eMarketing Summit at Innotech: How-to’s for Search, Blogs, Pods, and Web 2.0
By Kate McPherron and Chris Wain
A decade ago, Web 1.0 began a revolution that added eMarketing to the marketing mix – as well as changing the dynamics for existing marketing and communications media. Now Web 2.0 is taking the revolution a step further. The eMarketing summit at Innotech offered a wealth of tips and insights – starting with the basics of eMarketing and then focusing on Web 2.0. Following are summaries of each workshop, as well as links to presentations.
eMarketing Introduction
Presenter: Kent Lewis, Anvil Media
As an introduction to two days of seminars, Kent Lewis, CEO of AnvilMedia, laid out the major components of eMarketing:
- Organic search or search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (aka “paid search”), which is now overshadowing web banner advertising
- Sponsored links and link development
- eMail marketing “Everything has evolved at a lightning pace,” he said, “but a lot of strategies haven’t changed.”
To develop an effective eMarketing program:
- Assess all relevant information – see what people have already done (old blogs, newsletters, customer research)
- Conduct discovery and marketing research
- Set objectives, metrics, and benchmarks.
- Develop strategies and tactics
- Map out resource requirements (including determining whether to bring in an outside agency or consultant)
- Set timelines and budgets
- Get the campaign started, then test, monitor and analyze. “Search allows you to refine in real time,” he concluded.
The core of eMarketing is an effective web site. “Very few web sites work to the level of a savvy eMarketer’s standards,” he said. It’s critical to design the site for searchability, including engaging copywriters who understand the fundamentals of search optimization.
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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Search Engine Marketing Building Blocks
Presenter: Benjamin Lloyd, Amplify-Interactive
Two major elements comprise search engine marketing (SEM):
- Paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC): a form of advertising that involves purchasing keywords on a search engine such as Google.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): the discipline of optimizing the code and content of your web site to improve its rankings on the major search engines. Also known as “organic search,” SEO represents 80% to 90% of clicks on the major search engines.
Achieving a high position in organic search requires a strong foundation of keyword research. “Find out how people search, rather than how we think they should be searching,” said Ben Lloyd, CEO of Amplify-Interactive. To identify relevant keywords, start by brainstorming, then evaluate competitive web sites, and analyze the search logs on your own site.
After identifying the keywords that site visitors are likely to search on, build them into the site architecture and into web page content. Among the many site design techniques: make every page title unique. Also, on individual web pages, don’t include more than 2-3 keywords or phrases per page, and aim for a 2% keyword density (for example, in a 500-word article, keywords should appear no more than 10 times).
Another facet of organic search is generating inbound links to your site. These links can come from the press, blogs, social media sites and directories. “We work a lot with public relations people to make sure we’re leveraging their work,” Ben said.
For a paid search campaign, a crisp, focused message is critical. With a purchased keyword, you have just 70 characters to get across a message; use them to highlight a benefit and create a compelling call to action. The keyword should then take the visitor to a unique landing page on your site. It’s critical to align the landing page with the ad text and offer — to ensure that there’s a clear path to the call-to-action from the keyword ad. Also, eliminating your main web site’s navigation from the landing page will help keep the visitor focused on the call to action (for example, buying a product, or downloading a trial copy of your software).
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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Making e-Business Count
Presenter: Mohan Nair, The Regence Group
Companies may have a strong eBusiness model, a powerful sales focus, a significant brand — and still fail to acquire and retain customers. What does it take to energize your business and your prospects?
Mohan Nair took a step back from the how-to presentations to speak from a broader perspective based on his experience as chief marketing officer at Regence, a $7.6 billion company with 6,600 employees. A company’s effectiveness begins with having a common framework at several levels:
- Philosophy: “are we aligned?”
- Management framework: do we act on our philosophy?
- Do we use the same methods?
- Are we using the same tools?
Web 2.0 is a tool, he said, while social networking is a method. To guide the use of these tools, we need to ask, “Are we aligned in engaging consumers with the right philosophy?”
A philosophy is likely to be distinct from a corporate mission statement. “Mission statements have left the building,” he said. “I find mission statements boring. Missions are given, causes are taken.”
“Good web sites understand how to wake you up with a philosophical viewpoint,” he continued. Apple’s products and sites are hip, friendly and intuitively designed. They engage you with interactivity. “The iPod is the art of taking the mundane, an MP3 player, and designing it to excite people.” Southwest Airlines aims to make flying fun, on-time and non-threatening. “Their e-environment is straightforward: get in and get out quickly.”
