet marketing consultant for Shell Oil, Qualcomm, and Cox Communications, among others. Now at Piston Agency, Morgan focuses on business analysis, strategic development, optimization, and multivariate testing, synthesizing multi–channel data to uncover insights and increase ROI for clients. When she’s not optimizing for Piston’s client set, you can find her leading sessions on the future of Analytics at Conferences such as ad:tech, WebVisions, Digiday and the Online Marketing Summit

Dave Wieneke

Digital Strategy Practice Director, ISITE Design | @UsefulArts

Dave leads the digital business practice at ISITE Design. In this role, he manages ISITE’s consulting practice which helps clients drive digital innovation that squares with the strongest market opportunities and organizational capabilities.

Dave is a faculty member in Northeastern University’s graduate program for Digital Media. His experience as a brand marketer includes building digital teams for Thomson Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, and Sokolove Law. He has keynoted and shared his vision of the future of digital marketing for eConsultancy, MarketingSherpa, Online Marketing Summit, MarketingProfs, ExactTarget, Marketo, and e-Dialog. In addition, he dives deep into how marketers can harness mobile in his Mobile Marketing Crash Course.

Welcome to part-three of the top digital educators series. This part is focused on digital marketing as a whole, including content creation, email, Facebook and affiliate marketing. If you missed part one and two, read about what top OMI strategists had to say about the future of social media, and part-two focused on best practices for B2B marketers in 2013.

To help marketers discover new opportunities for driving ROI, the Online Marketing Institute identified the top 40 digital strategists, and asked them for their best advice for 2013. These are the digital leaders that are:

1. Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologies
2. Advancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teaching
3. Driving game-changing results for their clients and organization

DIGITAL MARKETING INSIGHTS

26. Grow Your Skills by Taking on New Projects

“Never limit your work to your job description or to the list of tasks you’ve specified you’ll perform. Great marketers win because they don’t let ‘that’s not part of my job’ stop them from achieving great results.”

– Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEO software company; SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media, co-founded Inbound.org, and was named on PSBJ’s 40 Under 40 List and BusinessWeek’s 30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand has keynoted conferences on search around the world, and shares his insights on SEO and digital marketing in his popular video blog, Whiteboard Friday. Rand is an addict of all things content & social on the web, from his blog on entrepreneurship to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

27. Evolve Your Facebook Strategy and Test Promoted Posts

“The introduction of Timeline earlier this year and recent changes to its Edgerank algorithm have changed the game on how brands interact with their target audience on Facebook. Contests and promotions remain the #1 tool to build and engage your fan base. However, gone are default landing tabs on brand pages so now, more than ever, marketers need to be wary of the “Field of Dreams” fallacy that if you build it they will come.

To see results from your promotional campaign you must reach out to consumers through all available social channels, email, and if you want to reach them on Facebook you should consider promoted posts. Once you’ve built initial momentum then the benefits of social sharing can take hold and your customers will become your brand advocates.”

- Ben Pickering, Strutta

Ben Pickering is the CEO of Strutta, a leading social marketing platform and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer. Prior to Strutta, Ben worked at Yahoo! where he held a variety of strategic roles within the company’s display advertising business. He started his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers, providing transaction support to the firm’s global high tech client base on their M&A activity. Ben holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and an M.B.A., both from Stanford University.

As a writer Ben has appeared on Mashable and Huffington Post Tech, and is a featured contributor to Social Media Examiner. He has spoken on the topic of social media promotions and marketing at events such as the AllFacebook Marketing Conference, Likeable Media’s #Likeable U Summit and as an instructor for the Online Marketing Institute.

28. Monitor the Right Facebook Metrics

“When looking at the performance of your Facebook Page, you should not rely on metrics such as the number of fans or the number of ‘people talking about this.’  These metrics are pretty much irrelevant when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing impact.

Content being the king, especially on Facebook, you should focus on your post level metrics and performance. In order to have a precise idea of your Facebook content’s performance, it is important that you closely monitor post level metrics such as the average number of fans reached by each piece of content, the average percentage of reached fans who have engaged with that content as well as the level of negative feedback that you’re getting. That latest metric is even more important since Edgerank is now giving it more weight.”

- Emeric Ernoult, AgoraPulse

Emeric Ernoult is the co-founder of AgoraPulse, a Paris and San Francisco based Facebook Marketing Technology launched in 2011. AgoraPulse is currently being used by more than 8,000 Facebook Pages across 37 countries and is expanding internationally through strategic local partners. He is one of the European pioneers in the field of social media marketing. The first company he co-founded in 2000 was a technology allowing brands to create their own white label social network—four years before Ning or Facebook. Emeric shares best practices for successful Facebook Marketing in his class, Facebook’s Best Kept Marketing Secret.

29. Test Out the Multiple Advertising Options Facebook Offers

“The mounting pressure on Facebook to monetize its vast audience is a win for marketers. Whether you’re looking to build your brand or drive direct response results, there’s a Facebook ad strategy that can deliver results. It may take some time to find the right combination, so keep testing and tweaking.”

- Aaron Goldman, Kenshoo

Aaron Goldman is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Freestyle Rap at Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company that engineers global technology solutions for search marketing, social media and online advertising. He thinks Kenshoo’s product suite is pretty sweet but prefers to let Kenshoo clients do the talking at Kenshoo.com/Testimonials.

Goldman has been running the digital marketing rap game for more than 12 years and is the author of Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google (McGraw-Hill 2010).

Aaron reveals proven best practices for your search and social strategy in the class, Successful Execution of Search & Social.

30. Techniques That Worked One Place, May Not Work for You

“I often speak with marketers who are frantically chasing the hot new channel of the week armed with nothing more than a couple of ideas from a case study.

The implementation plan sounds something like ‘My boss said we need to be on Twitter and I saw guru X present a case study that said we should tweet three times per week and use a short landing page with a red button.’ Without truly understanding why the red button worked, the marketer blindly applies the techniques. I call this ‘copy and paste’ approach the Case Study Crap Shoot.

If you want to dramatically increase your chances of launching successful campaigns or conversion tests, taking the time to truly understand the principles driving the results in the case study and translating them into a strategy appropriate for your situation is mandatory. Consistently producing bottom line results in a complex online ecosystem requires research and sound hypotheses (yes, plural. You’ll be testing a lot.). Asking yourself simple questions like ‘Why did that technique work?’ and ‘In what ways is my situation similar or different?’ go a long way to increasing your chances of success.”

- Matt Dombrow, Clixio

Upon entering the Internet marketing industry in 2004, Matt Dombrow quickly realized that everyone was chasing traffic but only a handful of people were working to convert all of those top search rankings into customers. Matt’s passion and focus has always been on increasing his clients’ website conversion rates and driving bottom line results.  Founding partner and head of business development at Clixo, a Denver based, boutique agency that specializes in paid online advertising combined with conversation rate optimization, Matt’s eclectic work history and holistic approach to Internet marketing routinely produce conversion gains of 30% – 250%.

31. Use Audience Delivery Validation to Understand Effectiveness

“An impression can’t make an impact if it’s not seen. Validate delivery and maximize the effectiveness of your digital campaigns by understanding how visible your campaign is and who it reaches.”

- Jason Patterson, comScore

Jason Patterson joined comScore to help advertisers get the most out of their digital media investment using comScore’s end-to-end suite of digital measurement solutions. For 12 years, Jason has produced research solutions and analytics yielding actionable insights into media usage and consumer trends for a variety of the world’s largest advertisers.

Jason shares more advice on increasing the effectiveness of your messages in the class, Validating Campaign Delivery: How to Thrive In Our Evolving Digital Economy.

32. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Podcasting

“Take a second look at podcasting. Yes, you heard me right. Now that nearly every person in the world has a smart phone with them at all times, this on-demand talk medium is poised to simply explode. Smart marketers are closely examining the power of broadcasting regular messages directly into the ears of prospective customers.”

- Micheal Stelzner, Social Media Examiner

Founder & CEO: Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers and the man behind large events, such as Social Media Marketing World and Social Media Success Summit. He is also host of the Social Media Marketing podcast show.

Michael dives deeper into content marketing in his OMI class, How to leverage business blogging for more traffic, leads and sales.

33. Use Your Blog to Generate Sales Leads

“Turn your blog pages into social media landing pages by advertising your products around your own content. Put calls to action in your posts and always ask for something at the end of a blog post. Make it easy to share and ask your readers to do so.”

- Brian Massey, Conversion Sciences

Brian Massey is the founder of Conversion Sciences and author of Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist™. He’s helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. Brian’s workshops have been characterized as “memorable” and can be attended virtually at OMI.

Brian shares proven advice for blogging success in his class, The Blog Volcano.

 34. Create Content Relative to the Stage in the Buying Cycle

“Content marketing isn’t just about adding more content; it’s about creating meaningful experiences for a targeted audience that inspires business outcomes. Smart marketers can do that by focusing on the information needs of their customers throughout the buying cycle and creating an optimized and socialized content marketing plan. Content and user experience focused optimization efforts will enable brands to attract, engage and convert more business while growing community and engagement.”

- Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Lee Odden is the author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. He is also the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and online PR agency that specializes in a 360 degree approach to growing new business and community engagement online.

Lee has over 15 years experience consulting, and is an active international speaker and publishes one of the most popular marketing blogs on the web.

35. Content Strategy is More Important Than Tools (Although, They Help)

“By now we all know that chasing the hot new marketing tactic is a fools errand, if for no other reason than it would be a full time job to keep up with them. Determine what you want to say before you decide where you are going to say it. Implement a content development process that blends helping with selling and allows you to understand where your leads are in their buying journey. That will set the foundation for everything else (including how you use the new shiny objects that pop-up).”

- Kim Albee, Genoo

Kim Albee is the founder and President of Genoo, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering of Marketing Automation and Integrated Online Marketing Tools. With over 23 years of software experience including 15 years of corporate and entrepreneurial management, Kim works closely with customers to ensure that marketing and sales are able to sustain and improve their alignment.  Kim frequently shares her expertise in B2B digital marketing at events such as MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit and Online Marketing Summit, and has authored a quick-read booklet, “Effective Online Marketing In A Nutshell.”

36. Evolution of Strategy is the Future

“The online marketing ecosystem changes so quickly and so often, that you can’t stand still. You need to ensure that you’re constantly moving forward; evolving your strategy and tools at a pace equal to or greater than your competitors to match what the search engines and social networks are doing – otherwise, you’re going to be left behind.”

- Simon Heseltine, AOL

Simon Heseltine is the Director in charge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at AOL Inc. In this role Simon and his team are responsible for organic search and training across all AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties. In his previous position as Director of Search at a Washington D.C. based agency, Simon was responsible for developing and implementing organic search and social media strategies for companies across several industries. He also developed and delivered training programs for clients, including several large U.S. media company, to enable them to best take advantage of the opportunities available to their companies through both organic search and social media.

37. Digital Strategy Must Appear Cohesive Across Devices

“About three years ago I became device agnostic as it relates to how people connect to the Internet. The reality is that over 50% of daily active users on Facebook are mobile-only, there were more iPad’s sold in December 2011 than PC’s, and the growth of tablets and mobile devices among youth, late adopters, and the developing world is staggering.

In short, if you are a business owner or want to make money online you need to devise a business strategy that is device agnostic and appreciate that the ‘Internet world’ as we knew it has drastically changed. It’s not enough to simply have a Web site and it’s not enough to only advertise on Google AdWords. The game has changed and to be competitive you need a multi-channel approach that optimizes across search, social, display, e-mail, mobile, and tablet….for starters.”

- Kris Jones, ReferLocal

Kris Jones is a prominent and respected internet marketing expert and award winning entrepreneur. He brings with him expert knowledge of affiliate and search engine marketing and has been featured as keynote, panel member, and moderator at prominent national and international industry conferences and events. Learn more about Kris.

 

 

38. How Sophisticated is Your Digital Strategy?

“Think about five stages of sophistication for your digital marketing. Stage 1 – You do it because it is cheap. Stage 2 – You do it because it is quick. Stage 3 – You do it so you can track and adjust. Stage 4 – You do it because you can personalize. Stage 5 – You do it to move your consumers across channel. The higher your number, the higher your sophistication. Where do you stand?”

– Sundeep Kapur, NCR

Sundeep Kapur has been assisting organizations with their converged channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, personalize and speak to consumers more effectively. Sundeep is also an avid user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, & video into a conversational blog. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he wrote his 1,000th article on February 17, 2011.

Sundeep demonstrates how to effectively integrate your social and email strategy in his OMI class, 5 Ways to Leverage Social Media to Improve Email Marketing.

39. Leverage the Affiliate Marketing Channel

“Affiliate marketing is the only marketing channel that integrates multiple consumer touch points strictly on a performance basis. Advertisers can leverage search, social, mobile, shopping, international and even offline marketing campaigns through third-party vendors completely based on performance to make it the lowest cost, lowest risk and widest reach marketing channel available today.”

- Sarah Bundy, All Inclusive Marketing

Sarah Bundy is the founder and CEO of All Inclusive Marketing, Affiliate Management Trainers, and Affiligate.org. Her passion lies in teaching advertisers how to get more out of their affiliate marketing programs through innovation, increased profits and high value affiliate relationships. Sarah leads the Affiliate Marketing department at the Online Marketing Institute where she educates students on performance marketing. Her blog, SarahBundy.com has been nominated for this year’s Pinnacle Award and is ranked in the Top 25 Affiliate Marketing Blogs of 2012.

In her class, Affiliate Marketing 101, Sarah explains how marketers can get started in affiliate marketing, and use it to build their business.

40. Define Your Goals, Success Metrics and Revisit, Revise – Optimize

“Digital marketing begins with a business objective.  After the goal is clearly defined a strategy can be designed using tactics to implement and Analytics for tracking.  Then it’s critical to revisit, revise and optimize.”

– Kelly Cutler, Marcel Media

Kelly Cutler is the CEO of Marcel Media, a Chicago based digital marketing firm specializing in search, social and analytics. Marcel Media uses a data driven approach to solving business objectives with digital tactics. Kelly has applied her knowledge and expertise to clients ranging from eCommerce to healthcare to financial services. Kelly speaks at conferences and events around the country including the American Marketing Association, Search Engine Strategies, Healthcare Internet Conference and many more. Under her leadership, Marcel Media has earned national recognition as one of the Inc. 5000′s fastest growing private companies and has won many awards for their outstanding achievements.

41. Establish the Email Relationship First

“Contrary to what most marketers may think, the biggest challenge for email marketers is not about generating revenue. It’s about how to holistically manage their email program in a way that not only stays ‘on brand,’ but also increases brand equity while incorporating email best practices.

Whether the challenge is acquisition, engagement, attrition, or a combination of these, marketers can achieve success by creating positive customer experiences that enable a relationship–not by simply sending a promotional message that relies on discount for effectiveness. Once the relationship is established, and not before then, marketers can gain the sales and social advocacy that lead to long-term upward growth.”

– Ryan Phelan, Acxiom

Ryan Phelan is the Vice President of Strategy for Acxiom/Digital Impact with over 13 years of online marketing experience to help clients realize the potential within their email programs. Prior to Acxiom, Ryan served as VP, Strategy for BlueHornet and Director of email marketing and acquisition for Sears.com and Kmart.com.  Prior to his tenure at Sears Holdings, Ryan managed the east coast professional services division at Responsys and was director of internet marketing and advertising at InfoUSA.

Ryan is a frequent speaker on digital marketing, and he reveals the latest techniques for successful social integration in his class, 5 Fundamentals of Integration Social into all Digital Efforts.

42. Provide Solutions with Your Content to Drive Results

“If you want to be effective with your digital marketing, you need to understand and map out your customer touch points. If you fail to do that, then you’re missing out big time when it comes to generating traffic, optimizing content, conversions, and social media participation.

For example, when someone first engages with your company online, what does that person know and what is he or she looking for? Are they coming to you with a problem they’re trying to solve and they need education on how go about it? Do they even know they have a problem? If so, are they aware that relevant products exist and they’re just looking to compare?

