Are you exercising your CORE?

Jim Leach, VP-Marketing Development, Harris Corp.

While b2b marketing can entail lots of things, a new clarity of responsibilities is emerging: Demand generation is its fundamental mission, and lead development is its primary metric.

To do this, you need to exercise your “CORE”: content, outreach, response and engagement.

• Content. Here, you need white papers, research reports, position papers, product videos, ROI calculators, press releases and e-books. However, there are two basic challenges to creating winning content. First, the people who know the most about your customers and product sales and product engineers are terrible writers. Second, your audience has no time to read.You can’t outsource the first challenge. The reality is, you need a person on your team who understands your product, calls on customers, writes clearly and has the time and interest to create content.

  This is not a marketing communications person who knows about brand guidelines, copywriting and layout. It’s probably a product engineer or customer support person who also is an amateur photographer, minored in literature and enjoys going to art exhibits. You need to find/hire this person and give them three to six months to get up to speed.

  The second challenge—your audience has little time—is easier to address. Be brief, be brilliant, be gone. Try to make one point and make it well. Lay out the copy with bolded headings for easy scanning. Use lists and bullet points. It’s about clear, concise communications.

• Outreach. Your salespeople can tell you what they are hearing from their prospecting calls, the issues that are top-of-mind, the business initiatives under way and the strategic shifts on the horizon. Take those insights and turn them into content nuggets—one-pagers with common themes. Use those one-pagers as part of a drip communications program.Create videos but don’t overproduce them. Handheld digital cameras are fine. Then post your videos on your own YouTube channel, paying careful attention to titles and search tags. Also, create webinars and podcasts; and invite people to on-demand viewings. Most important: Make sure you have documents that can be easily downloaded, emailed (small file sizes), printed, read, noted and filed for future use.

• Response. Too many campaigns point people to corporate home pages or product Web pages that make the visitor feel like they are starting all over again. A strong inbound marketing site automatically collects basic profile information, welcomes visitors with tailored messages and guides them to other valuable content and interactive tools.We must orient how we sell around how our customers buy, which involves (in order): awareness, research, evaluation, selection and purchase. The content and design of the site should be based on that buying process. The site will delight visitors by helping them recognize where they are in the buying process, presenting content that fits that stage and inviting them to go to the next stage.

• Engagement. Much of b2b marketing supports enterprise buying decisions that have strategic value, operational impact, relatively long buying cycles (12 to 18 months) and significant budget requirements. To be successful, you need to engage these prospects through interactive dialogue that builds a trusted relationship. 

  The most important aspect to engagement is “the ask.” Every time prospects have valuable interactions with you, either online or in person, you have earned the right to ask them questions. You should learn about them, their purchase intent and, of course, you should ask for the business.

 

CORE marketing can help you organize your marketing team, focus your efforts, improve the results of your campaigns and close deals.

 

Xerox PR releases enter the social world

Christopher Hosford

As a direct marketing channel, public relations remains key to distributing company news about product launches, new services and other company initiatives. But PR isn’t outside the influence of new digital channels, in particular social media.

Xerox Corp., for example, recently decided to use social media alone—no PR release involved—to distribute information about a rebranding move.

“Today, every conversation in marketing takes place within the social element,” said Xerox CMO Christa Carone. “Of course there are other tools in the PR tool kit, but social is the predominant one right now.”

Xerox’s news entailed its acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, whose brand Xerox decided to put an end to and instead offer a Xerox-branded product. It’s not an unusual move for large companies, but one that requires sensitivity to many publics, including investors and current customers.

“The ACS brand wasn’t extremely well-known, but we knew that it had an important customer constituent that needed to know we were making this change,” Carone said. She said her team prepared a traditional news release about the elimination of the ACS brand but had some questions about it.

“We stared at this news release and it didn’t do much for us,” Carone said. “We asked ourselves, “What are we were trying to achieve?’ There was little context, and it wasn’t especially newsworthy.”

As a result, Xerox decided to publicize the phase-out of the ACS brand via a blog posting.