Regence has embraced this approach by beginning with a philosophy of “transforming health care by transforming ourselves first,” he said. Among the initiatives has been MyRegence, a site currently available to Regence employees and plan members that helps with health and wellness decisions and provides a community for sharing health information.
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Gross Blog Anatomy - Dissecting Blogs from a Marketer's Perspective
Presenter: Janet Johnson, O'Johnson Partners
Consumers have shifted from web surfing in the ‘90s to searching and subscribing to content today. With the boom in social media, companies must move from tight control of messaging and content to transparency. In this environment, anyone with an Internet connection has the power to create a lasting impression of your business – positive or negative.
Janet Johnson covered some best practices and rules of engagement for working successfully in this new environment that includes nearly 75 million active blogs.
Some general principles of working with social media:
- The blogosphere is self cleansing: For instance on Wikipedia, interactions are corrected in about 6 seconds.
- Your word is your brand, and nothing that’s online goes away: “Be thoughtful about what you put up there,” she said, because it will stick around.
- Preserve your brand: companies should check the blogosphere at least every 8 hours. Google searches blogs effectively, and sites such as Technorati and del.icio.us can help with monitoring online influencers.
- Manage your issues: issues travel quickly but die down if addressed immediately. And by building relationships in advance, the self-cleansing nature of the blogosphere can come to your aid. “Influential bloggers can help you,” she said.
- SEO and blogs go together: sprinkle searchable keywords into your blog
When actually working in the blogosphere, some of the successful attitudes and practices include:
- Develop a thick skin. “You can’t take this personally,” she said. “This is still the land of the cowboys.”
- Be honest: “Lies are outed very, very quickly.”
- Do your research. “If someone says it better than you did, link to them.”
- Drive to closure. “Keep responding to an issue until you get to ‘agree to disagree’ or ‘agree.’”
- Keep a strong topical focus in the blog. “Otherwise you’re all over the map.”
- Have a crisis communications plan: “Who do you call over the weekend if something blows up?”
- Embrace the feedback you receive, including routing it to your chief technology officer, manufacturing groups, etc
- Don’t trash your competitors
- Post on your blog consistently and make it captivating. “This means speaking with an authentic voice and a strong point of view.”
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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Next Phase of eMail Marketing
Presenters: Alex Williams, eROI; and Dan Denewith, ReturnPath
By now, most companies have implemented some type of email marketing program. Done well, email marketing can have the best ROI of any marketing channel, said Alex Williams of eROI.
Email generates an industry-average return of $57 for every dollar spent. And if you’re able to follow up with web visitors on products they considered but didn’t purchase (for example, products left unpurchased in the shopping cart), 60% of those prospects will eventually buy.
To make the optimal use of email in the marketing mix:
- Marketers should start by reviewing their email program frequently: are click rates increasing or decreasing; are email “open rates” changing; and can you demonstrate the ROI of the program? And finally “are you treating your subscribers like cattle?” Your recipients may be among the 46% who opted in, but subsequently report that your emails are not targeted to their needs.
- Segment your list by demographics (age, gender, etc.) or by customer or prospect types (i.e., engaged prospect, VIP customer, etc.). Do as much of this segmentation as possible, but any segmentation is better than none at all.
- Ask your recipients when they sign up how frequently they want to hear from you and what they need.
- In the actual email, create a compelling subject line that includes your brand and a clearly stated offer. 69% of all recipients make decision to open an email based on subject line alone.
- In the email body, talk to a person (“Don’t just paste in copy from a brochure.”)
- When sending, understand your prospect well enough to know when they’ll be at their computer to receive the message (for example, good times for business users to receive email are just before or after lunch, or on Friday afternoons).
- Once an email hits the Internet, there are another set of challenges to ensure that it gets to the intended recipient. Fully 20% of permission-based email doesn’t reach the intended inbox because of spam filtering. Working within the bounds of these filters requires more than clean content (no references to Viagra) and sending only to recipients who opted in, said Dan Denewith, director of product management for Return Path.
The top three reasons for non-delivery are:
- Unknown users: ISPs will tolerate an “unknown user” rate up to 10%, but will start blocking emailers who exceed that level. Email marketers can overcome this by keeping their lists clean.
- Complaints about your email: you can work with your ISP to monitor complaints to see who complained and why. Process every complaint (i.e., suppress their name from your distribution lists).
- Infrastructure: use a reputable email service provider (ESP) and embrace the sender policy framework (SPF) to validate that you (the sender) are who you say you are.