Before you dive head first into driving traffic, developing content, optimizing landing pages, etc., it is important that you do your research to understand all the various touch points it takes to get a sale, support, retain, and ultimately turn that customer into a great referral source.”

- Adam Proehl, NordicClick Interactive

Adam Proehl, Managing Partner of Minneapolis based NordicClick Interactive, is a seasoned online marketing executive who has a passion for helping clients use online channels to grow their business. As a practical marketer, his ability to get at the heart of the core business issues, establish measurable goals, and map the appropriate online tactics to further those objectives has served his clients well.

In his class, Building the Ultimate Dashboard, Adam explains how to focus on the right metrics, and create an actionable dashboard.

43. Make Your Content King

“It’s time to replace the abstract ‘Content is King’ analogy with an analogy that has real meaning to marketers today, especially when it comes to creating, pitching and justifying content budgets. A more apt analogy is that Content is Gold. Like gold, content is an investment that holds or builds value and provides long term return on investment. Gold is highly conductive, and so is content, i.e. content is key to ‘conducting’ Likes, Shares, Earned Media and Word-of-Mouth referrals. Gold provides its holder with status and influence, and so does content. Think of it this way … in a competitive environment, those with the best content earn status and influence that provides competitive advantage. Like gold, content today is a form of ‘virtual currency,’ a medium of exchange for building audience, driving engagement and so on. And when done well – and by that I mean the most entertaining, the most educational, the most useful – content is the marketer’s bling.”

- Russell Sparkman, FusionSpark Media

44. Create Awesome, High-Quality Content

“The competitive imperative should be influencing marketer’s decisions to increase their content marketing activities for this simple reason: whoever has the best content will win. That means that whatever sector you’re in, whether it’s B2B, B2C or non-profit, if you’re not the one who is driving awareness, sales and customer service by providing the best content, it’s likely that your competitor is. Furthermore, there’s no turning back. This is real. The ‘content’ train has left the station. And marketer’s have ZERO choice over whether or not they need to be not only on board, but driving that train within their sector.”

- Russell Sparkman

45. Operate Like a CNN Newsroom

“A marketing department needs to look and function more like a CNN Newsroom and less like a cubicle enclave or warren of offices. In this new configuration, marketing, sales and customer service are seamlessly blended together into a single ‘Department of Communications and Engagement.’ Walls and desks are populated with monitors displaying in real time all brand related activities, conversations, sales data, etc. This configuration enables cross-pollination of ideas and awareness, and empowers the type of “real time” marketing, PR and sales activities that are critical in today’s environment.”

- Russell Sparkman

Russell Sparkman is a new media craftsman with more than 25 years of visual communications experience. Sparkman has been a content marketing evangelist since 2008, the year he first wrote a blog post about the topic.

Sparkman’s experience with what’s now called “Content Marketing” dates back to 1999, when he co-founded FusionSpark Media, a new media production and marketing communications firm that inspires, informs and influences through online content in support of corporate, non-profit and government communications initiatives. As CEO, Sparkman has played key roles in all FusionSpark Media projects, including executive producer, chief photographer, videographer, information architect, and project manager.

Russell provides a proven framework for content marketing success in his OMI course, Content Marketing Crash Course.

OMI is committed to bringing forth the insight of industry leaders. Look for the full list of courses from these top digital educators on the online learning center’s class topics page.

Even better, 3 out of the 5 tracks focus on what I believe are the 3 biggest opportunities for B2B digital marketers to increase revenue in 2013. See the Full Agenda.

1. Content Marketing: Drive Traffic and Influence the Buyer Journey

Effective content marketing boosts traffic, engages your audience, and can help your prospects navigate the complexities of the buying process. In addition, great content builds trust and credibility, and allows your audience to build an emotional connection to your brand.

Just the facts:

• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not. (HubSpot)
• 60% of business decision makers say that company content helps them make better product decisions. (Roper Public Affairs)

See the sessions and workshops on content marketing.

2. Conversion Optimization: Capture More Leads with Targeted Landing Pages

You can’t nurture what you don’t convert. According to a survey by BtoB Magazine, 59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. However, more than 60% of B2B marketers report that their greatest marketing challenge for 2012 was generating more leads. To efficiently boost revenue in 2013, focus on generating more leads by improving your landing pages.

Just the facts:

• Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10. (HubSpot)
• Those with over 40 landing pages got 12x more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages. (HubSpot)

See the sessions and workshops on conversion optimization.

3. Marketing Automation: Nurture Leads to Qualified

Conventional marketing wisdom says it takes at least 7 touches to move a cold lead to become a customer. Instead of sending rapid-fire emails to your entire list, get more relevant by communicating to your leads based on their segment, place in the sales cycle (lead score), and actions they take on your site.

Just the facts:

• Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (The Annuitas Group
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group)
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)

See the sessions on lead nurturing and marketing automation.

If your objective is to generate and nurture more qualified leads, I hope you’ll join us this week at the B2B Digital Strategy Summit virtual event. As a Business2Community reader, save 20% on your pass with code MORELEADS. Register now. See you Wednesday.

Welcome to part-two of the top digital strategists series. This part is focused on B2B marketing and how to use data to improve your digital strategy. If you missed part-one, read about what top OMI educators had to say about the future of social media in 2013.

To help marketers discover new opportunities for driving ROI, the Online Marketing Institute identified the top 40 digital strategists, and asked them for their best advice for 2013. These OMI online learning center digital educators were selected because they are:

1. Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologies
2. Advancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teaching
3. Driving game-changing results for their clients and organization

 11. Lead Generation is Nothing Without Management 

“Lead generation was marketing’s focus leading up to online marketing and the web. With modern marketing and sales tools like customer relationship managers (CRM) and marketing automation, lead generation tactics must evolve to the practice of lead management, which extends marketing’s role from the top of the funnel on down. To be effective, lead management requires the right people, framework, process, systems, and a company cultural to have one integrated marketing and sales process.”

- David Lewis, Demand International, Inc.

David Lewis is an early pioneer in Internet marketing, marketing automation, and CRM systems with over 22 years experience marketing and selling technology solutions through direct sales channels, online, and distribution channels. In 2007, he founded Demand International, Inc. a global consulting firm helping companies deploy and utilize marketing automation and CRM systems. DemandGen has become the trusted advisor to the world’s leading marketing and sales teams combining superior service, business process, and technology expertise.

12. Align Both SEO & Paid Search Efforts with Cross-Functional Marketing Strategies

“In a recent online marketing industry report, one of the interesting findings was that search marketing continues to grow worldwide and that search marketing represents a key channel for digital marketers. Search spend in the United states grew by 13% while ROI steadily improved. Additionally a recent Nielsen report finds that 94% of user interaction in search engines is on organic search listings compared to 4% paid interactions. This highlights that that there is a significant potential ROI opportunity for companies to align SEO with cross functional marketing strategies, especially between SEO and paid search.”

- Warren Lee, ADOBE

Warren Lee is responsible for over ~48 million monthly visits from SEO to ADOBE. Warren manages SEO for Adobe.com, Photoshop.com and the many web properties owned by ADOBE. Prior to ADOBE Warren worked for MOVE inc. where Warren was also an in house SEO manager responsible for keeping Realtor.com the #1 most visited website in the real estate industry as reported by Comscore.

13. Generating Qualified Sales Opportunities Requires Multi-Touch Approach

“Your prospects are overworked, busy, and distracted. They receive between 100 – 500 marketing messages per day in their inbox, social media and web experience. It’s unrealistic to think that one email or one social media touch will get their attention enough to make a purchase decision on your product.

Plan to build in multi-touch from the beginning of the campaign. Also, remember to be proactive, calling responders and non-responders alike. Here’s how:

Demand generation is really hard work. You need to plan your campaigns to incorporate between 7 to 13 touches. This often includes email, direct mail and social media outreach as the first touches. And then overlay a tele-prospecting and nurturing stream that can involve another 4 to 8 touches. This can involve several steps, including being re-directed to a more appropriate decision maker, leaving a message, calling a busy prospect back later, sending a follow up email, providing more information, setting an appointment to discuss further, and then finally have the conversation where they will discuss budget, purchase authority, need and time frame.

Also don’t rest your laurels on the inbound responders. Actively triangulate from the email and direct mail to reach the non-responders with a tele-prospecting and nurturing contact stream to engage them in the sales process. Given the right outbound campaign and nurturing stream, you could generate qualified sales opportunities from 10 – 15% of the list. Those are results any marketer would be proud of!”

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. www.BeasleyDirect.com, a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly a hundred companies. Ms. Beasley is an instructor of online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension and teaches in the Level 2 Demand Generation Certification program for the Online Marketing Institute.

14. Irrelevant Messaging Equals Costly Opt-Outs

“Buyers today have access to an abundance of information to help them make purchases: corporate websites, social networks, review sites and so on. And increasingly all that information is available in the palm of their hand, anywhere and anytime. This means that a buyer no longer has to talk with a sales rep to get the information they want about a purchase. Buyers use their access to this information to seize control of the buying process and delay engagement with sales reps until they know as much (or more) than the sales rep does.

Since buyers engage with sales later than ever, marketing has to step in and take a bigger role in the revenue process, nurturing relationships with early-stage prospects until they become sales-ready. These dialogues must be relevant to the buyer; or else they will opt out or screen out your communications. These must be individual conversations on the buyer’s time frame, not batch-and-blast communications on your time frame.

This is a MASSIVE scale problem. It’s not a dialogue with one person, or a dozen. It’s with hundreds of thousands or even millions of potential customers. And that’s why marketing automation technology suddenly becomes so critical. You literally can’t keep up with the requirements of modern marketing without a technology platform. As Lucille Ball famously demonstrated in the candy factory, attempts to implement these kinds of processes without the right systems quickly collapse into a mess of lost opportunity.”

Jon Miller is VP Marketing at Marketo, is the executive editor of the popular Marketo blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and author of the comprehensive handbook, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He shares the latest marketing tips and best practices on Twitter using the handle @jonmiller.

 

15. Video Must Deliver Correct Messaging to Move Prospects Down the Funnel

“Before you build a marketing video, think about where you’re going to use the video. Where is the customer in their purchasing journey when they see the video? What kind of information do they need at that stage? Then build the video to deliver the information the customer needs to make their purchasing decision and move to the next step of the sales process. And don’t forget to offer a button or link under the video showing them where to click to move further down the sales funnel after they’ve watched the video. Finally, it’s not how much you spend on the video – it’s whether or not you delivered the information the customer needed to move further down the sales funnel.”

- Leslie Drate, Cisco

Leslie Drate oversees the planning and operations of Cisco social media channels focused on serving the needs of the global Cisco community. Leslie is a 20+ year marketing veteran with a background in website development, ecommerce, and content strategy. In addition, Leslie is an expert on the Cisco video landscape and building effective videos for the BtoB audience.

Learn more now by watching Leslie’s on-demand class, Best Practices for Business to Business Video.

16. Provide Solutions to Your Web Visitor’s Needs to Improve Conversion Rate

“Conversion Rate Optimization is about truly understanding the existing needs and real-world context of your intended audience. Only by aligning the web experience with those needs can a business maximize financial value. So look for unmet problems, not do not try to push your existing “solutions” and products as the false answer to everything your web visitors’ desire.”

- Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners

Tim Ash is author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners, a firm that specializes in improving website conversion rates through landing page diagnosis and redesign, conversion consulting, a/b and multivariate test plan creation, and client training/mentoring. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. Tim is a highly-regarded keynote and conference presenter, and has published hundreds of articles about website usability, best practices in landing page design and tactics to improve website conversion rates, and he is the host of the Landing Page Optimization podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

17. Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

“LinkedIn can and should be any business professionals’ #1 social networking tool. By actively building a network of qualified connections, taking those connects off-line to create real business relationships, adding value to shared Group members, and by investing in your own personal brand, you can count on qualified lead generation on an ongoing basis.”

- Jasmine Sandler,  Author of Branding & Sales: The LinkedIn Way

Jasmine Sandler is a veteran in online marketing. She has over 15 years client experience in helping companies, both large and small, use the web to develop and grow business. She is a published author of “Branding & Sales: The LinkedIn Way,” and has expertise in the areas of using LinkedIn to grow business; B2B social media marketing strategy, and search marketing strategies for sustainable online visibility.

Jasmine reveals how to develop an effective LinkedIn strategy in her OMI class, LinkedIn for Personal Branding.

 18. Set Goals to Determine Success

“In marketing, there are so many different ways to measure success. Before launching a campaign, the most important thing you can do is establish clear and concise goals. Every business is different and so is every campaign; you must determine what success means for your business. Let’s put it this way: if you’re not willing to tie your own bonus to your campaign goals, then it’s probably not a good measure of success.”

- Tami Dalley, Salesforce Markering Cloud

Tami Dalley is the Senior Director of Analytics and Insights at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and oversees the company’s analytics and insights team. A self-proclaimed “fanatical explorer,” Tami has more than a decade of industry experience in deep-dive web analytics, usability consulting, competitive intelligence, landing page design and multivariate testing. Tami’s work has been honored with the Search Engine Strategies Award for “Most Effective Use of Web Analytics” as well as the HSMAI Gold Arian Award for “Outstanding Search Marketing Strategy.”

Tami explains how to effectively measure attribution and digital success in her OMI class, Changing the Way We Measure Success.

19. Utilize All Departments to Gather Data

“We have all heard the adage, ‘In this organization, everyone is a salesperson.’ Now it’s time to take that a step further – ‘…everyone is a data gatherer.’ Anyone that touches the customer in anyway or is out there designing products or following your industry from within your organization has access to data that can impact revenue. Therefore you need to learn how to efficiently gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon such data.”

- Joseph Zuccaro, Allinio

Joseph Zuccaro is the Founder and President of Allinio LLC, a marketing automation professional services firm helping organizations plan and implement web-based technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data that maximizes marketing ROI and drives higher revenue. He has over 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, and business development with B2B product and service companies, including angel-funded, pre-IPO and post-IPO technology companies. He is a fervent believer in properly measuring marketing and the need to relentlessly make marketing provide calculable value to sales and management.

In his OMI class, Setting Up a Lead Management Process, Joe reveals how to setup a lead management process that takes into account everything from your target personas, value propositions, content, and what you want to do with leads to get them ready for a sales person.

 20. Your Data Is Important!

“Customers have control and the fundamentals have changed. Barriers to entry are minimal and competition can enter and win quickly, thus customer relationships become your largest asset. Data becomes the “introduction, enabler, and insight” into those relationships.

- Thad Kahlow, CEO, BusinessOnline

Thad Kahlow is the CEO of BusinessOnline and is responsible for the entrepreneurial leadership of all operations. His visionary leadership style has helped propel the company into the online marketing spotlight; making BusinessOnline one of the nation’s leading digital agencies. He focuses on the alignment of business goals and customer needs so clients can make business decisions guided by information that matters. Thad has presented at numerous industry and executive conferences including the DMA, HTMA, AMT and Online Marketing Summit, and is published in leading trade and business publications like iMedia, ERA and B2B Magazine, and was one of the original founding members of the SEMPO institute.

 21. Make Digital Data Actionable

“The trend in marketing teams at retailers is an understanding of what first-party data means in a digital context, and how they can use it more efficiently. Take something like ‘site retargeting’ for instance: during the last 24 months many CMOs have realized that a visit to their site creates data, and with the right tools they can use that easily for their own needs.  Retailers will embrace Big Data and look for tools such as Programmatic Marketing Platforms to help them capture it, and make it actionable for their advertising and beyond.”

-Dax Hamman, Chango

Dax Hamman is the Chief Revenue Officer at Chango, the leading company in Search Retargeting, and is based in Chicago and Toronto. Prior, Dax founded and led the global iCrossing media group, developing the concept of ‘performance display’, an innovative planning strategy that drove significant ROI from display advertising for some of the world’s largest and coolest brands. He has 13+ years in the digital space with experience in just about everything online, including media, usability, creative, technical management and affiliate marketing. He writes and speaks extensively, particularly on new and emerging techniques within the digital media space.

Dax shares more advice for improving data and analysis in his class, Measuring What Matters: Analytics Tips for Success.