The issue of news release distribution is changing, said Jillian Tobias, senior account exec at PR company Boardroom Communications.

“In certain industries, I actually have Twitter lists to tweet about news,” Tobias said. “Social media also has been the most important tool for me when understanding national trends.”

Tobias said the traditional news release, optimized for search, still has a place in the marketing mix, but it depends on the client.

“If you’re Xerox, it may be effective. But for smaller companies, even if they have 10,000 followers, you may not be hitting the right markets with social announcements.”

For Xerox, the personal element was key.

“We asked ourselves, “Would it be more engaging if we told a story?’ ” Carone said. “We said, “Let’s give it a try.’ If we didn’t feel it was well-communicated to our constituents, we could always do a news release at a later date.”

Carone said that regulatory requirements, which often necessitate official publication via news releases, weren’t involved in this particular case.

“We were realistic about this,” she said. “We realized that the announcement didn’t require top-line media coverage. But we wanted to ensure that our employees and the customer base who were engaged in external social channels jumped on the news quickly.”

Carone said that, with this announcement, the personal touch was important.

“I wrote it from a personal perspective,” Carone said. “I offered a less formal tone. This doesn’t work every time, and a lot of companies will have the obligation to issue a press release. But for us, social is becoming a new, important way to spread meaningful messages.”

Carone’s blog received 2,400 visits on its first day online; and, after two days, that figure doubled.

“This turned out to be a more engaging approach to distributing news,” Carone said. “This isn’t rocket science, but every day we’re taking some risks and learning.”

USA ‘Suits Up’ to Social TV With ‘Suits Recruits’

by Christina Warren

 

 

 

When USA’s hit show Suits returns to the airwaves on June 14, fans will already be part of the storyline, thanks to a new interactive social TV campaign that the network is rolling out.

Known as “Suits Recruits,” the interactive and social media-laden experience allows fans to join the team at Pearson Hardman and help Harvey and Mike work on an on-going case.

This isn’t the first time USA has dipped into the social TV/transmedia waters. Last year, the network launched of a first-of-its kind interactive experience for Psych dubbed #HashTagKiller.

The success of HashTag Killer has helped pave the way for other social TV experiments, including MTV’s newTeen Wolf: The Hunt as well as “Suits Recruits.” As with Teen Wolf and Psych, “Suits Recruits” is built on the Social Samba platform. The experience was built in HTML5, which means it runs great on a phone, tablet or desktop.

“We’ve taken what we learned from ‘HashTag’ and applied those lessons to ‘Recruits’,” says Jesse Redniss, SVP of digital at USA.

“Suits and Psych have different audiences and that means we have to approach social in slightly different ways,” he adds.

Indeed, one of the benefits that Psych had with its interactive experience was a deeply social audience. Still, USA is hoping that the audience with Suits will still make time to log on and take part in the story.

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Making Social Scale

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“Suits Recruits” integrates heavily with Facebook — though users don’t have to connect with the social network if they don’t want to — and the storyline was written by Suits writers.

“The storyline was actually something that was originally intended to be an episode of the show,” Redniss tells us. The writers then crafted the script as a more interactive experience.

Moreover, video with the Suits cast was shot for use within the experience. What’s interesting to note about these videos is that they can act as stand-alone webisodes. In fact, the plan is to re-purpose the clips on the main Suits websites — as well as on DVD — after “Suits Recruits” ends.

Unlike #HashTagKiller, which launched without an advertising sponsor, “Suits Recruits” is sponsored by Lexus. Lexus also advertises on Suits, which helps show that social TV tie-ins can be a value-add to advertisers.

While “Suits Recruits” is a parallel storyline to the main Suits arc, there will be some potential overlap in the future. The interactive experience will roll out over three days each week and coincide with what’s happening on Suits on the air.

Moreover, USA is hoping to use the “Suits Recruits” site as a centralized hub for all the conversations happening around the show. To do that, the network will integrate its USA Chatter platform into the experience.

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This is the Future of Storytelling

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The fact that Suits doesn’t have the type of fanatical following on social media that Psych and Teen Wolf have is what makes “Suits Recruits” most interesting to us.