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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5 Insights from Online Analytics Experts
Presenter: Aaron Gray, WebTrends
The web is the most measurable marketing medium and provides unique insight into visitors’ preferences and behavior. Aaron Grey shared insights from WebTrends’ experience in helping their clients use web analytics in their eMarketing programs:
- Automation = insight. Automating your web analytics allows you to focus on the business problem at hand. In fact, automation is the only way to manage the typical company’s portfolio of 1,500 keywords.
- Measure the visitor (not the visit): web analytics takes you from measuring traffic to assessing individual visitors. For example, a site receiving 20 visits a week might discover that those visits were from just 2 unique visitors moving through the sales process.
- Establish consistent key performance indicators (KPIs): Select measures that tie into the performance of your business. Start by setting high-level business goals for your web properties, and then determine which metrics help achieve the goal (i.e., revenue, cost savings, registrations, etc.). Finally, when choosing KPIs, measure the tactics that get people to take actions that are valuable to the business.
- Expand your view of the customer across all channels. A unified customer database will allow you to measure effectiveness across all media: online media (email, search), Web 2.0 (blogs), and offline media (direct marketing, retail, etc.).
- Deliver targeted messages to customers and build long-term relationships. Corporations in the United States lose 50% of their customers every 5 years, so even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits substantially.
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Building a Web 2.0 Site from Scratch
Presenters: Ryan Buchanan, eROI; and Lisa Benson, Matchpoint
For most companies, customers own the brand, not marketers. Thus, giving customers a way to tell their stories is vital. Focus on basic human needs like meaning or feeling important to earn loyalty. Here are some examples.
Dunderdon lets customers enter its site, start a conversation, build community, and convert.
Another brand that gets it is Kettle foods, with the concept of people's choice: “Passport to flavor.” People vote on the next flavor Kettle produces, e.g., spicy Thai, cheddar beer, Aztec chocolate, island jerk. This allows people to give feedback by rating the chip, sending stories, ordering online. Kettle fosters the conversations.
At Konami, people submit how they do (compared to others) in the Karaoke Revolution game. There are lots of community aspects, but the community is also empowered to self-cleanse.
Dove Soap is creating meaning as a marketer, driving mothers and daughters to workshops to discuss real beauty. This issue orientation creates emotional connection to the brand.
Many companies exploit the niche aspect of social networking and that's good. One Seattle VC has a blog listing 100 social networking sites, and many music sites. He notes that music sites see the youth audience declining while “soccer mom” is increasing. The implication: broader social networking sites will have slow growth, while more and more niche sites with tighter communities will emerge.
Matchpointcorp.com is a site that helps parents balance professional life and home life, and is a hybrid of on- and offline. Matchpoint started from scratch, needed to find a targeted, core audience, and build evangelists. It has aspects like MySpace, but greater sensitivity to privacy because of the family audience. Because the site combines two functions, there’s really no competition. Similar sites such as Flexperience, Women for Hire, and Momcorps don’t have the front-end social networking component. Matchpoint employed viral techniques for quick growth in other states, hiring regional directors to help with the site as a recruiting tool, and as “hosts” helping to invite participants. Next steps include email trigger, regionality, and greater navigability and interactivity.
Building the Matchpoint site was quick, about 4 months. The company wanted to differentiate it from other players, so that people would have a rich experience and feel comfortable. The family audience demands greater levels of permission, and user flow is everything. It has to be easy, so, for example there’s only one place to go for creating a profile, regardless of what type of target audience they are. Even when people are not logged in, they have access to national news and events. One call to action is to invite others into your network, promoting by word of mouth. There’s an inbox for in-network messages.
Matchpoint uses grassroots marketing and PR: newsletters, events, partnerships. The key thing that needs to happen is more PR, more word-of-mouth for greater validation, so that customers feel it expanding outside the network that exists now. Matchpoint launched in March 2007, and within 5 weeks there were already numerous parent profiles, contract job placements, company profiles, service provider listings, and several press mentions.
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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Blogging, RSS, Wiki and Podcasting
Panelists: Steve Gehlen, Strategy Forum; Scott Kveton, JanRain; Brian Rhodes, Intel; Kent Lewis, Anvil Media; Ray King, AboutUs; and John Hartman, Feedia
The panel discussed the implications, applications, integration, best practices and trends of these Media 2.0 technologies.
Implications: Transparency – when customers start blogging or using Wikis, they are dragging companies across the threshold. Evolve the thinking process and let user-generated content push initiatives forward. This often implies taking marketers out of the equation as the focus turns to subject-matter experts. In this process, outside agencies can become enablers, although there is a risk that agencies can be dis-enablers with regard to transparency.