22. Expand Your SEO Plan for Longevity 

“Now, more than ever, how users interact with your brand online impact how important your brand is viewed by the major search engines like Google. If you want more natural traffic from search engines, it is vital to be strong with your PR plan, social media plan, site usability, content relevance and most of all… user engagement. Search engines continue to utilize more and more factors to prioritize which brands/sites are displayed when an Internet user does a search. Because search engines like Google are using more factors, a strong search engine optimization (SEO) plan will influence more factors and do so in a way that’s more balanced than ever before.”

– Brent Payne, Loud Interactive

Brent D. Payne started doing ‘SEO’ before it was even called ‘SEO’. He’s an internet marketer with over a decade of experience and proven success. He cut his teeth in online marketing as a vendor for Amazon.com where he became Amazon’s second largest electronics vendor by driving demand to Amazon from search engines. Brent is esteemed as one of the top SEOs in the world. He speaks around the world (just Google ‘SEO presentations’ to find them) at online conferences and has held online marketing roles at prestigious companies such as Tribune Company, where he grew Tribune’s search engine traffic from 500,000 visits per day to 1,700,000 visits per day in just 3 years.

23. Use Analytics to Increase Conversions

“The best kept secret of digital category brand leaders, has always been knowledge of the high ROI of Analytics. Nothing fuels the bottom line more than increased user conversion and retention rates through smart analyses, segmentation and targeting.”

- Morgan Vawter, Piston

Some say Morgan Vawter ’s first word was “Internet.” Since then, she’s demonstrated an uncanny knack for deciphering the complexities of the web. At age 16, she was selected to enroll in college two years early at the Georgia Academy of Mathematics, Engineering & Science. After graduating from Oglethorpe University, she spent years as a web analyst and Internet marketing consultant for Shell Oil, Qualcomm, and Cox Communications, among others. Now at Piston Agency, Morgan focuses on business analysis, strategic development, optimization, and multivariate testing, synthesizing multi–channel data to uncover insights and increase ROI for clients. When she’s not optimizing for Piston’s client set, you can find her leading sessions on the future of Analytics at Conferences such as ad:tech, WebVisions, Digiday and the Online Marketing Summit. It’s only complicated if you’re not a prodigy.

24. Integrate Your Search, Social, and Content Strategy

“In 2013 the smart marketers will be the ones merging the powers of social media, public relations and SEO and packaging an effective content strategy. The brands that optimize, socialize, visualize and publicize fresh content are the ones that will see the best ROI and monetize. Digital content that is fresh, visual, mobile and social will win the newsfeed race.”

– Lisa Buyer, The Buyer Group

When it comes to relationships, Lisa Buyer believes the connection between social media, search, and public relations is exponential. As the founder of three media companies and CEO of The Buyer Group, Lisa is ambitious about the influence of public relations on social media, SEO, and SEM, and she continues to share her innovative approach with clients, peers, and associates.

Lisa reveals how to engage your audience and tell your brand’s story in her OMI class, B2B Visual Storytelling.

25. The Future is Uncertain: Predictions for 2013

Search Engine Optimization Prediction:
Penguin/Panda have created a brand new world… where good design (usability, site speed, etc.) and quality content will a greater focus for search engines than traditional use of keywords & inbound links.

Analytics Prediction:
Fueled in part by the election and Google’s Universal Analytics capabilities, predictive (convergence) analytics will make strides this year as platforms and consultants gain the attention of the executive suite (particularly CMOs) as sales projections and marketing ROI tighten up. Attribution tracking will also greatly improve and adoption will flow down from enterprise to medium-sized businesses.

Conversion Optimization Prediction:
Marketers will focus more on conversion optimization than ever before. Tools, once again, come to the rescue, enabling businesses of all sizes to easily create, implement and manage landing page & conversion optimization programs.

Kent reveals best practices for social media analytics in this OMI class, What to Measure in Social and Why.

With a background in integrated marketing, Kent Lewis left a public relations agency in 1996 to start his career in search engine marketing. Since then, he’s helped grow businesses by connecting his clients with their constituents via the Internet. In 2000, Lewis founded Anvil Media, Inc., a digital marketing agency specializing in search engine and social media marketing for Fortune 2000 companies. Under his leadership, Anvil has received recognition from Portland Business Journal and Inc. Magazine as a Fastest Growing and Most Philanthropic Company.

The Online Marketing Institute is honored to have these same industry experts leading various online clases and events throughout the year, as they share their best advice on how to drive meaningful business results in the ever-changing digital environment. Look for the full list of courses from these top digital educators on the online learning center’s class topics page.

2013 presents exciting growth and opportunity in digital, as marketers continue to shift their offline budget to more quantifiable, online channels. According to a report released by ZenithOptimedia, Internet advertising is forecasted to grow by 14.6% in 2013, while traditional media will only grow by 1.7%, and digital advertising is predicted to make up about a quarter of all media spending by 2015. It’s clear that now is the time to learn how to weave online channels together to create a 2013 digital strategy built to deliver an optimal brand experience.

To help marketers discover new opportunities for driving ROI, the Online Marketing Institute identified the top 40 digital strategists, and asked them for their best advice for 2013. These OMI online learning center digital educators were selected because they are:

1. Embracing the latest integrated digital strategies and technologies
2. Advancing the industry through education — speaking, blogging, and teaching
3. Driving game-changing results for their clients and organization

Look for top marketing advice contributed by industry leaders like Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, Ekaterina Walter, social innovator at Intel and author of Think Like Zuck, and Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING INSIGHTS

In the first installment of this three-part series, digital strategists well-versed in the area of social media marketing share their best practices, predictions for the future of social, evaluation of industry trends and share the know-how to deliver thought provoking insight that will lay the groundwork for you to build an effective, holistic digital marketing strategy in 2013.

1. Develop an Integrated Digital Communications Strategy

“In one word – integration. Social media has exploded and there are multiple ways to connect and engage with customers. You must identify your key channels. Focus your efforts on those and have an integrated communication strategy for both your social media and traditional vehicles. For example, if you are trying to start a conversation on a particular topic, then have that topic exist in all your key channels. You will need to mold the conversation for the medium (don’t just copy and paste). If you want the song to stick, every channel has to play the same tune.”

– LaSandra Brill, Cisco

LaSandra Brill is a change agent, social media enthusiast and marketing visionary who was named ‘2012: 25 Women Who Rock Social Media’ by Top Rank Marketing Blog. As Senior Manager of Global Social Media Marketing, LaSandra Brill shapes Cisco’s marketing strategy to include a mix of innovative digital, mobile and social media techniques. At Cisco she is known for building and executing the social media strategy of one of the top five product launches in company history and for driving social innovation across Cisco. Learn more marketing how-to by enrolling in her OMI class: Social Intelligence Drives Social CRM.

2. Embrace the Four “B”s of Crisis Management

“No matter how well intentioned your presence on social media, eventually you will make a mistake. Whether it is a simple misstep or a colossal blunder, smart leaders are adopting the four “B”s to address their social crisis communication, “Be Humbled, Be Real, Be Honest, and Be Direct.” You must own the issue head on, let folks know where to go for questions or next steps, let them know you have learned from the issue and are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This will diffuse most issues and allow your folks to get back to successfully engaging in your social channels again.”

– Todd Wilms, SAP

Todd Wilms is founding member of the SAP Social Media Audience Team, helping SAP’s 47 solutions and 20 industries reach their appropriate audiences through social media marketing. The team is responsible for developing the strategy, helping to execute the program, and then developing repeatable processes to help other teams be more successful. A 20 year marketer, he has held executive product and marketing leadership roles with some of the world’s best known brands like eBay/PayPal, Citrix, PeopleSoft, and agency George P. Johnson. He is an avid writer and blogs on Forbes, his team blog socialb2p.com, and The Social Media Examiner. Learn more tips from Todd by enrolling in his OMI elearning class: Social Media Marketing Landscape: Competitive Strategies for 2013, available on-demand with subscription.

3. Don’t Use Social for Purely Promotional

• Members commit to a social site, not because of the site, but because of the commitment to one another – tap into that.

• Marketers need to think like publishers! Start with the audience, then deliver smart, useful content and build your marketing strategy around these pillars.

• Social media and digital must be built into day one of the event plan; they are too often an afterthought and become promotional, which then forces them to lose impact.

– Scott Vaughan, UBM Tech

Scott Vaughan, Chief Marketing Officer for UBM Tech, is a 20-year passionate practitioner and student of marketing and the technology market. As a sought-after thought leader, his experience spans B2B marketing and sales strategy, revenue and demand generation, database analytics, media, and content, product, event and digital marketing. His views and observations on all things marketing, technology and business can be found on CreateYourNextCustomer.com.

4. Keep it “Light, Bright and Polite”

Light: Keep it short. On social media, that means work hard to keep your messaging under 100 characters. Most adults are consumed in their lives, thus you have a very narrow window to grab their attention.

Bright: Make sure what you’re posting is something helpful to your readers, and perhaps, so valuable that they will forward it on to their friends (without you having to say, “Share this with your friends” or “Spread the word”). This means it will shine on its own and be shared without asking.

Polite: This means you and/or your brand would be proud of the message if it were to be posted on a billboard the next day for thousands of people to see. Your tweets should outlast the week, month and year. Keep them polite so you’re proud of them if they end up on a billboard for your parents to see or your boss finds your posts in the future.

– Josh Ochs, Media Leaders

Josh Ochs is the Author of “Light, Bright And Polite,” and the founder of MediaLeaders: The Marketing Team that Advises 36+ Brands On Social Media.

With background in marketing at Disney and a love for all things technology, Josh Ochs combines both to advise businesses on how to use social media to find new customers, nurture existing relationships and tie each campaign back to the bottom line. As the grassroots founder of MediaLeaders, the team that manages Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn for over 36 brands, Josh is leading the industry with innovative and creative campaigns that blend traditional sales methods with new technology. Josh outlines many of his counter-intuitive techniques in his latest book: “Light, Bright and Polite” which shares many of his tips with businesses of all types. Connect with Josh on LinkedIn.

5. They “Google It” but They Can Also “YouTube It”

“Being findable on the Internet means optimizing with your customers’ keywords. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are search engines. They Google it now on social media sites. Are you ready?”

– Heather Lutze, The Findability Group

Ready to learn more great tips? Watch Heather’s class: Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap to Social & Mobile Marketing

Heather Lutze is the widely acclaimed speaker, trainer, and consultant who literally wrote the book on search engine marketing. Two books, in fact—The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing and the brand new Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing. Her writing and in-demand keynotes are delivered with the same witty, “no-geek-speak” style that has managed to demystify internet marketing for countless business owners. Breaking free of corporate “cubicle” jobs over ten years ago with nothing more than a dream of entrepreneurship and a computer in the basement, Heather built her business into a multimillion dollar company—The Findability Group.

6. Don’t Focus on Conversation

“The biggest myth in social media marketing right now is that EVERY effort has to involve a conversation. If a customer is trying to book a flight, for example, they probably don’t want a conversation. They want to get something done. The best thing many social media teams can do is to evaluate when their customers really want to “engage” and when the best possible thing they can do is to just make it easier to get things done.”

– Rohit Bhargava, Influential Marketing Group

Rohit Bhargava is Founder of the Influential Marketing Group and an expert in helping to bring more humanity back to business. He is the bestselling author of two books (including the recent global marketing best seller LIKEONOMICS), a non-boring keynote speaker and also Professor of Global Marketing at Georgetown University.

Ready to learn more on social media marketing? Enroll in the Online Marketing Institute’s elearning center today and gain access to many classes focused on social media topics influencing the future of online marketing.

7. Utilize Social Scoring Tools

“Small and mid-sized market will be revolutionized by social customer acquisition at scale. Specifically, new social profiling and scoring tools will allows marketers to analyze and apply custom segmentation logic to their social databases to meet specific customer acquisition and conversion goals. As a result companies will see a tangible social marketing ROI – increase in sales and customer retention.”

– Mike Lewis, Awareness, Inc.

Mike Lewis is an International speaker, author of “Stand Out Social Marketing”, active blogger and Twitter personality. He is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Awareness, Inc, a social media marketing software provider. Mike helps companies like Sony Pictures, Major League Baseball, American Cancer Society, FOX Broadcasting, and many others, realize the benefits of social media marketing and how to align social technology with practical business benefits.

8. Tailor Social Media Messaging to Target Demographics Properly

“Social media provides a wealth of demographic targeting information. Whether you’re adverting on social media or using social logins, make sure you’re harnessing that data to target the most relevant messages and offers to the right audiences.”

– Janet Miller, Search Mojo

Janet Driscoll Miller brings over ten years of search engine marketing experience to Search Mojo and is considered a leading expert in her field. Janet has spoken at search engine conferences including SMX Advanced, Search Engine Strategies and Pubcon, has published articles in B2B Magazine, Visibility Magazine and others, and contributes to several blogs, including Search Marketing Sage, Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Journal.

9. Identify Business Goals for the Pinterest Platform, It’s here to stay…

Pinterest keeps evolving. In November 2012, they started to allow businesses to create their own profile. Not only can this help a business owner showcase their products and services, but it can also be beneficial in highlighting events, top customers and much more. Pinterest remains a great platform for creating content but also allows you to share your boards to your Facebook and Twitter, resulting in a cross partnerships between the two social spaces.

James Hickey is a top leader in the Internet Marketing industry. He provides his clients and students with a proven Internet Marketing business model for Retail Businesses. He is an expert in all aspects of Internet Marketing , including Google Adwords, Video Marketing, Blogging, Article Marketing and Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Mobile Application Download Strategy and much more. He also has a personal Social Media Following of over 150,000+ connections.

10. New Generations Want To Create Together As A Team

“50% of population is under 30 years old. These are digital natives who grew up in a global village with technology being an essential part of their lives. They connect and communicate differently than other generations. As marketers we need to understand that building relationships with this generation of consumers will take a different approach. We have to market with them, not to them. They are entrepreneurial generation; we need to help them succeed. They create together, so we have to facilitate togetherness and deliver tailored experiences that enable great memories.”

- Ekaterina Walter, Intel

More Facebook tips are shared in Ekaterina Walter’s OMI e-learning course: Tips and Tricks of Successful Facebook Growth, available on-demand with subscription.

Ekaterina Walter is a social innovator at Intel. A recognized business and marketing thought leader, she is a speaker and a regular contributor to Mashable, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and other leading-edge print and online publications. She is an author of the book “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg”. Connect with her on Twitter: @Ekaterina

 

The Online Marketing Institute is committed to bringing forth the insight of industry leaders. Look for the full list of courses from these top digital educators on the online learning center’s class topics page.

Read our next installment on B2B marketing and how to use data to drive results: Read Part-Two Now

According the Corporate Executive Board, 60% of the B2B buying process now happens before a prospect ever talks to a salesperson. As marketers, we are more valuable than ever before. We are now tasked with:

• Attracting and engaging leads
• Addressing pain points
• Overcoming sales objections
• Providing solutions

This is an exciting opportunity for marketers to impact revenue, and with the right digital tools and strategies, we can make it happen.

With that in mind, I’ve outlined what I think are the 3 biggest opportunities for driving revenue in B2B digital marketing, and how you can improve each initiative in 2013.

When you focus on improving these key programs—content, conversion optimization, and lead nurturing—you will be better equipped to improve your search, social, mobile, and digital advertising results, as well. An integrated digital marketing strategy and plan is key.

1. Develop Content for Each Stage of the Sales Cycle

Create a framework for matching your prospects’ needs with captivating content to navigate through the complexities of the marketing funnel, and drive action on the part of your target audiences. This content framework should be integrated into your entire digital strategy—content, including blogs, white papers, eBooks, and more, is the fuel for your search, social, lead nurturing, and digital marketing programs.

Your content should:

• Provide solutions to improve your target audience’s day-to-day work environment, business results, and quality of life
• Be helpful and of value to your target audience
• Build trust and credibility in your brand
• Help your target audience develop an emotional connection to your brand
• Build the case for your solution

As part of your 2013 content strategy, focus on crafting content for your most important and profitable segment. These are the customers you know and understand well, and the ones that can have the biggest and most immediate impact on your bottom line.