If “Suits Recruits” is a success, it’s even more proof that social TV has real potential as a future storytelling medium.

For years, I’ve been arguing that social TV can’t really take off until content creators and networks start thinking about the social elements when actually writing the show. Each successive interactive storytelling exercise gets us closer to that point.

“Suits Recruits” will run for the first half of the new Suits season and will launch later today.

Thriving in the age of complexity

John Obrecht

The watchword in marketing this year is not social or mobile. It’s not Facebook or iPad. No, it’s something much simpler: complexity.

In February, Peter Naylor, exec VP-digital sales at NBCUniversal and the recently installed chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, stressed in his opening remarks at the group’s annual meeting in Miami Beach that the digital advertising industry needs to combat what he termed “complexity creep.” (It’s tough not to think of that fine turn of phrase in an anthropomorphic sense.)

“Our products are complicated and our processes are complex,” Naylor said. “The higher the complexity, the lower the confidence marketers have investing in digital media.”

Complexity was also a recurrent theme at BtoB’sinaugural Digital Edge Live conference last month in San Francisco.

When asked what their biggest marketing challenge is, two of the four members of a panel of CMOs cited increasing complexity.

“Everything is becoming much more complicated, and my biggest challenge is trying to work out how I can use all these channels available to me as an integrated, outbound program to generate business,” said Chris Boorman, senior VP-education and enablement and CMO at Informatica. “I’m increasingly using social networking. I use direct marketing. I read all the textbooks, hear all the theory and understand how, in theory, you’re supposed to combine all this together. But my biggest challenge remains gaining the maximum ROI from all this to feed the pipeline.”

Tom Haas, CMO of Siemens, said: “Complexity is our biggest issue. One thing we’re trying to do at Siemens is start an extensive education process, getting people up to speed on what they can do and how to go about it, especially in social media marketing. We’re in different industries, and we’re working with our companies to create blogs addressing industry challenges. But the biggest thing for us right now is managing all that complexity, getting people trained and giving them the tools.”

Haas also delivered perhaps the best line during the full-day event, when addressing the challenges of taking advantage of the ever-burgeoning amount of data that marketers are generating these days. He said there’s a saying around his company—“If Siemens only knew what Siemens knows.”

Despite the massive upheaval in the world of marketing over the past decade, with the pace of change accelerating daily, it seemed clear that Boorman, Haas and the other speakers at Digital Edge Live, whether marketers or agency executives, are charged up about their work. They may feel overwhelmed at times by “big data,” but they see the promise it holds for getting ever closer to customers and prospects. They see the same potential in social media and mobile, too.

Despite all the complexity, this does indeed seem the best of times to be a marketer. It’s that simple.

Burberry Tweets Personalized Animated GIF Cards to Celebrate 1 Million Followers

by Lauren Indvik

To celebrate the accumulation of more than 1 million Twitterfollowers, British fashion house Burberry is sending animated thank-you cards personalized with followers’ names.

Up to 3,000 followers will receive a virtual notecard emblazoned with their Twitter handles in return for sending a tweet of congratulations or a tweet with the hashtag#thanksamillion, which the company has paid Twitter to promote for the day. The notecards are written the style of Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey’s hand and rest against a windowpane of sliding raindrops, which are looped in an animated GIF.

The cards may be a small thing, but followers seem to be enjoying them, if initial response count is anything to go by. Burberry, as a rule, doesn’t publicly respond to users on social networks, except when Bailey takes over the @burberry account for London Fashion Week. (UPDATE: The company has informed me it does frequently reply to consumers’ Twitter inquiries through@burberryservice.) To get a reply from the company, however automated, is a novelty many are likely to think worth sharing.

The cards also amplify two aesthetic themes: one, the handwritten note from Bailey, which the company frequently distributes in the form of invitations and thank yous across its social profiles; and the animated GIF, which Burberry employed during its February catwalk show to showcase its Autumn/Winter 2012 collection.

We’re curious: Has a brand you follow ever done something memorable to celebrate a milestone? If so, please share it with us in the comments.

