Marketing Technology Blog

If you weren’t at the Webtrends Engage 2010 conference, you missed an incredible business intelligence conference. Engage is unlike any other company conference I’ve been to. The objective is to provide customers and industry professionals with exposure to some of the best and brightest experts throughout the online industry. Register for next year’s Engage in San Francisco – they always sell out!

This year I was invited to do a sprint, a 10 minute powerpoint about something online marketing related and that I’m passionate about. I decided to do mine on inbound marketing (click through if you don’t see the presentation). In New Orleans, I spoke specifically about business to business marketing, but the best practices apply to business to consumer marketing as well.

The original presentation was a bit different since it was animated and beautifully stretched across an 80 foot screen behind me… but here’s the meat of it!

Of course, if you were in New Orleans, you got a real treat… I did my speech and compared Social Media to the evolution of dancing. I even threw in a couple of steps and got some laughs. It was a great time all around!

Here’s a rundown of the content of the slides:

1. Inbound Marketing Strategies
2. Compelling content is what generates conversions. Great content is a combination of effective keyword usage and content that answers the visitors question – and encourages them to the next step in the sales process. Your blog is optimized for search engines.
3. Back in the day, Sales and Marketing were the source of information for prospects. Prospects relied on them.
4. Now Search Engines often offer the information that prospects are seeking.
5. Social Media now impacts both search and influences the decision maker. The prospect is now getting information from Search Engines and from their Social Network.
6. If your Sales and Marketing teams want to be involved in the prospect’s decision making, they need to be leading in search and involved in social networks. No longer can a company simply wait to have prospects ‘come to them’.
7. You need to be everywhere!
8. Utilizing syndication and other integration tools can save you time and keep you in front where you need to be!
9. Additionally, there are other tools on the market to simplify your integration needs.
   Every single blog post should have a path to engagement. Typically, this is a call to action, to a landing page, to a conversion!
10. The customer lands on your blog post, and sees a relevant call to action. That call to action will lead them to a landing page and into the conversion funnel.
11. Most people don’t read. Repeat: MOST PEOPLE DON’T READ! Use whitespace effectively, symbolize with images and add video and audio. Feed the senses: visual, audible, kinesthetic.
12. Downloads, Events, Questions and Answers, Emails, Whitepapers, Prizes…. All of these options should require a data form to collect the lead information. Your blog is free – trade everything else for data!
13. Build compelling landing pages that capture a minimal amount of data and that even prequalify leads. Make it simple. This is a superb example from Compendium.
14. Measure how your leads are arriving… through syndication, social media, email newsletters, events, etc. This will allow you to figure out where you should be investing the most time!
15. Watch referring domains, set goals, and monitor your conversion funnels!
16. I’m Douglas Karr (Twitter: @douglaskarr), If you need help, contact me at DK New Media.

Oh… and I might add that I opened with a fantastic poke from Indianapolis to New Orleans regarding the Super Bowl. Needless to say my prediction went awry somewhere in the 4th quarter and the Saints fans let me know it on Sunday night!

What do the Washington Post, BBC News, and New York Times have in common? They’re enriching the content presentation for links on their websites, using a tool called Apture. Rather than a simple static text link, Apture links trigger a pop-up window on mouse over that can display a wide variety of contextually related content.

On the publishing side, Apture makes it very easy for authors to find, link to, and display related content in their blog posts. Simply highlight the text you want to link, and with one click, the Apture plugin – which is available on just about any popular online publishing platform – searches the internet for a variety of different forms of contextually related content, and turns your text into a slick, helpful rich media link.

One of the benefits to your readers is quick access to additional bits of information. Mousing over links will display a little pop-up window that shows content directly related to the term. This could be a YouTube video, a Wikipedia entry, or even real-time Twitter search results.

Ordinarily, these links might take users away from your post, even if they just wanted to find a quick bit of information. Instead of potentially sending your user to another site, Apture quickly and efficiently displays the content the user might be interested in exploring, and in effect, tries to address their interest or their inquiry within your post itself.

The idea behind Apture is to make your posts more sticky, and should, theoretically, increase time on site – a critical engagement metric for many brand marketers.

And for all the analytics junkies out there, you can track the links through Apture’s analytics service in the paid version. Note that while the publishing platform plugins for Apture generate links that Google sees as regular old links, the browser plugin does not produce links that are recognizable by search engines.