Break the content you create into three phases: cold (attract), warm (nurture), and hot (convert). While the graphic below can serve as a guide in your content development, content marketing is not black and white—there is overlap. What’s important is that the most relevant content is available to your audience at the right time, whether they find it themselves on your website, or receive it via your lead nurturing program.

Phase 1: Attract

Start by creating content that is directly related to the problem your solution solves. This content should attract and engage the type of lead that already has a need for your solution. Consider this your low hanging fruit—the potential buyers most likely to close. For example, if you offer a marketing automation solution, your phase 1 content should include best practices for lead nurturing, lead scoring, email segmentation, email frequency, reducing the sales cycle etc.

Once you have that down, cast a wider net by developing content that is valuable to your best, most profitable customers, but not necessarily directly related to your product or service. This is especially helpful if you market a disruptive product—a new innovation that your target audience doesn’t have a line item for, or a clear understanding of just yet. Then, you can nurture the lead over time, and start to build the case for your solution, before the lead has even pinpointed a problem. Once the lead identifies their need and enters the consideration phase, they will already have developed trust and a connection to your brand, and your company will be top of mind, instead of your competitors.

For example, Marketo and Eloqua not only create content about lead nurturing best practices, but they also do a great job creating content about other aspects of B2B marketing and sales. They cover content marketing, B2B social media, search etc., even though their main offering is marketing automation.

TIP: For any content that isn’t behind a lead capture form, such as your blog, make sure to include an easy and obvious way for visitors to opt-in to your lead nurture program. If you look at the HubSpot blog, they include various conversion points, such as banners within blog entries, and a subscribe form on the right rail.

Phase 2: Nurture

Once you’ve attracted the lead and they begin to get to know your brand, your content should help build the case for your solution. At this point, it’s likely that these prospects still haven’t spoken with a salesperson, but as part of your lead nurturing program, your content can begin to move the prospect down the funnel with more product-focused webinars, 3rd party reports, etc.

Help your prospects overcome any initial sales objections through FAQs, case studies, ROI calculators or even blog posts. For example, a common sales objection is “I have no budget.” You can explain to your prospects how to get their budget approved, or how to find budget (there usually is one!) during a webinar, in a blog post, or as part of a buyer’s guide. You can also provide a simple calculator that demonstrates how your solution will ultimately help save money and improve profitability.

Even if your prospects aren’t currently engaged in a dialogue with a member of your sales team, that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged in the buying process. Today’s B2B buyers have changed—they are laying low and taking matters into their own hands. With the technology and digital channels available today, messages traditionally communicated by salespeople can now quickly and consistently be delivered throughout the sales process via your integrated content marketing and lead nurturing program.

Phase 3: Convert

As sales starts to take over and get involved, your content marketing efforts can still help move the sales process along. Whether delivered by a sales team member, available on your website, or promoted via a drip campaign, content such as executive briefs, ROI calculators, and case studies can help seal the deal.

Create (or Repurpose) Content for Your Different Segments

Now, once you’ve developed content for the key stages of the buying cycle for your general audience or most important segment, identify your next important segment, and get more specific. Marketo has done a great job with this by developing specific blogs for both marketers (modern B2B marketing) and salespeople (modern B2B sales).

For example, if you market to both SMBs and the Enterprise, you can create two versions of your most popular white paper—one that addresses SMB pain points and solutions, and another that focuses on the unique challenges in the Enterprise. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, either. You may very well be able to take one piece of content, update it, and repurpose it for each of your unique audiences. Assuming you have key segmentation data on your leads, you’ll then be able to deliver the targeted content with your marketing automation solution.

2. Generate More Leads with High-Performance Landing Pages

You can’t nurture what you don’t convert.

According to a survey by BtoB Magazine, 59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. However, more than 60% of B2B marketers report that their greatest marketing challenge for 2012 was generating more leads. To efficiently boost revenue in 2013, focus on generating more leads by improving your landing pages, and then nurturing them to sale with a targeted lead nurturing program (more on that below).

I’ve created and tested many B2B landing pages—and I can you the absolute #1 most important element of your landing page is the message. Your headline and body copy must be clear, not clever, and focus on benefits, not features. I know you love your product (hey, I do too!), but strip your page of copy that focuses on features or company jargon. Instead, use the jargon that your target audience uses, and speak directly to them.

In this example below from one of our own campaigns, the headline and copy focus on clear and obvious benefits, and the page converts at over 60%.

Also, ensure that the message on your landing page clearly matches the message of the ad or offer that got the visitor to click. The more tightly matched they are, the higher your conversion rate will be. If you’re managing a large scale or more sophisticated digital program, this means creating tens, if not hundreds, of unique landing pages. A landing page management solution such as LiveBall by ion interactive can help you scale your program efficiently.

Now that you’ve got the message down, the best way to see a continuous improvement in your conversion rate and lead quantity is to A/B test your landing pages. If you’re not testing your pages already, it’s always best to begin by testing the element that you think will have the biggest influence on conversions.

My favorite elements to test and constantly improve are:

• Required form fields: The less form fields you require on your landing pages, the higher your conversion rate will be. If the objective of you landing page is to generate leads for lead nurturing, I recommend only collecting first name, last name, and email address. You can gather more information on the leads over time with progressive profiling. Now, if your sales team or other members of the marketing team are hesitant to remove other fields, propose to A/B test the page. Once you can demonstrate the significant increase in lead quantity (and maybe even quality, because your best leads may be hesitant to share information), they’ll agree to collecting less information initially.
• The headline: David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” In my experience, simply testing your headline can result in a conversion increase of 100%.
• The call-to-action: Along with the overall message, your call-to-action is critical to the success of your landing page. The more specific the call-to-action, the better. Clearly state the intended goal of the page, and guide the visitor to complete the action that you want them to do.
• Design: Your design should enhance the message and support the goal of your page, not detract from it. A pretty page with a lousy message is far less effective than a boring page with a great message. But the real gold is when you combine a great message with an effective design. And the best way to find out which design supports your goal best is through testing. Start with high-contrast A/B tests, find champions, and go from there.

If you’re ready to start testing, tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer allow you to easily test elements on your website, without working with IT or development resources. If the process of creating and managing landing pages is not a pain point for you, I recommend starting there. Most of the popular marketing automation solutions also include landing page testing capabilities. I find that what they really excel at, however, is lead management, scoring, and drip marketing–not landing page optimization.

If you’re creating and testing multiple pages, solutions such as Unbounce (SMB) and LiveBall (Enterprise) make the conversion optimization process much more efficient by allowing you to create, test, and measure pages within a single platform—which results in faster speed-to-market, better performing campaigns, and higher revenue.

3. Nurture Leads to Revenue with Marketing Automation

Conventional marketing wisdom says it takes at least 7 touches to move a cold lead to become a customer. Instead of sending rapid-fire emails to your entire list, get more relevant by communicating to your leads based on their segment, place in the sales cycle (lead score), and actions they take on your site. Marketing automation solutions such as Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, Manticore etc, allow you to score leads and deploy very targeted drip and email campaigns.

Having setup marketing automation solutions myself, I understand that it is a big task—from integration, to lead scoring, to strategy development etc. Depending on the size of your business and resources, the initial setup can take weeks, but the ROI is absolutely there. According to The Annuitas Group, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.

So once you have your marketing automation solution such in place, I recommend that you start small, and focus on your warmest leads.

Tips For Starting Your First Drip Campaign

• Focus on your warmest leads—the leads most likely to close: If you are already sending general, best practice-focused content to your leads every week or so (many B2B marketers I talk to are), your first drip campaign can focus on nurturing warmer leads, as these leads are your priority, and most likely to have an immediate impact on revenue.
• Determine which leads are already warm: Check your CRM, marketing automation, or email solution, and look up the names of some recent qualified prospects and customers. Take a look at how many times they visited your website and opened emails, which pages on your site they visited etc. It’s going to be different for everyone—but this is a good starting point for deciding how to score your leads, and determine which ones are into you, and which ones aren’t… just yet. It’s always a good idea to work directly with sales on this, as well.
• Flag your warm leads: Once you have a good idea of which leads are warm, you’ll be able to add them to this “warm lead” nurture cycle. This is usually a pretty simple process. For example, within the marketing automation solutions I have used, you can setup a rule that says, “if lead score is above 50, add to XYZ campaign”.
• Develop your email messages: Your 5-part campaign should shift the dialogue from best practices to your solution, and how it solves a unique problem that your target audience has. Focus on benefits, and introduce prospects to your sales team by making the from name of your messages a sales team member. You can even include a headshot of a sales team member in the email signature. I’ve had great success with both text-based and HTML emails. Overall, simple works, and what’s most important is that your message is relevant and meaningful. Your email design should support, and not detract, from that message.
• Decide on frequency: As a general rule, I find that spacing out your emails every 7 days is a good place to start. Monitor open rates and click-thru rates to see how your leads are responding. Once your program gets more sophisticated, you can provide frequency options, and increase the frequency based on response rates or actions that your leads take. For example, if a lead visits a page on your site that explains technical requirements, but does not take any other action, you can trigger an email within 24 hours that invites them to attend a demo etc.

Overall, your goal is develop an emotional connection with your prospects, and communicate how your solution will improve their day-to-day working environment, professional aspirations, and success in business and beyond.

Lead nurturing programs can become very sophisticated, but again, if you’re just starting out, start small, and go from there. The below example is a good, general place to start—a simple program that focuses on nurturing your warmer leads, so they can be handed off to sales for follow up.

Bonus Tip! Attract and Engage with Visual Storytelling

Once you have a defined content program in place, visual content can really help amplify your efforts. Over the past year or so, visual storytelling has become one of the hottest ways to tell your brand’s story. And with good reason—it works.

Visual content, including memes, presentations, videos, infographics and photos, is easily shared through social channels. Adding visual content to your digital marketing mix allows you to deliver your message to your audience—without requiring them to invest time in reading.

According to 3M Corporation, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. Publishers that use infographics grow traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t (source: Ansonalex).

If you’re not already using visual content, determine if it will help you achieve your marketing objectives. Start small by promoting an infographic on your blog, or sharing a relevant meme on your Facebook page. Review the results, and go from there.

Here’s to a successful 2013!

Take the Next Step to More Leads and Higher Revenue

To dive deep into B2B digital marketing, explore the Online Marketing Institute’s collection of B2B-focused online classes, including a few of my favorites:

Content Is Opportunity: Developing Content for Every Stage in the Buying Cycle with Michael Pranikoff
B2B Visual Storytelling Best Practices with Lisa Buyer
Landing Pages for Business Marketing with Scott Brinker
How to Develop a Lead Management Process and Plan with Carlos Hidalgo

1. Develop Visual Content

“2013 is the year when we will truly feel the rise of visual marketing. Visuals and video done right are highly effective in cutting through the noise. It is snackable kind of content that resonates with people across the globe and increases engagement across social nets. Brands will need to understand what it takes to do visual marketing well, whether within their current communities or new networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and others.”

- Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist, Intel, and author of Think Like Zuck

2. Create Success Metrics That Clearly Support a Business Goal

“I’m a measurement and analysis guy at heart so one of the best pieces of advice I can give to brands would be to have success metrics that very clearly support a business goal. For example, if building your company’s reputation as a thought leader is a business objective, then one of your success metrics should focus on how much of your content is shared and in what social media circles.”

- Adam Proehl, Managing Partner, NordicClick Interactive

3. Develop an Integrated Communications Strategy

“In one word – integration. Social media has exploded and there are multiple ways to connect and engage with customers. The key is to identify your key channels, focus your efforts on those and have an integrated communication strategy for both your social media and traditional vehicles. For example if you are trying to start a conversation on a particular topic have that topic exist in all your key channels but don’t just copy and paste, you will need to mold the conversation for the medium but like advertising if you want the song to stick, every channel has to play the same tune.”

- LaSandra Brill, Senior Manager of Global Social Media, Cisco

4. Become a Smart Editorial Publisher

“2013 is the year smart brands will become smart editorial publishers. Three reminders: 1. Merge your public relations news into your social media content strategy that includes visual story telling. 2. Write like a reporter. 3. Throw out the cream puff press release writing and generic social media messages.”

- Lisa Buyer, CEO, The Buyer Group

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Become a Geek

“Things are changing fast in our industry. As an online marketer, you’ve been used to overcoming new challenges every year. The kind of challenges that did not exist the year before.

But putting together a successful social media plan is a really different type of challenge. It is different because in order to be successful at banner advertising, email or content marketing, you don’t have to understand the technicalities of the media. Who cares how the banners are distributed or how the emails are sent and tracked, a long as it works!

With social media in general (and Facebook in particular), if you don’t understand how the platform, its features, its API and its insights work, you will  probably miss most of the potential this new media can offer you.

Did you know that you can obtain highly qualified data about your Facebook fans using applications? That you can publish a Flash app directly in the newsfeed and collect leads or display interactive demos of your products for free? And finally, are you familiar with all the possibilities that OpenGraph applications can offer to your website?

If you accept to become a little bit more geek with Social Media and dive into some techy stuff, you will learn a lot and be a lot more creative and successful. Go ahead, it’s also fun.”

- Emeric Ernoult, CEO & Founder, AgoraPulse

6. Extend Social Beyond Facebook

“Facebook is no longer just a destination. Thanks to Open Graph which enables developers to embed social into any desktop or mobile experience, Facebook is now a feature. It’s a minimum requirement for engaging consumers online. As a result, social engagement is shifting dramatically. The user experiences of 2013 will be social (on or off Facebook.com), deeply interactive with game mechanics, and accessible from every connected device imaginable. We call it the all-screens era and it’s coming fast in 2013.”

- Bart Steiner

7. Keep it “Light, Bright and Polite”

“When writing, responding or sharing something on social media, always keep it “Light, Bright and Polite.” Let’s break this down:

Light: Keep it short. On social media, that means work hard to keep your messaging under 100 characters. Most adults are consumed in their lives, thus you have a very narrow window to grab their attention.

Bright: Make sure what you’re posting is something helpful to your readers, and perhaps, so valuable that they will forward it on to their friends (without you having to say, “Share this with your friends” or “Spread the word”). This means it will shine on its own and be shared without asking.

Polite: This means you and/or your brand would be proud of the message if it were to be posted on a billboard the next day for thousands of people to see. Your tweets should outlast the week, month and year. Keep them polite so you’re proud of them if they end up on a billboard for your parents to see or your boss finds your posts in the future.”

- Josh Ochs, Founder, MediaLeaders

8. Develop or Hire a Social Media Marketing Evangelist

“In 2013, smart companies will upgrade their social media teams with an Evangelist role. Unlike a Social Media Marketing Manager role steeped in tactical execution, the role of the Social Media Evangelist is that of that of a strategic planner, manager, trainer and facilitator. Essentially, the Evangelist is Chief Brand Officer/CMO/Editor-in-Chief/HR Director all wrapped into one. Instead of being the single voice for the company, the Evangelist manages the overall voice of the company, as created by employees at all levels. Notice the term “Marketing” is dropped from the job title, since the responsibilities of the Evangelist expand well beyond marketing into R&D, customer service and sales. The Evangelist is responsible for the company’s overall presence in social media, and that the brand is accurately represented across all departments/divisions. Read the background article or full job description for details.”

- Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media

9. Test Every New Facebook Ad Format

“Ever since its IPO, Facebook has been releasing new ad types and targeting at a torrid pace. And there are no signs of things slowing in 2013. The mounting pressure on Facebook to monetize its vast audience is a win for marketers. Whether you’re looking to build your brand or drive direct response results, there’s a Facebook ad strategy that can deliver results. It may take some time to find the right combination so keep testing and tweaking.”

- Aaron Goldman, CMO, Kenshoo

10. Imagine That You a Communicating Face-to-Face

“Trigger finger syndrome — the compulsiveness we develop from playing videogames or using other applications that call for clicking on the mouse or fire button — makes people type things online that they’d never say to you in person. So the shortcut guidepoint on how to moderate communities online is to at least mentally transform that conversation from static text on a screen to a discussion. As you read what others have written and write your responses, imagine what they sound like. If you’re able to speak them aloud while typing, so much the better, although if you’re doing this work in a cubicle farm, your neighbors might not appreciate listening to you talk to your screen. Think of what you would say to each posting party if you had the chance to talk face to face.”