Send your database to boot camp

Craig Conard, President, Sudden Impact Marketing

Nearly all business-to-business companies wrestle with database issues. Database fitness, or a lack thereof, becomes readily apparent when marketing campaigns are launched. Poor results can generally be tracked back to database issues.

There are a number of reasons companies get into binds with databases. Overengineering of database structure, disparate data sources, old data, bad data, siloed data and direct imports of purchased lists are some of the most common.

Often as with fitness programs, you need to shed fat and break down muscle to resculpt the body. Here are a few simple keys to building a healthy, high-performing database.

Start with the assumption that your company has finite audiences it wants to sell to. Begin by asking yourself where your sales team’s best prospects are geographically, even if you sell globally. Define the characteristics of these organizations, both demographically and by line of business. Look at job functions that intersect with both the purchase and purchase influence of your products and services.

If you serve a broad and dispersed customer base, pull your top 10% of customers by profitability and determine what their similarities and motivations are for doing business with you. White-board a profile based on these for each line of business your marketing efforts supports.

Get face-to-face with your data. Download your database—or a random sampling of it—into a spreadsheet. Take a look at what you have and compare it to what you need. Look at 100 records: How many of these records fit the profile on your whiteboard? How many of those have good email addresses and complete information? Repeat a few times, until you have an accurate sense for what comprises your database.

Have your phone team, inside sales or an intern call through and see how good your “good data” actually are.

Once you’ve completed your database fitness self-evaluation, don’t be surprised to find that your data is full of listings you really don’t want to direct marketing efforts toward. Channel partners, competitors, students and home-based businesses seem to find their way into databases, and you are paying to store and market to people who will never buy your products.

Here are six steps to building a stronger, more responsive database:

 

1. Syphon off the best and create a new database or database instance for campaigns. Determine what you can identify as your best data assets. Using whatever tools or filters are at your disposal, create a subset of your database that aligns best with your profile. If your company has many, even hundreds, of products and services, your strategy might entail multiple core databases and the employment of analytics tools to utilize data throughout them.
2. Simplify your database structure to house core customer information as it pertains to marketing your products. Databases with dozens, or hundreds, of fields are at best wishful thinking since they rarely get populated and can lead to clutter and complexity without purpose.
3. Look for gaps in coverage, geographically, vertically or other. Are there areas where your database doesn’t support your sales teams? Are there vertical weak spots in the database that don’t align with the products and services you are selling? Is there enough density across the strata of job functions you want to market and sell to?
4. Plug the holes. Use list acquisition and campaigns to fill the gaps. For starters, look inside and see if other corporate and sales databases can help build up your database. Assume the worst, and expect to scrub before you import these or any other contacts. Add from outside, but carefully. Responder lists to similar offers are a good start, but first qualify them to some level. Never import a raw outside list; this will send you back to square one in no time.
5. Gate what gets into your database. Set standards as to what you will allow in. A website inquiry, event attendee or email blast respondent does not automatically constitute a lead. Build a suppress list of specific industries or companies you do not want to market to.
6. Create a process to stay in front of prospects and ensure the data is maintained. Enlist email, direct mail and phone campaigns to assure continued integrity of your database. Do not rely on the sales team to maintain it for you.

 

Avoid these 4 creative gaffes in emails

Karen J. Bannan

When it comes to interactive, marketers are spending a lot more time on customer acquisition than they are on retention, according to the latest Direct Marketing Association/Winterberry Group “Quarterly Business Review.” According to the report, which is based on results from an April 2012 online survey of 234 DMA members, in the first quarter of 2012, marketers allocated 61.7% of their overall direct marketing budgets for customer acquisition methodologies, including email marketing. It’s not surprising then that customer retention creative gets short shrift in many cases, said Regina Gray, VP-strategic services at Experian CheetahMail. “Emails are the last thing in the list of priorities, so design isn’t optimized,” she said. “We tell customers that they have to start thinking more strategically for creative.” When they don’t, she said, they make several common mistakes.