We are using the WordPress version of Apture on the current iteration of our blog, and as a company that just makes content – all day, every day – so far, we really like it.  All of our content producers have had positive things to say. It helps make for interesting and relevant posts, and helps out quite a bit with generating new content ideas – and making the ideas we already have more engaging to the user.

Try out a demo of Apture on their site – it makes making the content fun, and your blog more effective.

This week I’m working on a presentation for the Webtrends Engage 2010 conference in New Orleans. My topic is quite specific and the time slot is very brief (10 minutes), so it’s challenging me to do one heck of a presentation! I’ve been asked to speak to successful B2B Blogging.

I’ve narrowed the keys to Business to Business Blogging down to 5 distinct strategies for the presentation:

1. Be in front. It’s not enough to blog, you must be in front of all the other competitors and other noise out there. You have to be in front of customers, in front of relevant social networks, in front of competitors’ search engine results. No longer can you simply wait for people to find you.
2. Provide a path. Every page of your blog is effectively a landing page. You must supply ways for visitors to contact you, must supply reasons for them to contact you, and you must make it simple and easy.
3. Feed the Senses. People don’t read blog posts, they scan them. Some don’t read at all, they look for visual and auditory mediums. If you’re not using white space effectively, doing sound and video, you’re not connecting with a large percentage of your prospective audience.
4. Capture Information. A blog is a fantastic way to provide information and build authority with prospects and customers. You don’t have to do it for free though… it’s okay to survey and request information about your reader. Providing additional resources such as whitepapers or webinars requires registration.
5. Measure in Dollars. Engagement isn’t measured in comments, it’s measured in dollars and cents. It’s essential to integrate a business analytics tool that can accomodate accurate measurement of your blogging efforts.

Each key, of course, can have an associated presentation… but don’t lose sight of the big picture if you’re blogging for business with other businesses. I hope to see you at Engage ‘10 down in New Orleans February 1st to 4th, this is going to be a fantastic event!

Overwhelmed with the amount of information, apps, and new solutions coming at you?  I know I am!  Call me silly, but some of the items I mention today may be old news to many, but with so much information out there, who can really keep up.  Unless you are Douglas Karr or Kyle Lacy – which by the way, I am convinced they don’t sleep!

I’ve started using some new organizational tools to keep all of the details in check.  Here are just a few that I find helpful:

1. Delicious: Okay, okay, I know many of you reading this may already know about Delicious.  I’ve known about too, but until the world of social sharing evolved, it never had as much impact.  I love that I can bookmark and tag away and no matter what computer I am on, where I am at, I always have my favorites right there.  Not to mention a quick and easy place to find all of those links I want to remember.  Like a recent blog post, a webinar invite, or even an article.
2. Picnik: Again, marketers are creative people and we have to be able to design in a pinch.  I can design when needed, but when I want something quick, simple, and easy…I choose picnik!  Especially for those projects you want to spice up a bit without a lot of brain power.  Their interface is very easy to use and again like any web-based app….you can access your pics anywhere.
3. Feedburner: By now I am sure you are thinking, what rock has she been under?  Not so much….remember, I am a busy marketer juggling it all A-Z!  I need quick, I need simple, and I need to get back to it when in a pinch.  While I have always known and loved feedburner for the RSS capabilities, but I just recently learned of the ability to embed an email form in your blog as well.  And then the metrics, very cool that I will have all of these tools all within my Google platform everyday.
4. Google Apps: I don’t want to sound like a Google devotee because like so many other marketers I have always been bewildered by them just trying to improve my search.  However, at Delivra, we all work from Google Apps for everything and while I’m sure the cost savings are huge compared to any desktop software, I am impressed with the various applications from mail, calendar, sites (which we love!), Documents, you name it.  Now I know it isn’t perfect, but the accessibility and the fact that it doesn’t crash once a day has me sold.
5. SmartSheet: This is probably the only app that many of you may not know about.  I love SmartSheet as I am a constant list maker.  How else do I keep track of the thousands of things I do everyday?  In any event, the application helps me manage multiple to-do’s where I can rank them by priority, share with others, make edits anywhere, print or access wherever I might be.

There you have it, five simple tools that keep me from succumbing to information overload.  If you are a time starved marketer or simply time starved, incorporate some of these tools into your bag of tricks and you will be able to manage the load with the greatest of ease.  If not, consider them new hyperlinks to what you already know and love.