- Jackie Cohen, Director of Social Media and Communications, Ticular

11. Get Authentic Recommendations

“In the social media age, the holy grail for marketing leaders is getting customers to authentically recommend you. Advocacy- not ads- is what drives purchase decisions and perceptions in nearly every product category. Smart businesses and marketers aren’t fighting this customer uprising. They’re harnessing it. They’re systematically finding their Advocates and turning them into powerful marketing forces. The question of brand advocacy should go beyond the CMO; it should be at the top of the CEO’s agenda as well. Advocacy is strategic. Advocates drive profits. Companies with happy customers grow faster than those without. It just makes sense. You have to evangelize evangelism.”

- Rob Fuggetta, CEO & Founder, Zuberance

12. Correlate Social Media Marketing to Revenue and Sales

“If you’ve been using fuzzy metrics to justify social media initiatives, 2013 is the year to add sales and revenue impact to your list of social media KPIs. With a slew of new tools, you can now determine which social media marketing channels drive real, meaningful revenue, and which ones fall flat.”

- George Revutsky, Founder, MyNextCustomer

13. Engage and Interact with Your Audience

“There is tremendous untapped potential for you to develop meaningful relationships with your audience. Don’t just post tweets and status updates. Monitor conversations. Connect with people. Reply to their Tweets. You will be amazed how simply interacting with your audience can help build lasting customer relationships.”

- Megan Leap, Director of Marketing, Online Marketing Institute

Want to discover proven techniques for improving landing page conversions?  Check out the Online Marketing Institute’s class, “Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Convert More Clicks Into Customers.”

I had the pleasure of attending Conversion Conference this week in beautiful Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The event was packed—and I loved meeting so many smart marketers who are passionate about ROI.

Now, the discipline of conversion optimization is full of many myths, including “red converts better than blue,” “short pages always outperform long pages,” and more.

In his information-rich session, “How to Develop a Conversion Optimization Strategy”, Chris Goward, President of conversion optimization consultancy WiderFunnel, shared his top 3 myths of conversion optimization:

Myth 1: Multivariate Testing Provides the Best Results

Think multivariate testing is superior to A/B testing? Think again.

According to Chris, multivariate testing takes too long to reach a statistically significant result. Marketers will achieve better results with A/B testing, with which they can focus on strategy and a very specific A/B test.

Myth 2: You Don’t Need Controlled Testing

If you want to achieve continuous improvements in your conversion program, you must test in a controlled environment. Without a controlled environment, you will never know which variables positively (or negatively) impact your conversion rate.

Myth 3: Usability Testing is a Substitute for Conversion Optimization

Need to learn is a visitor is able to complete a desired action that you give them? Usability testing is your tool because everything needs to be validated.

But real conversion optimization is the intersection of persuasion marketing (the processes of motivating visitors to take action), experience design (removing barriers to action), and the scientific method (testing your hypotheses).

This post was originally posted on OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

Jon leads strategy and execution for all aspects of Marketo’s thought leadership and content marketing programs. He is executive editor of the popular Marketo blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and author of the comprehensive handbook, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

1. What is modern B2B marketing?

As I wrote way back in 2007, the core tenants of Modern B2B Marketing is that modern marketers:

• Know that customers control their attention and that marketers should engage when and how the customer wants
• Create leverage by enabling and nurturing a community of customers, prospects, partners, and other influencers
• Are left-brained (math and science over creativity and art)
• Are accountable – and more influential as a result

2. Why is it important for B2B marketers to use marketing automation and adopt a modern approach to their marketing?

If you ask the VP Sales about their system of record, you’ll hear about CRM. If you ask the CFO, you’ll hear about ERP.  And you’ll get answers from the VP Support, VP Human Resources, and almost every other department in the enterprise.

But if you ask the CMO, you’ll hear crickets…. or something about a hodgepodge collection of spreadsheets and cobbled-on features to CRM.

The need for marketing departments to have a platform and system of record “of their own” is driving modern marketers to adopt marketing software – and especially marketing automation – at an accelerating rate.  And these investments can deliver amazing ROI.

Consider this:  The Marketo Benchmark on Revenue Performance (Sept 15, 2012) found that companies that use marketing automation source more pipeline from marketing, have more productive sales reps, and experience better revenue attainment.

3. What are the most common mistakes B2B marketers make?

It’s a mistake to take the responses to any campaign and call them leads. Downloading your paper, watching your demo or signing up for your Webinar doesn’t make someone a lead. Usually, these respondents are in the prebuying cycle and are just looking for information or researching. Without lead scoring to find the true leads, and lead nurturing to develop relationships with the rest, marketers are doomed to inefficient lead generation.

Second, marketers sometimes think that they’re doing lead nurturing by sending their contacts a monthly newsletter and an occasional Webinar invite. This is not lead nurturing; successful nurturing needs to be a personalized process for building individual relationships over time by (a) staying in the front of prospects’ minds with relevant, useful information and (b) watching and listening to each prospect and reacting in an appropriate way to accelerate his or her buying cycle with appropriate responses.

Third (and this is a bit self-serving but true nonetheless) it’s a mistake to try to implement modern demand-generation processes without marketing automation. You simply can’t keep track of all the appropriate activities, scores and next steps for each lead without technology to help — and it’s much cheaper to buy software to automate these processes than to hire people to manage it manually.

4. For marketers just getting started in marketing automation, where should they begin?

Most categories of enterprise software are “all-or-nothing propositions” that require you to fully implement the new system, transforming your processes completely. But marketing automation is different.  Marketing automation can deliver fast results – but then requires ongoing usage and adapting business processes to get full benefit. The most successful users of marketing automation have a big vision for what they want to do, but deliver fast value and then evolve from there to drive maximum value.

In other words, go for the quick wins. Often, this is in a basic Lead Recycling strategy, or basic lead scoring to help prioritize sales time on the hottest leads and opportunities.

5. Where do you see the marketing automation industry headed in the next 5 years?

One of the biggest changes is that marketing automation is no longer so email-centric. Email is still important, but increasingly it’s just one of many channels used for developing relationships with leads.

For example, social is increasingly important. If you “Like” Marketo on Facebook and I can get my status updates to show up in your newsfeed, then I am nurturing the relationship – probably even more effectively than I would over email. The same is true for your LinkedIn today, Pinterest account, or any other channel where people can follow your brand.

On the lead scoring side, it’s no longer confined to behaviors just on the corporate website. What you tweet and who you follow can be important buying signs, just like visiting a pricing page.

This post was originally posted on OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

Steve was brilliant innovator—who married stunning, user-friendly designs with the latest advancements in technology. He had an innate ability for developing products that consumers wanted, before they even realized it.

Now you’re probably thinking: what can Steve teach us about landing pages? The answer is: a lot.

1. Never Stop Innovating

Apple is a powerhouse of innovation, having introduced game changers such as the PowerBook, iMac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad. But innovation doesn’t come without risks (the Newton, anyone)? Yet, with great risks come great rewards, and even with some failures along the way, innovation combined with continuous iteration has made Apple one of the most innovative companies in history.

Landing page lesson: To achieve dramatic lifts in your landing page performance, you must innovate. Test completely new experiences, messaging, layouts, campaign goals etc. While new innovations in your conversion program may not always win, if you keep pushing the needle and iterate along the way, you’ll achieve game-changing wins like Steve did.

2. Keep it Simple, Focused, and User-Friendly

Apple’s products combine beautiful, streamlined designs, with functional, user-friendly features.  In fact, Steve credits his calligraphy class at Reed College as the inspiration behind Apple’s beautiful typography, graphics, and design. The combination of beauty with smart, user-centric features is the magic that fuels Apple’s tremendous appeal.

Landing page lesson: The best landing pages keep the user in mind. They combine 1) a clear, benefit-focused message 2) user-friendly, streamlined design 3) and a strong, obvious call-to-action. But effective landing pages can be beautiful and engaging, too. If you are ready to start innovating, combine the key ingredients of a classic direct response campaign, with a beautiful design like the one below from ion interactive. But make sure to test first. Because depending on your business, goals, and target audience, there is a chance that a page that resembles a BlackBerry Bold may actually outperform a page that takes a cue from the iPhone 5 (strange, I know).

3. Marry Strategy, Design, and Technology

Steve’s success at Apple is due not only to the fact that his products are beautiful, but that they are powered by the latest advancements in technology. From the iPhone’s touchscreen, to the iPod Nano, to the MacBook Air, Apple’s simple, elegant products are powered by impressive, game-changing technology.

Landing page lesson: A nice, well-designed landing page without a testing solution is okay. And a landing page testing and optimization solution without a smart strategy might help you somewhat. But you’ll achieve the best results by combining your marketer brilliance with robust technology.

Just like Apple does.

Want to discover proven techniques for improving landing page conversions?  Check out the Online Marketing Institute’s class, “Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Convert More Clicks Into Customers.”

This post was originally posted on OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

To give you a taste of the great advice she has in store for you this Wednesday, I caught up with Nichole and asked her about her favorite social media tools, common mistakes to avoid, and more. Here’s what she had to say:

1. What social media metrics do most marketers overlook (but shouldn’t?)

Cost per lead, both the soft lead (someone who provides contact information for content) and the hard lead (someone who provides contact information for product information). Others are cost per click, cost per site visit, cost per inbound link.

2. What are your favorite tools for measuring social media marketing?

I like to use Google’s Analytics custom URL parameters to pass data from links shared in social channels into the Google Analytics interface. I’ve also become pretty fond of SocialSnap, which is the tool that is most closely aligned with the Full Frontal ROI methodology that I’ve found.

3. What are the most common mistakes marketers make when measuring social media performance?

We make it too hard and we present the wrong data to the C-Suite. We’re trying to use “social” metrics like fans, followers, shares etcetera instead of core business drivers like sales volume, revenue and cost. Every marketer can measure cost, right now, but instead I see reports with follower growth instead of things like cost per impression, cost per engagement and cost per lead.

4. When marketers walk into the office in the morning, what is the first social media metrics they should look at?

As a community manager it’s important to look at the standard social metrics, like audience growth and engagement. That’s what I look at, but I also look at cost per impression, cost per engagement and cost per lead to see if we are headed in the right direction.

5. What are some of the most common misconceptions about measuring social media marketing?

That it’s hard. Social media interactions take place on the web, which is inherently more measurable than offline channels like print, TV and Radio. Measuring social media is actually really easy and most marketers have the tools they need. They just need to start using them a different way.

6. Is it really possible to calculate the value or a Fan or follower? If so, how?

Yes, it’s super easy. The value of a Fan or Follower is $0. That’s right, $0. Until you can correlate that a fan or follower is more likely to buy, will purchase at a higher frequency, or will retain as a customer longer there is no monetary value for a fan or follower. Because most aren’t measuring that type of impact today, the value today is $0. But if you measure it, it can actually be much higher. :-)

1. Align your SEO efforts with cross functional marketing team strategies.

“In a recent online marketing industry report, one of the interesting findings was that search marketing continues to grow worldwide and that search marketing represents a key channel for digital marketers. Search spend in the United states grew by 13% while ROI steadily improved. Additionally growth rates for search spend are strong in the UK and Germany representing an 18% and 12 % increase respectively YOY. This highlights that that there is a significant potential ROI opportunity for companies to align SEO with cross functional marketing strategies, especially between SEO and paid search.

During my session, ‘Google Ranking Factors: Live Critique and Demo’, I’ll explain how Adobe used an advanced customer segmentation strategy that aligned with SEO strategy to drive 350% ROI increases. Plus, I’ll also preview participant submitted websites and SEO best practices.”

- Warren Lee, SEO Manager, Adobe

2. Focus on measuring quality, not just quantity.

“It’s a common pitfall in digital marketing– success is often measured by the old direct mail perspective of eyeballs, rather than level of engagement with the right audience. Companies will commonly judge social media success by the raw number of friends or followers they have, harkening back to the days of high school and wanting to be the most popular person in the class. Social media is about creating better ways to engage with the people who have an affinity for your brand. Not everyone on social media sites is going to LOVE your brand, but through authentic engagement, you have an opportunity to give them a positive perspective on it. Don’t focus on how many, focus on the conversation and type of people who want to let you into their personal community.”

- Ryan Phelan, VP, Strategic Services, BlueHornet, @RyanPPhelan

3. It’s not always about the sale.

“Think about your favorite company or product. Now, mentally list out the top 3 reasons you love that brand. I am betting that none of the top 3 reasons were “because it’s cheap.” If this is true, why do we believe that the only message we have for our subscribers or customers is “It’s on sale!”? If you’re only communicating a sale or promotion, then you have a very limited relationship with your social connections. But if you start to have an authentic conversation with your social connections and form a real relationship, you can occasionally mention a sale or promotion, and also start to talk about the really cool things that are going on with your brand and company. Being that loved brand with your social fans and followers is work, but it has more long-term payoff than sales or promotions alone.”

- Ryan Phelan, VP, Strategic Services, BlueHornet, @RyanPPhelan

4. Claim and optimize your Google+ Local page.

“Local search is growing fast and it’s important that your Google listing is claimed and optimized so your business can be seen in the local results. When you optimize your page by adding categories, a keyword-enhanced description, photos, store hours, etc. you make it more attractive to search engines as well as your potential customers. Add an Offer to grab the attention of consumers and help you stand out from the rest of your competitors. According to comScore, 60% of a local searchers use offers and most return to businesses they’ve visited in the past. Also, encourage your customers to leave reviews. Good reviews help your rankings and inspire new customers to try your business.”

- Steve Yeich, CEO, Local Splash

5. Align social data with CRM.

“Social marketing will continue to gain focus into 2013 and brands will face increasing pressure to (1) differentiate themselves across social channels and (2) demonstrate a repeatable social marketing ROI. Differentiation is difficult because on the social web brands don’t only complete with their direct competitors but with every other brands competing for the attention of the audience. Brands that will truly stand out on social channels will be those who leverage data to target and drive meaningful interactions with their audience. Aligning that data with CRM (or other customer management systems) will become a requirement to demonstrate repeatable and provable ROI across the social web.”

- Mike Lewis, VP of Sales & Marketing, Awareness, Inc and Author of Stand Out Social Marketing (McGraw-Hill 11/2012), @bostonmike

6. Collect and leverage social data to make more intelligent, data driven decisions.

“The concept of social CRM is finally able to come to life with the technology advances over the past couple of years. There is so much data that can be collected from listening, social login and by monitoring the behavior on your website. All of this data can and should be analyzed to better understand your customers so that you can enrich their experience and ultimately build a better relationship with them. For example if John Smith connects to your site via social login you can pull down his social graph information and leverage his likes and interests to personalize your marketing messages. You can also broaden that view by brining in conversations he’s having on the social web to better understand his interests and mood which can help build a better rapport.”

- LaSandra Brill, Social Media Marketing Manager, Cisco, @LaSandraBrill

7. Build a social media command center.

“If you’re still struggling with getting executive buy-in consider a social media command center. The visualizations bring the customer conversations to life in a way that no executive can ignore. For whatever reason when they see it in lights something clicks and they want to understand more.”

- LaSandra Brill, Social Media Marketing Manager, Cisco, @LaSandraBrill

8. Harness multi-attribution modeling with web analytics.

“Multiple customer touch-points before you close a lead or sale is the rule not the exception these days. Are you using multi-attribution modeling with your web analytics so that you have a full picture of your sales funnel? You already understand what digital channels directly bring in sales/leads. Now understand how each digital channel serves to assist in that conversion. Knowing this will allow you to create an integrated digital marketing strategy and spend your money more wisely.”

- Jamie Duklas, Director of Social Media, Booyah Online Advertising, @jduklas

9. Think email series, not email blasts.

“If you’re structuring your email marketing program as a rapid-fire deployment of one-off communications, you’re hindering email ROI on at least two fronts. First, conventional marketing wisdom tells us it takes at least seven touches to convert a cold prospect to a customer, and whether the magic number is seven or not, it’s definitely true that new prospects need multiple chances to familiarize themselves with a brand, gather information and build trust before buying. Basically the more touches you have with a prospective customer in as many ways as possible, the more likely you are to build strong relationships and in turn sell your product or service. Email can play a major role in this process.