Below, Gray details the top four creative gaffes that email marketers are making today.

 

1. Placement or use of images is all wrong.When people code emails using images, they often use one large image at the top and place text underneath, Gray said. The problem with this, she said, is that when images are turned off, you might not see any text above the fold. Another problem is that images may not render well on mobile devices. “The size of an image might be wrong. The call to action isn’t big enough to read on the screen, or a button doesn’t have enough space around it so someone can push it on a touch screen,” she said. Gray suggested alternating text and images—not creating a single image but a series of images. She also said marketers should test and use alt text tags so the design is engaging even when images are off.

 

 

1. Multiple columns are used. On the Web, one long column looks boring—which is why most pages have multiple columns and fields. However, in email, especially on a mobile device, one column is the design-of-choice, Gray said. “It looks clean and crisp and renders well on all devices,” she said.

 

 

1. Video is embedded in an email. Plenty of marketers are using video in email just because they can, Gray said. However, even when it is warranted, most aren’t presenting it in a way that it can be consumed, no matter which device an end user is viewing it on. Video should never be embedded in an email, Gray said. Marketers should provide a link to a video on a Web page that does not start automatically. Users should have the option to press “play.”

 

 

1. Social sharing is lumped together with email housekeeping notices. Social shares links are being added to the bottom of emails alongside unsubscribe links and CAN-SPAM compliance information, where they get lost. “People don’t even look at them,” she said. “Marketers should think about how they can add those links and make them engaging rather than just an afterthought.” One strategy, Gray said, is to use customer-generated social content in conjunction with sharing links. “Obviously, you’re not going to do that in every email, but it definitely makes it more engaging,” she said.

Is Augmented Reality Right for Your Brand?

by Duke Greenhill

Duke Greenhill is the founder and CEO of Greenhill+Partners, a top New York branding and marketing consultancy specializing in digital technology and luxury brands. Duke is also a prolific writer, film producer, and speaker. Find him onFacebook. and follow him @BrandTherapy.

Augment reality is defined as “the live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.” While technically accurate, to a consumer, AR is about something utterly different — something intangible, utilitarian, and evocative.

Because of this, the marketer who views AR as a technology is missing the point. Instead, brands and marketers who want to leverage AR must look at it through the consumer lens. When a client expresses interest in integrating AR in their platforms and campaigns, I walk them through my version of augmented reality 101. With it, any brand or advertiser can determine whether AR is right for them, and if so, how best to integrate it.

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What to Consider

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The first step for any marketer is to determine whether AR is feasible for his or her brand, and whether it compliments or detracts from current brand marketing goals. There are three primary concerns in the first phase.

 

• Innovation: Innovation is a loaded word. Who doesn’t want to be innovative, right? But as with any new tactic, the smart marketer must question whether it’s the right tactic, and the right time. There are essentially two kinds of AR marketing out there: the type that aims to be long-term and platform-supported, and the kind that intends to be a one-off, an earned-media generator, a campaign.A fragrance brand, for example, might benefit more from an AR campaign in the fourth quarter that drives in-store holiday sales, while an automotive brand may see a better ROI if they build an AR platform that touts the features of their new models year-round and year-to-year. Any brand or marketer first needs to decide what kind of AR tactic suits their goal. Only then can they move on to the next consideration.

• Cost Versus Engagement: Comparatively speaking, the cost of deploying an AR campaign or platform can be substantially cheaper than other forms of marketing. More importantly, it can also result in priceless earned media. For example, when Burberry celebrated its Beijing store opening with an AR fashion show in which holographic models appeared to walk next to the real-life ones, Burberry received top coverage in countless major publications including The New York Times. The AR elements cost Burberry substantially less than buying advertising would have, and they enjoyed the cache of maintaining their reign as the luxury fashion digital leader.However, the Burberry AR example is a one-off, and long-term AR platforms can be a great deal more expensive. That’s why the cost-benefit analysis for marketers boils down to this: Is the goal to create awareness and to generate innovative cache, or is the goal continued engagement and sales conversions? In either case, AR is a viable tactic, but a smart marketer must build the AR experience from the goal up.