Q. How does one justify spending time blogging?
A. First, find ways to automatically garner or bring information to you – outside sources can add relevance to who the company and brand is. Evangelize blogs with these two points: it’s as easy as email and a great way to get feedback – an ego-booster. A Wiki may work better when information is hard to find, because it facilitates a wide range of contributors, plus ongoing clarification, refining and organizing. It’s important to have a licensing policy and terms of service when collecting outside voices – ideally, this should be more automated than (manually) collecting traditional “customer testimonial” approvals.
Applications: Blogs are best when there is one expert who has current things to talk about. Wikis are good for many voices where information may or may not have currency. The hard part is less technological – MediaWiki lets people make blog-like posts and PBWiki is a very easy hosted service – and more cultural: how to build regular contributors. You have to get enough people to build a Wiki (and enough content for a blog) so it’s important to drag people in: ask them again and again, thank them, etc. There are even macros that convert Word files to Wiki syntax, which is great for existing information. Panelists recommend Paul Culligan’s book “Business Podcasting Bible” and Shel Holtz’s “Blogging for Business,” plus anything by Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell and Alan Scobel for big-picture strategy.
Integration: The concept of a tag is critical as is tagging strategy, with the goal of “owning” a word on Google. It’s the same education process as with keywords – finding the vernacular – though the format, RSS, Podcast, Video – defines the terms. Tags are “folksonomy” – like taxonomy, but defined by “what we say it is,” i.e., a user-defined categorization strategy. It’s important to frame tags in the customer’s language, and new users will need to be trained to do tags. Marketers are used to thinking like a customer, and may have to clean up tags in content generated by staffers who don’t think like the customer, e.g., engineers. The New York Times publishes a “tag cloud” showing the relative popularity of buzzwords in the news.
Best practices and trends:
The best way to get results is with a “do-ocracy” – see who naturally gravitates toward the job, and who will do it. Don’t assign or demand.
Use online search engines to search through blogs – they’re getting better – as well as Technorati. Also, social media tools such as Digg can be places to submit and get feedback.
Moving Web 1.0 to 2.0: crawl before you walk before you run. Test the waters by starting with a small audience, e.g., an extranet. If you find you have the bandwidth and passion, move up. Your industry will tell you what you need to do, and give you evidence why you need to do it. Are competitors doing it? Customers? Partners?
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Internet Industry Trends and Outlook
Presenter: Murray Gaylord, NYTimes.com
2007 will see the “perfect storm” for Web 2.0 because of the convergence of media, consumer behavior and technology, predicted Murray Gaylord, VP of marketing for NYTimes.com.
For newspapers, the model has shifted from putting the newspaper online to creating a community. For instance, within a few hours of the Virginia Tech shootings, over 2,000 comments appeared with NYTimes.com’s coverage of the tragedy.
In this new environment, “we have to do something remarkable”, he said. “Look for the purple cow among all the other cows.” The New York Times has looked for ways to innovate that go beyond providing standard editorial content. He demonstrated an interactive map showing campaign contributions by state for each candidate. The map is also searchable down to individual zip codes.
The key, he said, is to give users something to do, and get them involved with your brand or product
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Fostering Online Communities: Lessons from Open Source and Grassroots Development
Presenters: Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, Citizen Agency
In what many attendees agreed was the most cutting-edge session, Hunt and Messina described their work creating community-centric products. Citizen Agency applies the “mall pieces loosely joined” theory (from The ClueTrain Manifesto) to client work. With a range of social network examples (see the presentation), the two answered questions such as:
What is community? A virtual community includes personal content, the ability to interact with others, and the ability to make friends and share content. NOTE: Passionate customers do not necessarily make a community.
Benefits of community: loyalty, self-policing and filters on content (which emerge naturally) amplifies word-of mouth, better feedback. Why spend time in a community? Because there are a growing number of niches that have a better ‘fit,’ so don’t expect the biggest group, just the best.
Fostering community
Motivation: you must overcome the pull of the offline world – must offer something better
A sense of membership – you know when you’ve found it. Feelings are how a social network becomes personal: “my peeps,” speaking my language, being heard, being understood. Examples: Vampirefreaks, Dogster/Catster/Hamsterer; VIRB attracts a lot of designers because it’s very refined.
Integration and fulfillment of needs: rewards like finding work, new friends, expertise, support, shared values, or validation. Enhanced with status rewards, in-crowd knowledge, i.e., tricks only some know. Examples: Spread Firefox, Last.fm, Plazes, Ma.gnolia.
Find ways for people to meet in person: Internet friends evolve to real friends when they have shared history, frequent interaction, experience crises, etc. Example: barcamp.