Second, not only should you think in terms of matching email messages to customer life stage, but structure your email program as a series of messages per stage rather than a single “blast”. For example, new subscribers should be welcomed, and while one welcome message is better than none, an onboarding series of emails that welcome, educate and invite new prospects to make a first purchase (or advance the relationship toward purchase) is up to three times more effective than a single welcome message. For better email ROI, structure your program as a series of email “conversations” vs. one-way messages, and your subscribers will be far more engaged, confident and loyal in the long run.”

- Karen Talavera, Synchronicity Marketing, @SyncMarketing

10. Deploy triggered email and dialog tracks.

“While you’re thinking in terms of email series vs. single messages, it also pays to think in terms of email conversations. One size does not fit all when it comes to your list, so “blasting” everyone the same message without customized follow-up leaves money on the table. True, some subscribers will convert instantly (especially if they are existing customers who’ve bought before), while others need coaxing and incentives in the form of further messaging – or “conversations”. Designing triggered follow–up email sequences for different response actions (open, click, or conversion) becomes a key way to continually nudge the undecided toward a clear yes or no response, nurture prospects into customers, and encourage customers to buy again.”

- Karen Talavera, Synchronicity Marketing, @SyncMarketing

11. Create landing pages that seduce and convert.

“Landing pages are a critical component to the generating quality leads from PPC. You want to direct potential customers on their next steps. Do you want them to order? Contact you? Download more information? This is achieved by having a strong call-to-action (CTA) on the landing page that matches the messaging on PPC ad the visitor just clicked on. Make the primary CTA stand out visually with the use of a button or other eye-catching graphic. Think size, color, and placement of the CTA graphic for maximum benefit. It’s amazing how many advertisers miss this important step, and it can make or break a campaign!”

- Lisa Raehsler, Big Click Co, @LisaRocksSEM

12. Take control of your data.

“Understand what data you have access to is good. But what is great is to appreciate all the data collected on your site. From widget companies to free analytics tools, there are many companies that collect data and which you don’t necessarily can act upon. Run an inventory of data collected on your site and try to see what value they can bring to your web site and campaigns”

- Dax Hamman, Chief Revenue Officer, Chango, @daxhamman

13. Be smartly efficient about campaign testing.

Test only those elements which will net you the maximum ROI of time, energy and money. For small companies and/or those with limited resources, I’d focus on headline and calls-to-action testing (both copy and design.)
Roberta Rosenberg, Director of Marketing, Business Resources and Education, American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), @CopywriterMaven

14. Connect to the search psyche of your potential buying customer.

“Digital Marketing often becomes about speaking and communicating to robots, the search engines and the algorithms. My session is going to re-connect your marketing efforts, whether you are a small business or an agency, to the search psyche of your potential buying customer in Social Media Sites. You must know them first, write content to what they want and only then will conversions show up one tweet, follow, like or comment at a time!”

- Heather Lutze, CEO and Founder, Findability Group, @HeatherLutze

15. Always test your landing pages.
“Testing pays off. No matter how much you “think” you know your audience, always challenge what is working. Testing can be as easy as a multi-step page versus a single landing page – and the results can be significant. Know your results. They will sometimes surprise you.”

- Sally Lowery, Director of Revenue Marketing, ion interactive, @sallymacnc

16. Develop a video marketing strategy.

“Video offers greater retention and recall: up to 5 times greater than the written word. So how to get started? Below is a list of recommendations to consider when developing a successful video marketing program, from strategic planning to measurement.

• Benchmark the competition (analyze profile design, overall content and level of interaction)
• Based on analysis of existing videos, the ideal duration to maximize engagement is 30-120 seconds
• All videos should include a closing call-to-action (visit a website, subscribe, comment, share, etc.)
• For trademarked or copyrighted content or improved measurability, consider digital watermarking
• Create a text transcript for all videos (good for search engine optimization and ADA compliance)
• Create an audio-only “podcast” for distribution on iTunes and other audio websites
• Create still images from HD videos to post on Pinterest, Flickr, Facebook and other profiles
• Don’t forget to set default sharing option to “public” or “allow all”
• Use Comments, Hot Spots and A/B Testing as your virtual focus group (to determine future content and format ideas)
• Based on new posting rules recently released by YouTube, be sure to use your Google+ profile when commenting on videos”

- Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media, @kentjlewis

17. Secure proper budget for digital campaigns.

“So you’ve struggled to secure digital marketing budget to optimize your website, build out a pay-per-click advertising campaign or build a social media presence. Fear not. Even if you shared the benefits of digital marketing outlined above without success, there are three effective sales strategies you can use: appealing to logic, ego or simply begging for forgiveness.”

- Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media, @kentjlewis

18. Focus on the right social media metrics.

“While social metrics like growth in # of fans, followers or likes can certainly help set a baseline and provide trending for general reach and frequency, they can be misleading or misinterpreted as absolute values. One way to minimize the limitations of these metrics is to track them as ratios instead. The benefit of a ratio is that it focuses on relationships and relativity. For example, marketers shouldn’t care as much about the total number of Likes on Facebook; rather, they should care about the level of quality and engagement with those individuals. One way to do that is by looking at relationships like the average number of comments or shares-per-post.”

- Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media, @kentjlewis

Join OMI September 17-28 at the Digital Marketing Strategy Summit—the world’s leading online event for digital marketing education. Choose from over 36 sessions on social media, content, search, email, analytics, conversion, and more. See agenda.

Note: this post was originally posted on OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

I’ve been lucky enough to know Roberta for the past few years. Not only is she a brilliant copywriter, but she’s a savvy marketer as well. Currently, Roberta is the Director of Marketing, Business Resources and Education at the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC). You also may remember her popular Copyblogger series on landing page makeovers. Anyways, you don’t want to miss her Summit session, 10 Tips for Writing Killer Email Copy, on Email Marketing Day (Wednesday, Sept 26). Here’s a sneak peek of what she’ll talk about:

1. What are the elements of a great email headline?

I think the same rules that make a great headline for a direct mail letter, landing page, or blog are pretty much the same:

• One clear, strong, easy-to-grasp idea crisply and uniquely presented
• Focus on inherent and direct benefit to prospect
• Be clear, not clever

2. What makes a great email call-to-action?

From a copy standpoint, making a strong connection between the click, what happens when you do, and if possible, a taste of the benefit. For example, “Get your instant download now!” does a pretty good job of connecting the click to the expectation. “Click to get your Instant Registration Discount!” connects the click to the expectation and the benefit.

3. What is the most important piece of advice you can give to marketers that need to improve their email communication?

Think of it as a conversation between two people – you and your prospect. An email is not an article, a speech, or an essay. It’s a letter, an intimate exchange between two people. When you keep this in mind, your copy will always have a genuine, authentic tone.

4. Copy vs. design? What do you think is more important in email marketing?

Great copy can get the job done with minimal design – think of the traditional direct mail letter. It’s not fancy and mostly words. The importance of design for email copy is about how well it supports the words. Clean, easy to read fonts … white space … generous margins … what have you. The best designers know the seamless, ‘invisible’ design is about keeping the reader engaged, not oohing and ahhing about the color thematics and font choices. Design that calls attention to itself fails the message.

5. What are some ways to develop your tone and voice in B2B?

It’s important to match the tone/voice to the expectations of your market. Having said that, I do believe that “business conversational” is a great foundation for all B2B. Warm, friendly, but professional works across all verticals. From there, use the regular vocabulary of your audience. If you’re selling financials/insurance, you’d have one tone – serious because we’re talking about people’s money, but not stuffy. Selling to ad agencies? You can get a little more “crazy” and still be taken seriously. You want the tone/voice to be familiar to your audience to get them to trust your message and drop their guard just a little to take in what you’re saying.

6. If you weren’t a marketer, what would you do?

Oh, that’s easy. I’d go back to stand-up comedy/comedy writing which I explored in my very early 20s … or become a life coach for mid-life women … or get my masters and teach about marketing, entrepreneurship, etc. Maybe I’ll do all three. :)

Catch Roberta live this September on Email Marketing Day (Wednesday, Sept 26) at the Digital Marketing Strategy Summit (online). She’ll share “10 Tips for Writing Killer Email Copy”. See Agenda.

Note: this post was originally posted on OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

Over the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the team at Wordstream, a provider of search marketing tools. Not only are their search marketing solutions smart, but their marketing and product development team is equally as smart and awesome, as well. So I thought you’d like to get to know Wordstream’s Founder and CTO, Larry Kim. In advance of Search Marketing Day at the Digital Marketing Strategy Summit (Sept 17-28), I picked Larry’s brain on the future of search, common PPC sins, marketing metrics, and more. Here’s what he had to say:

1. What changes do you think we’ll see in the engines over the next 12 months?

I’ve visited Google and they’ve already shared some of the 2013 plans with me – they’re basically focusing on a few key areas: Mobile Search, Display Advertising, and Google+ (no surprises here!). Beyond that is just speculation, but anyway, here’s what my crystal ball says:

• Google will make SEO increasingly difficult, by making it un-measurable, by crowding out search results with larger paid ads and ad other formats, and rolling out algorithms that actually punish SEO, and other shenanigans. I think that Google CEO, Larry Page views SEO clicks as theft and has basically declared a War on SEO to drive Google revenues.
• With SEO under attack, look for the ratio of organic searches to paid clicks (often cited as being somewhere around 70% organic, 30% paid) to shift increasingly in favor of paid clicks. In fact, for keyword searches with high purchase intent (searches where the ads take up all of the above-the-fold screen space); I estimate that paid search ads already get the lion’s share of the traffic!
• I think that companies, burned from Panda updates, or stumped by the increasingly complex work required to successfully do SEO, will look to Paid Search as a way to stabilize and diversify their lead flow. Don’t get me wrong here – SEO is still very important, it just that more and more people will realize that it’s important to have both PPC and SEO in the mix.
• Microsoft Bing desperately needs to partner with the likes of Apple, Twitter or Facebook in a big way, soon. They’ve lost Billions and will need to change the game in some way, or exit the business.
• Look for Remarketing on the Google Display Network to see big growth. Many marketers still have bad experiences from advertising on the Content Network from back when it was a waste of money and somewhat of a deceptive product offering. But it’s come a long way, and is definitely worth a second look!

2. What are some easy ways that our readers can improve reduce their cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition?

On one hand, we’re seeing that even the most basic and important PPC advertising features aren’t being used: for example, we recently found that over half of small and medium sized businesses don’t even use conversion tracking!

But if you’ve already covered the basics such as campaign targeting options, then some powerful yet under-utilized AdWords features that come to mind include the use of negative keywords, modified broad match, long tail keyword selection & grouping, ad extensions, etc.

Since every AdWords account is in a different state of greatness (or shambles?), the low-hanging fruit is different for everyone. Recently, we developed a Free AdWords Grader , which conducts an audit of your PPC account, quickly identifying any problem areas.

3. What are some of the most common PPC sins marketers commit?

The most common sin (by far!) is that of sloth (i.e. laziness and indifference). This is more a sin of omission than of commission. We’ve analyzed the results of thousands of accounts of people who ran our AdWords Grader, and we’ve found that around half of small and medium businesses don’t even do any account optimization work in the last month – meaning, they haven’t added any new keywords, or new ads, or changed bids or anything, period!

Like anything else in life, you get out of PPC marketing what you put into it. Meaning – you can’t just set it and forget it! That’s not a viable strategy. To succeed at paid search, you need to periodically, spend some time on stuff like:

• Adding relevant keywords that you might have missed out on
• Replace poorly performing ads and landing pages with new ones
• Doing negative keyword research to eliminate wasteful spending
• Optimizing your Keyword Bids
• Reviewing and potentially pausing poorly performing keywords
• (etc.!)

4. What would say is the most important metric for marketers to measure?

I usually track the basics: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, and Conversions. There are hundreds of other metrics in your AdWords account (like CTR, CPA, Quality Score, etc.), but most of them are based on some ratio or trend involving these basic metrics. The cost metric in particular can help you in prioritizing where to focus your time and energy (just follow the money!).

We recently surveyed 17 experienced PPC marketers what are their most important PPC metrics – we published the results in our Ultimate Guide to PPC Metrics.

5. What are your top 3 favorite features of AdWords?

It would have to be Remarketing in the Google Display Network. (And, I’ll pick this as my #2 and #3 favorite feature as well!). We’re finding that it is a way to both drive conversions and brand awareness to a highly targeted audience.

6. How much do you think marketers should automate in their PPC campaigns, vs. execute manually?

Marketers should focus their efforts on setting PPC objectives and strategy, as well as certain tasks that are harder to automate because it requires creativity or a deep understanding of the business, such as keyword selection, and writing great ads and landing pages. Marketers should try to lean on tools and automation for repetitive, time consuming tasks such as data analysis, report generation, etc.

7. What has been your greatest work challenge recently? How did you resolve it?

One big work challenge has been in coming up with the WordStream “elevator pitch” – meaning, trying to define what exactly what WordStream’s PPC Platform does and how it’s different from other things out there in as succinct a way as possible.

We recently came up with an easier concept that we’re calling The 20 Minute PPC Work Week and it seems to be far more easily understood concept. The idea is that if you use WordStream PPC Advisor, then we’ll do a lot of the heavy lifting in figuring out what you should be doing in your AdWords account, and present it to you in a way that you can move the ball forward and be on a path to success in just 20 minutes each week.

8. What is one thing marketers can do today to improve their PPC results?

I’m biased, but I would recommend that marketers run a free AdWords Account audit on your account then try to figure out where’s the leverage in the account. For example, it doesn’t make sense to be leveraging advanced call extension options, if you haven’t covered the more basic issues, like campaign targeting options.

9. Is it possible to integrate your PPC and social strategy? If so, how?

There are several points of overlap between PPC and Social Media Marketing, for example:

• You can link your AdWords account with your Google+ company page. This way, the friends of people who have +1’d your page will see annotated ad impressions.
• Social marketing strategy often involves driving visitors to some content asset, like a blog post, or infographic, or video. By placing an AdWords remarketing cookie on whatever content asset you were trying to promote, you can keep the conversation going even after the user leaves your site, even if they don’t fill out some form.
• Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer various PPC-like advertising options, and in some situations, it may make sense to co-ordinate search and paid social campaigns – for example, a Facebook advertising campaign could be targeted to get more followers.

Beyond these rather small overlapping areas, I have found that PPC and Social Media Marketing are typically different roles in a company, and that Social Media is usually more aligned with SEO and content marketing.

10. What’s is your favorite part of your job?

Helping companies grow their business! I firmly believe that Pay-Per-Click Marketing is a powerful marketing channel for almost every company; however, it can be quite challenging to do well, especially if PPC marketing isn’t your full time job!

About Larry

Larry Kim is the founder & CTO of WordStream, a provider of  tools and software for PPC.

Learn how to rank higher in the engines this September at the Digital Marketing Strategy Summit. The flexible, online event includes sessions on The 8 Elements of Highly Effective Search Marketing, How to Rank Higher In Google (live critique), Selecting and Managing a Search Vendor, and more.See Full Agenda. 

This post is originally from OMI’s Online Marketing Blog.