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How to Do it Right

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If a marketer decides that AR is the right move, then here’s how to do it effectively.

 

• Immediacy: The nature of AR as a technology poses a significant time hurdle to marketers trying to engage hurried audiences. For AR to work, it must be fast and easy. Take, for example, a Red Bull AR campaign that required the user to first purchase and collect a series of cans, then line them up, then download the Red Bull app, and only then could they enjoy the augmented experience. That’s a lot of work for a time-pressed audience, and the Red Bull campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.One solution is to skip the app. Countless successful AR campaigns have lived inside live events that don’t require a device at all. In March 2011, Axe deodorant put signs in London’s Victoria railway stations asking travelers to look up at a giant LCD screen. On the screen the travelers saw themselves with angels, who were a centerpiece of both the U.K. and U.S. Axe campaigns [http://mashable.com/2011/03/17/unilevers-angels-ar/]. Whether a brand chooses to remove the need for devices all together, or simply to make the barriers to use minimal, any successful AR tactic must provide easy and immediate gratification.

• Content: For AR to work, audiences have to be willing to purposefully request a brand’s content. Therefore, the content has to be exponentially more compelling than that of other channels and more useful. TheStella Artois Le Bar Guide is successful because it requires only the download of the branded app, and offers real-world payoff. It combines GPS tracking with directions and user interaction. By locking into your physical location, the app recognizes if the bars you are walking toward serve Stella Artois. If not, it directs you to those that do. It’s just more proof that low barriers to use and high utility are keys to successful long-term AR.

• Emotion or Entertainment: This approach to AR is best suited for marketing strategies that demand a more evocative and sensory connection with customers. Categories like automotive, luxury, and travel often see great success with emotion or entertainment based AR, since their products tend not to be about function or utility, but rather about how they make a consumer feel.The goal of AR in this case is to create an emotional connection between what the buyer is searching for and what the product can offer. In short, it gives the product a personal feel when consumers can picture it in their own world. Take for example the Volvo AR campaign that promoted the launch of the new S60 model, and gamified AR for entertainment value. The user activated the AR function by scanning a YouTube video that allowed him or her to drive a virtual Volvo S60 around a track by tilting their smartphone left and right. By connecting their brand to the fun of driving a racetrack, Volvo reported an almost 300% leap in traffic to their homepage.

  Keen use of emotional AR comes most frequently from the luxury category. Dunhill, for example, is leveraging the London Olympics with the latest iteration of its “Voice” campaign. The campaign connects the Dunhill brand with a series of iconic British Olympians. This means that when a user scans a print ad or billboard, they can watch a video of one of the Olympian luminaries talking about what inspires him or her, while dressed to the nines in Dunhill. The AR experience makes the link between incredible accomplishment and the Dunhill brand all the more poignant, and it brings the brand values and emotions to life.

Searching for Goldilocks ‘Scorecard-analytics’ model seeks combo of Web analytics that is just right

by Matthew Schwartz

At the CA World conference in Las Vegas last November, the software giant created a new marketing vehicle to get a better read on what the show’s 5,000 attendees were thinking about the event and the CA brand.

Using Radian6 technology, which specializes in social media monitoring, CA set up a Social Listening Operation Center on the show floor.

Attendees were encouraged to make comments via a Twitter hashtag (#CAWorld) that was promoted during the event’s keynote speech and in printed materials, said Michelle Accardi, VP-Internet marketing. Twitter comments ran on a large screen in the middle of the show floor and were streamed on the CA.com and CA World websites. The comments and questions from the crowd were then aggregated and distributed to the appropriate departments at CA.

“We saw the amount of discussion around CA and CA’s role go up from where we had it tremendously,” Miller said.

She said that CA is now considering using similar Web analytics for some of its other marketing programs. “We are looking at extending our social listening operations center into our customer executive business center, as well as extending our listening profiles to better enable our marketing and customer success [departments] to more proactively engage with customers on Twitter and other social channels.”

These days, social media is having a growing impact on almost every facet of b2b marketing, and Web analytics in particular.