Process for Clients: Ask why people would come, then do market research exploring the environment. Who needs this? What is the importance of being part of a community? Will community be fostered with online tools such as blogs, peer-to-peer, email, avatars, a party host, etc.? Include rules of engagement, a publicity policy (different than a privacy policy). Could community help you with partnerships and co-opetition? With rewards to members, VIP programs, promotions or events? When to start a business community? Well, Moleskin might want to because there’s already a group of true-believers out there (on Flockr groups).
Q: Can you give an example of an affiliation that benefits the community first, business second?
A: It’s important to evaluate what members want – the wrong choice might tick them off. There’s a ticket selling site that chose a vendor that gives more benefits to the community but fewer kickbacks.
Link to the PowerPoint Presentation
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Search 2.0: Advanced SEO and PPC Techniques
Presenters: Hallie Janssen, Anvil Media; and Scott Orth, GTS Services
Search 2.0 means finding information on Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, Wikis, videos, images, podcasts and user-generated content. Social networking sites such as de.licious, Digg, Yahoo answers, etc. can be used to search.
Participation is the first step to creating searchable content. Blog and read others, get help, create unique, nowhere else linkbait, allow site visitors to promote content, and monitor the social media.
Optimization is the next step. Keywords are still king. Use them in file names, alt image tags, on landing pages with optimized text and headers, etc.
Blogs are not just a journal, they should include “breadcrumbs” throughout, keywords in the title (and a title that’s catchy!), cross links – especially those that will help people who get the RSS feed back onto the site, where they’ll see ads. At the end, blog content should allow people to subscribe, share, bookmark the story, and the bottom should include links to related stories.
The latest buzz in PPC includes multivariate experiments, which are like A vs. B page testing, except multivariate – you can test any combinations of header, title, body copy, images, etc. There’s also dynamic ad text that contain the keywords users search on, video and mobile ads, “dayparting” and ad scheduling – that limit the time of day an ad runs, search volume trends that allow seasonal keywords, e.g., flip-flops, demographic targeting to women, regions, etc., pay-per-action such as downloads or purchase, preferred cost bidding, and more.
From a business perspective, you have to look at the shopping experience, set goals, and integrate search engine marketing into the business. Since both corporate/store and web goals have their own distinct behavior models, it’s important to align web goals with company goals. It helps to break goals, which are hard to track, into small trackable targets like KPIs (key performance indicators). Examples of web KPIs might be to increase search engine rankings, increase visits to product page, and decrease shopping cart abandonment, and offline KPIs might be to increase calls from the web site 800-number (which should be unique from print and other 800-numbers), increase “call me” actions on the site, or have printed web coupons brought into the store.
The website should not stand alone – it’s not a separate business, so it must be aligned with corporate and integral to the business. Marketing should control the web messaging, along with print, TV, etc. Sales should do the same thing online as off with calls to action. And IT should act as a technical resource to both.
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
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Widgets and Mash-ups and Twitters (Oh My!)
Panelists: Kevin Tate, StepChange Group; David Hersh, Jive Software; Rael Dornfest, Values of N; and Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial
Although Jive has an audience and developers who are very hooked into the 2.0 world, the company still has a very traditional software sales model. One of the main problems Jive seeks to address is the growing gap between what IT is providing its users, and what those users actually want. As a result, Jive seeks to bring together unified collaboration tools that users and IT can love.
Thoughts on being a Web 2.0 company
One negative to 2.0 technologies is that they are perceived as “lite,” just an application layer or light database. But all the richness and depth required to build a set of tools is nontrivial.
One of the big issues of being 2.0 is too much feedback. Great, you have a rapid cycle of innovation that’s so informed, but it’s also imperative to be nimble. There are surveys, polls, discussions, comments – all these conversations on top of calling customers on the phone. But you have to listen, if only to see what 2 or 4 things the community asks for.
Because Web 2.0 is so transparent, it’s harder to hide product deficits. If it sucks, it’s revealed.
Mashups are a great part of 2.0 – like Craigslist on MapQuest to find out where stuff for sale is. But is there a business in it?
Portland is good for 2.0/emerging new-tech companies. There’s a growing angel investor network and more focus on customers here than in the Bay area (less noise and fear and less of “who’s going to eat your lunch”). But there’s also less “gravity” in many senses, so many companies still head to Silicon Valley to get funding.
Link to the PowerPoint presentation on Innotech site
About the authors
Kate McPherron, a technology evangelist, has helped technology and industrial firms manage and market their products and services for 20 years. She can be reached at klm54@cornell.edu.
Chris Wain, a local writer and marketing consultant, is a 10-year veteran of eBusiness and Internet marketing. He can be reached at chris.wain@comcast.net.
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