1. Set up a Google+ hangout and connect with customers on a personal level.

“Google Hangouts are worth learning about and setting up. A Hangout offers you the ability to meet live with up to 9 people in a video and text chat environment, save the event and broadcast it to the world… or not. It’s a great way to visit with customers and connect with them on a more personal level. Think about a bicycle repair shop demonstrating options for repair or replacement parts to a customer, instead of just trying to explain the problems and solutions in a phone call or email. How about a politician holding a personal group discussion with a few people and answering questions recorded on YouTube from many others? And suppose it was all saved and broadcast to millions? Pretty effective, isn’t it?” - Gillian Muessig, Founding President, SEOMoz

2.  Create personas for each social media platform.

“Create personas to help understand the audience on each social media platform. While this is a glittering generality, here’s a lighthearted way to begin to think about the audiences on Google+ and Pinterest: men are from Google+; women are from Pinterest.” – Gillian Muessig

3. Get to know your Fans and wow them.

“Just responding to comments on your fanpage is not enough. If you really want your active and engaged fans to become repeat buyers for life, you have to really know them and let them know you care. They need to feel like they are special. The last time I went to buy some wine, the seller looked at his computer and asked me “did you enjoy that Bordeaux you bought last week?” I was amazed, and wowed for good! These guys knew me and cared about my experience with them. You want to give that same impression to your fans. If they have posted something last week and come back to comment this week, you want to show them that you remember their previous post! To do that, you need some tools, Facebook won’t be enough. But the WOW it will create will be worth the investment.” - Emeric Ernoult, Founder, AgoraPulse

4. Learn about the OpenGraph.

“Building a fanbase on Facebook and publishing great content to get them engaged is good. But what is great is to build that Fanbase on your website, not only on Facebook! Very few people know that they can turn their entire website into a fan capturing machine. By displaying like buttons on their products’ pages AND integrating simple OpenGraph meta data withing their HTML code, they can turn their visitors into actual fans and send them very targeted message through Facebook Newsfeed. This tactic just requires to learn a little bit about the Facebook OpenGraph concept. This is something you need to learn.” – Emeric Ernoult

7. Tap in to the power of partner marketing.

“Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a small business, you can partner to increase the return on your social media marketing investment. One suggestion to raise the profile of your campaign is to co-brand with a partner. You can provide additional exposure for the partner brand while they lend their brand equity to your marketing. If you have a promotional tab on your Facebook page, for example, consider incorporating partners into the design and messaging. If you’re running a contest or giveaway leverage partners to contribute prizing. Partners can provide access to prizes you might not otherwise be able to offer, both material and experiential.” - Ben Pickering, CEO, Strutta

8. Don’t fall victim to the Field of Dreams fallacy

“If you build it, they will come” may have worked for Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams but it is not a good mantra for running a social media promotion. You can’t simply put an app up on your Facebook page and think it will “go viral.” Running a successful social promotion requires a well thought out marketing plan that spans the life cycle of the campaign.” - Ben Pickering

Mobile apps, mobile websites, mobile commerce, mobile search… the time to start forging relationships with your mobile audience is now. That being said, developing a mobile strategy can be overwhelming. Where do I start? How do I know what will work for my company? To help master the basics and kickoff our Mobile Marketing Crash Course (tomorrow at 12pm ET), I asked our lead instructor, Dave Wieneke, a few key questions.  Here’s what he had to say:

1. If I don’t have a mobile marketing strategy yet, what is the best place to start?
All good marketing starts with your audience and where you meet them. And while there are many mobile tactics, the core of most firms’ mobile strategies is made up of their owned mobile assets: their websites and applications.

I’ve watched mobile traffic ascend for client firms from being a very small share of traffic deserving the kind of attention we’d give an aging browser, to shares above 40%. That’s a primary use case. That means designing interactions around these uses first. It’s a different approach to how we line-up to meet customers online.

In class this week we’ll look at unique mobile mindsets that set mobile use apart, the ways that mobile design turns PC based design conventions upside down, and the new business models mobile fuels.

2. What are some of the biggest mistakes companies make in their mobile strategy?
Enterprises have found that it is easier for millions of individual consumers to buy tablets and smart phones than it is to re-engineer to serve them. It’s a disruptive change for enterprises, but not for challenger brands who enter competitive spaces focused on this new traffic. And so enterprises are re-conceiving their operations to be mobile first.

So, the biggest mistake is to miss this opportunity by recreating legacy victories. Remember Palm Pilot, the original mobile device? They promoted the one of the great legacy PC wins – Excel spreadsheets, on Palm Pilot. It’s a generation later and we can see that simply porting over the last era’s win wasn’t the future. Handheld music could have been a huge win, and photography, but not spreadsheets – the form factor was too restrictive. Mobile is a new foundation, and it is a chance to start fresh with designing new user experiences and businesses.

3. Which companies are doing a good job in mobile now? 
Park Mobile is extending a buy button so that people can pay for parking easier, and ZipCar’s giving them their car through an app. Expensify is making is easier to travel, Amazon to shop. And its not just companies. Fruit Ninja (a game), Hours Tracker (which helps freelancers bill), and Things (a priority list) aren’t companies, but they have huge audiences. If you want to “think like a publisher” and gather audiences, then make great tools.

Whether you use mobile native applications or website, the online experience is increasingly application based. Are Netflix, Twitter, or Google really websites? At some level we know their applications are delivered through web interfaces. Both mediums are led by application experiences.

This turns making great web experiences into a more complex product-like effort, which requires more of a team approach than making the shift to social media does.

4. Do I have to create a mobile specific site?
No, there are in fact many good reasons to make sites that change how to display the same content across different devices.

Elements on smaller screens need to be bigger and clearer to be seen, and user flows need to be simplified. We’ll dig in to how this can be done using Responsive Design – so that different kinds of users can have the right experience all from one single content source. And yes, this takes some organization in advance.  But it is harder to maintain one set of content and to avoid duplicate content penalties with search engines using responsive design. We’ve seen Google shift in this direction, and in the long term this provides more flexibility to innovate and a lower total cost of ownership.

5. What are some of the biggest opportunities in mobile marketing now?
Mobile commerce extends the buy button anywhere. It changes buyer behavior, and is likely the still unrevealed killer application of B2C mobile. But what of B2B? Mobile products can be relationship pipelines that change marketplace relationships through product experiences. One B2B example that comes to mind is Autodesk’s mobile app – which has reached more users in under a year than their enterprise design products have over the life of the firm. The app has created huge awareness and rewarded their mobile innovation. Their CEO observed this was the most effective advertising they’d ever done.

6. Where is this shift to mobile taking us long term?
The erosion of mass media started on the Internet, and emerged through social media. Now, because mobile is so personal, it busts up the mass media experience which still partly lived on the Internet. Mobile users have far higher expectations of interactivity, and mobile conventions are evolving far faster than the Internet to keep up with the audience opportunity.

While people had access to PC’s during work and a portion of their day, mobile access is constant. A study I just read showed that 60% of social media is being consumed through mobile devices. The rise in video consumption tracks closely with mobile growth – and mobile viewing has lots of headroom for growth.

Users don’t just want content, they want tools to make their life easier. That means being able to buy in new ways through mobile commerce. Brands are able to use push messaging to connect with their most loyal audiences. The Washington Post has been pushing me breaking news election alerts over the last year. The key to push messaging is that it needs to be focused on in customers’ lives and relevant to helping them in real time.

While video, m-commerce and alerts are all great tactics, the bigger picture is the shift to personal experiences that empower audiences individually. The influence of what brands say about themselves through advertising or marketing is waning. Increasingly, digital experiences embody our customer experiences, and utility to customers. If brands are an accumulation of experiences, then they are increasingly mobile, personal, and organized around the customer and not the brand. Brands are less and less deductively announced by firms, they are increasingly inductively assembled by customer experiences. And mobile is a huge way to reach and stay connected with our markets.

Join the Online Marketing Institute Tuesday, June 26 at 12pm ET for the Mobile Marketing Crash Course, and in just 90 minutes, learn how to create a mobile marketing program that engages, nurtures, and converts. You’ll master what you need to do to create successful mobile experiences in your owned media, and leave this course with a to do list to engage your mobile customer base and forge lasting customer relationships.

This post, “Developing a Mobile Strategy“, was originally posted on the Online Marketing Institute blog.

1. What kinds of staffing, in terms of job titles, should a company have in order to successfully implement Marketing Automation?

In mid-market to larger organizations, you will often find a role that takes over the day-to-day operation, management, and implementation of a marketing automation function.  This role of marketing operations is on the rise.  When you look at the growth of groups like MOCCA (Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance) you can see the value of this operational role and how effective it can be.  That being said, I think it is less about job title more about skill set.  This is the first time in the history of B2B marketing in which marketers are responsible for purchasing and managing their own technology. You need a marketing technologist: someone who not only understands technology but technology in the context of what you are trying to accomplish from a demand generation and lead management perspective.  They are becoming more plentiful out there with trainings like these and with the work that a lot of the automation vendors have been doing to educate their customers.

2. The marketing automation talent pool is shallow at the moment, is it necessary to search for people with specific experience in Marketo or HubSpot? Or is a generalist good enough?

I think a generalist is good enough.  I would put less focus on what tools they know and make sure understand how B2B buyers buy today and what the role of a marketer should be today.  Do they understand process, what a campaign is, taking a theme of content and delivering that to a buyer at a specific stage and how that is relevant?  Do they understand content marketing, buyer 2.0, metrics of analytics?  You can teach the technology, and all of the vendors have training programs.  It is much harder to teach knowledge and skillset than it is to teach someone how to use a tool and a marketing automation solution.

3. How does an organization police itself to ensure both sales and marketing are living up to what they’ve agreed to in service level agreements?  It seems like there are a lot of potential failure points when implementing a marketing automation strategy. 

It is best to start small and simple and benchmark your success along the way.   There is no need to adopt a marketing automation system and choose 25 nurture streams at once.  Start with one, get proficient on it and then move forward.

SLAs are built to keep both organizations on track.  When your top decision makers come together and recognize that SLAs are built to better service and align around the customer, you will generate more revenue.  The discussion of who didn’t live up to a particular expectation goes away, and the SLA exists simply to understand which needs are being met.  Change the mindset and the alignment becomes easier, and you see less failure.

4. What happens to SLA agreements when the VP of Sales or Operations changes during a marketing automation implementation?

If the SLAs are not already a part of your company’s culture then you must immediately integrate them into your DNA.  While you look for a replacement VP, find other counterparts to rely on (so if you are in sales, marketing and if you are in marketing, sales) and teach them the importance of your SLAs.  This won’t be too difficult if your SLAs were developed with a collaborative effort.  If SLAs came down from directors and were simply implemented by the rest of the team, it will be a bit harder.  Get representation from every level from the beginning, so that if someone does depart you won’t feel as big an impact by the vacancy.  I even advocate seeking rep involvement at the marketing and sales SLA level, as well as the involvement of your entry level Marketing Managers.  This way, SLAs become part of the fabric of your organization at every level.

5. Would you advocate marketing automation for companies of all sizes, or is there a threshold at which it becomes attractive?

The size of your company matters less than your company’s goals and marketing maturity.  On paper, a company with $400 million in revenue and hundreds of employees is a perfect candidate for marketing automation.  If their marketing strategy for last year included only two emails, however, any automation would have very little impact and would likely cripple the organization.  On the other hand, a 15-person organization with a defined process and clear understanding of their buyer’s goals is a great candidate for marketing automation.  It is about maturity, what you are trying to do, what your goals are, and what audience you want to reach.

6. What is a realistic timeframe between pulling the trigger on a MA solution and being able to show management that things are happening?

This will vary depending on your average sales lifecycle.  If you have a long eighteen-month cycle, you can quickly show some initial engagement metrics (opens, clicks, shares) but data on pipeline contribution to revenue will take a longer time.  If you are a transaction-oriented company with a short cycle, less time will pass before you can show the impact you can have on pipeline and revenue.  Your CEO is less interested in engagement metrics and would rather see the revenue driven by marketing campaigns that are enabled by automation.

7. Should sales have a say in a marketing automation program?  They comment on campaigns but have no marketing experience!

Yes.  Some of your sales people don’t have marketing experience, but they do have a unique view to your customer.  Marketing is not there to serve sales, sales is not there to serve marketing, but you are both there to serve the customer.  Your marketing automation program must be developed in a collaborative fashion.  This does not mean that you’ll take every piece of input they provide and bring those into your campaign, but they have to be at the table.

8. How much time should I anticipate to get my lead management process developed and implemented?

We have seen companies develop a foundational lead management approach and process in as little as nine months.  We have seen large enterprises take over three years.  A lot of it depends on the complexity of your organization, how mature you are in the lead management maturity curve, and then understanding and getting everyone behind the initiative.  These steps alone, or the change management aspect, can take over six months in larger companies and are often not accounted for in planning.

9. How frequently should our prospects hear from us via email?

Your prospects will let you know.  We did a case study where potential buyers were receiving over 100 emails a year from a particular security vendor, and as a result they all began deleting actual security warnings.  The damage to the company was detrimental.  A rule of thumb would be once every couple of weeks, but if your buyer is very engaged, is showing from a digital body language perspective that they like the content you are putting in front of them, then don’t be afraid to expand on this.  Be sure to not get caught in the email only trap.   Use live events, telephone, direct mail, and social, as part of your multi-channel mix.

10. What is the average length of a nurture cycle for cold leads?  How many emails should be included in a welcome cycle?

It depends on whether or not you have done this before.  A client who has never gone into a nurture strategy may have a simple four-step nurture program at first.  On the other hand, we have built campaigns with over twenty different steps if a prospect were to run through each one.  It also depends on how much you have to say. No matter what the length of your nurture cycle, make sure that what you are saying at every step of the way is relevant and applies to where your audience is in their buying cycle.

11. Does it ever make sense to include product-focused emails in a nurture cycle for new or cold leads? 

Three weeks ago I attended a major event in our industry, and since that point I have received six different emails from vendors asking me to sit through a demo. I have responded to none.  While sales people are very eager to drive the product, what they have to understand is that today’s buyer does not want to be force fed product.  This is Buyer 2.0.  Empathize with me first, tell me that you understand my problem, you understand my challenges, and then we can discuss product and solutions or services.

12. As a general rule, how long do you think it should take to nurture cold leads to warm?

There are so many factors that play into this.  Ask yourself three questions: First of all, is your content relevant and up-to-date?  A lot of companies are out there communicating noise and buyers don’t understand what you are trying to say. Also consider the kind of reputation and brand promise your company has…does it resonate with your potential buyer?  Finally, what kind of sales cycle do you have?  The longer your sales cycle the longer it will take to move your customers.  Your content, customers, brand, and sales cycle will all define how long it should take for nurturing to show any contribution towards pipeline.

13. How do you decide which segments to start with when developing first trigger campaigns?

Go for the one that is most profitable.  One of the most frequently missed opportunities when companies start nurturing is in their own customer base.  Even though they have already provided you with some revenue, your existing customers are a huge target for potential revenue.  Figure out what segment will be most profitable for you and start there.  If you have multiple solution sets towards multiple SMB, mid-market, enterprise, figure out which will have the biggest impact and start there.  Learn from it and move to the next one.

14. How do I secure the support of my senior management team if I am the newest member of the organization? 

Talk about revenue.  Senior management is focused on contribution to revenue and increasing their overall margin.  Do some research and figure out what you are spending on marketing programs today.  Then find out how many leads you are generating, or what the cost of the sales process is.  Next, go into your CRM system and pull a lead aging report to determine how many marketing generated leads sit in the funnel without being followed up on.  Take the cost of the sales process and multiply it by your lead decay.  This will answer the question of what does it costs your company to not do marketing automation?  Now you have a business case based on revenue lost by your company.

15. What do you think the marketing automation landscape will look like over the next year or two?

We know that Eloqua filed for its IPO so we should have our first publicly traded company!  We will see some more acquisition and mergers in the next year, and ultimately will be left with a few companies standing.  New vendors will continue to arrive on the scene and will service a small pocket here and there.  I think the biggest changes will come as we move towards enabling social media and exploring B2C opportunity as well as B2B.   There are some monster vertical opportunities waiting for marketing automation, including healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.

This blog was original posted on the Online Marketing Institute blog. See the original post here.

If you’re like most digital marketers today, you’ve gone through the process of selecting and managing a marketing technology solution. From email deployment to website testing and measurement, marketers are now empowered with more tools, knowledge, and capabilities than ever before.

With all of these exciting advancements and opportunities in marketing, there is a growing need for a new marketing function within organizations and agencies: the marketing technologist.

But what exactly does a marketing technologist do? And do you need one?

To learn more about this growing function and get some much needed advice on selecting marketing technology, I caught up with my favorite marketing technologist (and technology marketer), Scott Brinker, President and CTO at ion interactive and author of the popular blog, Chief Marketing Technologist. Here’s what he had to say.