SOCIAL POSITIONING

 

 

 

“Social is going to be key because that’s where we’re generating so much discussion about our new offerings and campaigns, and this can help us understand how well-positioned we are,” said Cay Drew, senior digital initiatives program manager at IBM Corp.

Drew said that social media analytics is a major element of several of Big Blue’s marketing initiatives, including the “Smarter Planet” and “Smarter Computing” campaigns.

“These are big campaigns we’re leaning on to carry us into the next few years, and this is where we’re looking more and more at social metrics to understand what the marketplace likes and how we can serve it,” she said. “We observed, for instance, when we had a couple of guest bloggers on our P4SP blog [People for a Smarter Planet] that the topics and discussion drove increases in engagement on our website, evidenced by traffic going deeper into our Smarter Planet website and increased virality.”

IBM uses its own software, including Unica Net Insight, to measure online benchmarks such as increase in Web traffic, referrals from social media, traffic from mobile devices and registrations for offers.

Drew stressed that social media metrics need to correlate with financial metrics that IBM deploys to drive all its online measurement programs, including contacts responding, leads and lead revenue.

KEEPING SCORE

 

 

 

While a lot depends on the audience being targeted, b2b marketers are increasingly using a blend of both paid and free Web analytics services to improve their online marketing efforts.

For example, Google’s free API enables marketers to integrate other Web analytics tools, such as paid services, with many other services offered by Google Analytics, according to Rich Dettmer, director-digital strategy and partner at b2b ad agency Slack and Co., Chicago, who works with Google as a client.

“I’m starting to see a move toward a more “scorecard-analytics’ model,” said Dettmer, whose other clients include Dow Corning Co. and Fellowes.

He added that marketers are trying to “figure out what combination of factors is most predictable for shortening their sales cycle and for turning prospects into sales-ready leads. A function of that is tracking not only onsite but offsite and offline behaviors; monitoring it all together into one analytics package.”

SEO, of course, often lies at the heart of an effective Web analytics strategy. In 2009, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a research and advisory company, began re-evaluating its SEO strategy when it realized that its marketing campaign pages on its website were landing on pages about CEB itself, rather than driving to content pages featuring the latest research, according to Matt Stevens, head of digital marketing at CEB.

“The majority of our website traffic was being directed to background information on CEB, our business model and our client base,” Stevens said. “Pages showcasing the benefits and impact of CEB’s research and client engagement actually represented a much lower portion of our overall Web traffic.”

Abdul Khimani, senior search strategist at b2b ad agency gyro, New York, who worked with CEB on reforming its keyword strategy, said: “Our first plan of attack was to figure out what nonbrand-related keywords people were searching for when researching the services that CEB offers. We made sure that pages on the website were optimized for high visibility on those queries.”

Stevens said CEB also redesigned the home page on its website and created a “client testimonials” page.

The changes have paid off, Stevens said, with CEB’s website traffic up more than 150% in February compared with the year-earlier period.

 

Social Media Day!

by Tania Kasongo

Mashable launched Social Media Day in 2010 as a way to recognize the digital revolution happening around the world. This is a global celebration of the technological advancements that have given rise to the connected generation.

Come celebrate with Mashable and Motorola Mobility, our exclusive global sponsor, for our 3rd annual Social Media Day on June 30, 2012 at The Box SF.

This event is free, but due to limited capacity, please make sure to register and arrive promptly.

The event will feature networking, music, hors d’oeuvres, drinks and gadgets.

For updates and to find out what others are up to for Social Media Day, follow our @mashsmday Twitter account and like our Social Media Day Facebook page.

Mashable is pleased that Social Media Day 2012 is presented by Motorola Mobility. Like Mashable, Motorola Mobility’s mission is to connect people around the world through innovative technologies and this is exactly what Social Media Day celebrates.

We look forward to celebrating Social Media Day with you.

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SF Social Media Day Details

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Date: Saturday, June 30, 2012
Time: 5 to 8 p.m.
Location: The Box SF, 1069 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Hashtag: #smday