1. Who should be in charge of marketing technology within an organization?

That’s like asking, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Who should be in charge of marketing technology? Well, marketing, of course.

Seriously, marketing technology today is more about “marketing” than it is about “technology.” From the digital channels we use to reach customers, to the software we use to power internal marketing operations, technology has become a critical component of the modern marketing organization. It has a direct impact on marketing’s capabilities, and by extension, the outcomes that marketing is able to deliver.

So if marketing technology is thoroughly entangled with marketing’s ability to conceive and execute brilliant marketing programs, why shouldn’t they be in charge of it?

The only excuse has been, up until recently, there weren’t many people in the marketing department who understood enough about the technical aspects of technology to assert such leadership. But that’s changing rapidly. A new breed of hybrid marketing technologists are blossoming, rapidly raising the “tech IQ” of the marketing department as a whole.

2. So what exactly is a marketing technologist?

The role is exactly what it sounds like: a technologist who works in marketing. It might be a tech-savvy marketer. Or a marketing-savvy technologist. It’s someone who can configure and operate marketing software from analytics to automation. Someone who’s comfortable lifting the hood and doing a little coding in Javascript, HTML, CSS on the web site. Someone who understand how to organize and analyze the vast amounts of data now swirling in marketing’s domain. Someone whose ears perk up when they hear “API.”

Marketing technologists help organizations apply marketing technology for strategic advantage. They help architect the technical infrastructure of modern marketing operations. They push the envelope with experimental ideas to win new customers. And, where necessary, they use the tech equivalent of duct tape and rubber bands to stitch together all the diverse pieces in marketing’s digital ecosystem.

3. Do you foresee the marketing technologist function growing in need and popularity? What skills should a marketing technologist have? 

The role is certainly growing in popularity, albeit with a wide variety of titles: marketing technologist, creative technologist, marketing developer, marketeer (marketing + engineer), growth hacker, etc. Regardless of the label, the need is clear. Marketing has moved beyond crafting images and language in print and TV — it’s now in the business of crafting digital experiences. Just as marketing relied on graphic designers and copywriters in its previous era, this new age requires a third pillar of the creative team: the technical architect.

Marketing technologists should obviously have strong technical skills, especially around web and mobile platforms. I believe that the ability to program software is important. Even if someone doesn’t do a lot of pure software development in this role, having a native understanding of the dynamics of software and coding provides a grounded perspective for good technology management.

But it’s not enough to just have technical chops — it’s necessary but not sufficient. A marketing technologist must combine those skills with insight and passion for marketing. They must be able to connect the dots between technical possibilities and market opportunities, collaborating with the rest of the marketing team to bring those ideas to life.

4. Should IT be part of the process of selecting marketing technology?

Since selecting marketing technology is a marketing decision more than a technology decision, the marketing team must take primary responsibility for choosing the right technologies and applying them smartly. While they can — and should — consult trusted advisors, which hopefully includes the CIO and the IT department, they can’t turn over technology decisions wholesale to someone else without relinquishing a big piece of modern marketing leadership.

It’s the 21st century, and technology is ubiquitous in the workplace. I think the old notion of the IT department as the gatekeeper for all things technology related in a company is anachronistic. IT still has an important role to play, especially in coordinating shared infrastructure technologies across an entire business. But every profession — marketing, sales, human resources — must directly embrace technological innovations in their own field to understand how to really leverage them. “We are the innovators we’ve been waiting for.”

5. When purchasing marketing technology, is it better for organizations to select a software platform that does many things (for example: email marketing, website analytics, and social media), or select a solution that serves a single marketing function? Is the jack-of-all-trades really a master of none?

The concept of full-stack marketing suites is compelling — everything in one place, all coordinated in the box. But the one-suite-to-rule-them-all strategy faces a number of challenges. The marketing technology universe is so large that for one package to try to do everything often spreads itself thinly across many features: as you say, a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. This is exacerbated by the fact that the marketing technology landscape is constantly changing and expanding rapidly, so it’s easy for a suite to fall behind. Sometimes suite providers play catch up by acquiring new software start-ups, but the integration of those features back into their platform can get messy, which starts to erode the benefit of the all-in-one suite in the first place.

That being said, trying to piece everything together yourself, completely from scratch, is a lot of work.

I think one of the best strategies is a hybrid approach: choose a suite or two to be your primary systems of record, the backbone of your marketing operations. But choose suites that emphasize an open architecture, making it easy for you to share data and services with other more specialized solutions. This gives you a stable foundation, but also gives you the flexibility to adopt specialized products for key functions where you need better capabilities or greater competitive advantage. If something new comes out, really state-of-the-art, you have the freedom to leap on it.

See the original post on managing marketing technology on the Online Marketing Institute blog.

Last month he presented the FREE webinar, Optimize and Socialize for Better Content Marketing, so in advance of the webinar, I picked Lee’s brain on blogging, lead generation, SEO, and more. Here’s what he had to say:

1. What is the biggest mistake marketers make when developing a content marketing strategy? 

Imagine you’ve started a new company selling software to other companies. You’re excited about the product and you know it inside and out. Knowing that the product is a new solution in the category, the need to educate and nurture prospects with content seems the right approach.

So you list off all the features and benefits of the product, research relevant and popular keywords and go about creating the kinds of content that makes the most sense to you: product pages, landing pages, emails, press releases, case studies, even a demo video and webinars . Sound about right? It’s a BIG mistake that companies are making every day.

What’s missing in this situation is the customer. That’s the biggest mistake marketers make when developing content marketing strategy.  Who are your customers? Why would they buy your software? What are their goals and pain points. What problems does your software solve for them and what kind of information do your ideal customers need throughout the sales cycle? Also, who are your worst customers? Do you really want to optimize and socialize with content to attract them?

A customer centric approach is central to the message in Optimize and it helps readers do the homework of identifying ideal customers and then turn that insight into a content plan that emphasizes SEO and Social Media marketing tactics.

2. Should all companies blog? Why or why not?

The success we’ve had and that many of our clients have had moves me to say that any company can become more successful through blogging. But the truth is, without making a commitment in resources, staff and a cycle of listening, engagement and creation, business blogging will rarely work.

Blogging is just a tool and tools are only as good as the expertise of the people using them. Companies that have unrealistic expectations about what blogging will do for them and that approach it with chest beating and self interest are not going to attract and engage a community.

Blogging works for businesses willing to put in the work. At Online Marketing Blog, I’ve been blogging for over 8 years. By sticking to it and continuously adapting our approach to meet both readers and our agency’s goals, we’ve been able to turn an experiment in curating news into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the web. How many agencies can say that?

3. How can marketers tie blogging back to lead gen and revenue? 

Measuring the success of a business blog is no different than any other online marketing effort. It starts with setting goals.  The business value from blogging extends beyond lead generation and sales, although those are certainly the first order of the day for most companies.  Blogging is a communications channel that can work in concert with other communications to add value, reduce or deflect cost, increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Because blogging is so dynamic and works best as a component of an overall content marketing strategy, it’s important to develop a hypothesis about what you expect will happen form a successful blogging effort. What does success look like? How will you know you’ve met ROI expectations with blogging? Answering those questions will be key in setting specific goals.

With goals, timeframe and a blogging strategy in place, then monitoring of KPIs and measurement of performance can be put in place. If goals are customer acquisition, then it makes sense to map the steps a prospect might take during the sales cycle from awareness to purchase and determine what’s measurable about that journey.

Key performance indicators can range from rankings to traffic to social shares and referrals from the media and other blogs or websites. Tracking the quantity and rate over time of KPIs should serve as an indicator that your blogging efforts are moving in the right direction to achieve business outcomes like micro conversions (RSS subscribers, email newsletter signups, demo sign ups, white paper downloads, etc) as well as referrals from the blog to pages designed to sell on the company site. Any leads generated there can be attributed to the source of the referral. Of course any contacts or inquiries made directly on the blog count as well.

Blogging promoted through social networks means tracking network size and rate of growth as well as engagement. A blog post can travel far through RSS, tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn shares, links from other blogs and of course the potential effect of Google+ shares. Visibility on social networks may not create leads directly, but the touchpoint through social when added to search visibility, email marketing, ads and media coverage all add up to building trust in prospects about your brand. That trust shortens sales cycles, increases order size, improves retention and many other trackable business outcomes.

Not to be redundant, but I dig into this quite a bit in Optimize, so readers should get that and really get the goods.

4. What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face when developing an integrated content strategy? How can they overcome them?

When SEO is owned by marketing and public relations runs social media and content creation is shared across multiple departments, integration of those tactics across a company’s content efforts can be a challenge. What brings things together are:

• Leadership support through common goals
• Identification of how an integrated approach will help each individual group as well as the company overall
• Training, process and tools/technology to enable integration of tactics

Find the low hanging fruit for an integration project and share the results upstream and horizontally. Make sure that as different departments work together to integrate Social, SEO and content (as well as other online marketing tactics where appropriate) that there is a feedback mechanism in place for those involved to see that they are having an impact. Even if it’s not specific to them, showing a trend line of how something like website traffic, or share of voice or leads and sales have improved during the time integration best practices are in place can be very motivating.

5. What is the most important piece of advice you can give to marketers that need to drive more traffic? 

I’d ask why more traffic? More traffic = more what? Sales? How many sales? Over what period of time? I think you get where I’m going. Identifying specific goals is the first step towards a plan towards reaching them. That might be more traffic. It might be more of the right traffic. I’d take 100 leads from 1,000 visitors over the work it would take to attract 100 leads from 100,000 visitors any day.

1. OMI is thrilled to partner with the Marketing Automation Institute to deliver best-in-class B2B marketing training and education to marketers worldwide. Can you explain why you decided to partner with OMI, and how you think the industry will benefit?

Since we founded the MAI about a year ago the goal and objective has always been to enable, equip and educate the marketing automation and B2B marketing professional with the education they need to perform their roles in this Buyer 2.0 world in which we live.  In the OMI we found a like minded organization that sees the need in the marketplace and has a mission that is right in line with ours, equipping and enabling through education.  Given that our focus is the same the partnership made perfect sense.

2. What is the biggest mistake marketers make when developing a lead management program?

One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is they do not go far enough in the development of the process.  Many organizations and even consultancies describe lead management in the context of lead scoring and lead nurturing.  There is so much more the lead management then those two areas and to not expand to an entire framework you will not see the benefit that lead management can bring.

Secondarily, many organizations do not clearly embrace the change management aspect that occurs with a lead management process.  You cannot develop and implement new process and not think about the behavior change that is needed with marketing and sales.  The sooner organizations embrace and drive that change, the faster they will achieve success.

3. Why did you decide to start the Marketing Automation Institute? How did you get involved with B2B marketing training and education?

First and foremost the marketing world that I and many others grew up in has changed dramatically and as a result so has the role of today’s marketer.  We have the change in our buyers to blame for this and quite honestly it is a good thing as b2b marketing is now more relevant than ever before.  However, with this role change came a lot of uncertainty and new skills that needed to be developed.  The questions that were being asked by marketers were a good indication that there needed to be an educational resource and with that the MAI was born in conjunction with a group of industry leaders and vendors.

As for how I personally got involved?  I have always been passionate about ensuring marketers could do their jobs well and have always believed marketing should be a key contributor to the revenue generation of a company.  As a result, I spend a good amount of my time conducting workshops and trainings for clients so I guess you could say this type of education has been a part of what I have done since the my early days of the MA space.

4. Do all B2B organizations need lead management and marketing automation? Why or why not?

I would not say all, but will say most. I do believe that all need a lead management process even if the company is 2 people working out of their home.  Every organization needs to have a defined understanding of how they will manage a lead once it is generated.  This can be done manually on a very small scale.  For those that have a very small business, I do not think that automation is a mandate.  In many of these instances, an organization can get by with a simple email solution.  However, once you get past a certain size organization where you are needing to tie in your sales data via a CRM system, track multiple leads and sources and have full funnel reporting and metrics, I would say an automation system is a must.

5. How can marketers stay on top of all the latest advancements in marketing automation?

There is so much information out there, some good and some pretty bad.  I think buyers need to be aware that if it sounds to good to be true i.e. 978% increase in leads, trillions of dollars of revenue added to your bottom line, 543% increase in sales conversions, it probably is.  So with that, it is best to go to third party sites that have done the research and also ask other users.  Some sources I would recommend for this are:  Marketing Automation Institute (of course!), Focus, Quora, LinkedIn (plenty of groups you can join including the MAI group, Sirius Decisions, Marketing Automation Times and DemandGen Report.  All of these will provide the most objective information available and on some of them you will be able to dialogue with other end-users and get their experiences.

6. How do you think B2B marketing will evolve in the next 5 years? 10 years?

I think more and more marketing is going to be looked to as a revenue catalyst and a sales enabler.  The changes in our market will keep on coming and marketing will be tasked with enabling the organization to adapt and keep the buyer in focus.  It is an exciting times for B2B marketers and one that should be embrace.  The next 5-10 years, if anything like the last 5 years will be quite an exciting time and will continue to thrust the B2B marketer to the forefront of organization growth strategies.

Fill your lead funnel through content marketing!Content is a critical component of great B2B marketing today. Content can help position your organization as thought leaders, nurture prospects over time, and best of all, it can generate high-quality leads, too. Without any further adieu, here are 7 ways to generate high-quality leads with content marketing.

1. Create content that attracts your best prospects

If you’re like most B2B marketers, you’ve identified a few sweet spots—those prospects that are most likely to close and become your most profitable, best customers. While you may already focus your PPC, search and banner efforts on attracting them, you can do the same with your content marketing. Make sure a portion of your content focuses on the pain points and interests of your most valuable and important segments.

2. Help solve problems and address pain points

All good content, whether white papers, blogs, webinars, or slides, addresses pain points and solves problems. Create Guides, Top 10 Lists, How-Tos etc. This is a critical step in attracting your best prospects, because when they are searching for you, they may not use words to describe your company or product—they’ll use words that focus on solving problems and improving their results. It’s your job to educate them that the way to solve their problem is with your solution.

3. Go beyond your specific offering

Sure, while you should always create content about your organization’s specific area of focus, you’ll attract a bigger audience if your content addresses other topics that are interesting and important to your best prospects. For instance, let’s say you market social media solutions to senior-level marketers. While I recommend becoming a trusted source of information and advice on social media marketing and creating content about it, you should also create content that focuses on marketing ROI, public relations, industry news, and SEO, because most senior marketers that are interested in social media, are also interested in those topics, too.

4. Become a trusted resource

Every marketer is now a publisher. It’s important for your content to be helpful and useful. Give away some secrets to the magic behind your company—really. Don’t shill. Don’t sell. And when your prospects are ready to evaluate solutions, they’ll go to you, not your competitors.

5. Delight and engage—let your prospects to get to know you

Don’t discount the importance of delighting your visitors and letting them get to know you and your brand via your content marketing. After all, buyers don’t buy from companies—they buy from people. And every touch point of your marketing, whether that’s content, social media, search, or email, is an opportunity for your prospects to get to know your organization and what you stand for. So delight them, engage them, and deliver awesome. The more you do, the more likely they will be to raise their hand, become a lead, and hopefully, a customer.

6. Include conversion points within your content

Think you can’t generate leads from blog posts? Think again. Every blog post is an opportunity to convert a visitor into a lead. For example, if you’re promoting a webinar on email marketing, you can generate interest in the webinar by writing a blog on the “Top 10 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates”, and then cross promote a call-to-action at the end of the blog to sign up for the webinar. You can also link to a landing page with gated content (ex: a white paper), which will allow visitors to learn more about the topic. (ion does that at the end of this blog post! See below.) You can also include banner ad on your blog, or a call-to-action within any white papers that get passed around. (Me? I use LiveBall to create landing pages that I link to from blogs and white papers.)

7. Make it easy to share

This may seem obvious, but the easier you make it for your visitors to share your content with their networks, the more likely they’ll be to do it. So, include share buttons for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other network that your prospects use. Don’t only use these buttons on your website, but also include them in any PDF content as well.

Want to learn more about generating leads from content marketing? Check out ion’s FREE guide, Conversion Content Marketing.