It’s All Marketing Event Overview

WTWH Media recently hosted the first-ever “It’s All Marketing” conference at FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland, OH, better known as the Cleveland Browns Stadium. We were joined by 75+ guests from marketing managers to sales to CEOs from the wind power, solar power, design engineering, fluid power and social media industries. The free, one-day conference included a variety of speakers including Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute, Carlos Hidalgo, CEO & Principal of ANNUITAS, Jonathan Lacoste, Co-founder/COO at Jebbit, Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President of Marketing Insights at ExactTarget, Nathan Kievman, CEO of Linked Strategies and Mike Murray, Online Marketing Coach. A live feed of key takeaways tweeted during the event are available in the Twitter Recap. Below you’ll find a brief overview of each presentation and a link will soon be available for you to download their presentations.

Mike Murray, President, Online Marketing Coach, opened the event with discussing how to use SEO to generate leads and sales, what it takes to successfully use SEO and how to overcome any obstacles involving it. Shockingly, there were over 18 billion U.S. searches in July alone. Murray stressed that in order to use SEO successfully, playing on your weaknesses is a must. He also suggested reevaluating your meta title and description. Adding keywords to your meta title does not always work to your benefit in fact, Murray stated it could lower your search engine ranking. Instead make sure your link is set up properly by separating words with dashes or hyphens.  Bottom line, producing great content and building relationships will vastly increase your SEO ranking.

View Mike’s presentation slides here.

Jonathan Lacoste, Co-Founder/COO of Jebbit,  discussed the evolution of B2B advertising and where it is heading. He backed up his statement that web development is still number one within digital marketing trends with factors including dynamic creative, post-click engagement and focusing on making content that is easy for your target audience to use. Lacoste’s bread and butter was his section on the 7 Deadly Sins of B2B Marketing. The sins laid out the importance of understanding the customer within B2B marketing. It included engagement, understanding the customer and most importantly test and measurement. By turning the failures-or sins-into an actionable list, a marketer would be able to successfully run a campaign.

The 7 Deadly Sins of B2B Marketing:

1. Failure to Understanding the Customer
2. Failure to Practice Flexibility and Adapt
3. Not Knowing if the Message was Heard
4. Failure to Stop and Test
5. Not Measuring Date and Insights
6. Failure to Optimize the Campaign
7. Wasting Ad Spend

View Jonathan’s presentation slides here.

Nathan Kievman, CEO of Linked Strategies shared his advice for success on LinkedIn at It’s All Marketing. He was passionate about the power of LinkedIn explaining it is the number one professional network with a database of 300 million people. Kievman showed us the real power of LinkedIn is the direct access to business opportunities such as:

• Opportunity to position and brand yourself
• Can brand a company via employees and customers
• Build targeted networks
• Establish long term thought leadership
• Direct access to top talent when hiring
• Ability to create and maintain business partnerships and alliances
• Source of new prospects and clients

Kievman also shared tips to improve profile pages. He suggested getting a professional and friendly profile image, having 10 recommendations and networking on a regular basis.

View Nate’s presentation slides here.

Jeffrey Rohrs, Marketing Insights Team Leader at ExactTarget discussed the importance of audiences. He explained an audience should be considered an asset with effort devoted to growing the audience base. Rohrs’ marketing acronym to remember, “ABBA” stands for “Always Be Building Audiences.” While everyone wants a large audience Rohrs reminded audience size is relative to company size and competitors. A successful audience development strategy will not only focus on developing an audience but also engaging the audience. Audience engagement equals attention, usage and visibility.

Rohrs’ 3 Different Types of Audiences:

• Joiners: This is the biggest form of audience. These audience members are looking for information. They will choose to connect with a brand using a channel that provides convenience to the reader.
• Seekers: Those actively seeking out are a desirable form of audience. These types are researching and looking for information on their own already.
• Amplifiers: These are the most desired type of audience. Amplifiers engage with a company and share a brand’s message with their own audience, helping extend the reach of a company.

View Jeffrey’s presentation slides here.

Joe Pulizzi, CEO & Founder at Content Marketing Institute, spoke about – you guessed it – content marketing! Pulizzi demonstrated key marketing strategies aimed at attracting and attaining customers. To do so, Pulizzi says one must create valuable, compelling information on a consistent basis that results in a behavioral change. The 5 elements of Content Marketing:

1. Sales, savings, or sunshine
2. Create a content marketing mission statement
3. Don’t build your content ship on rented land
4. Leverage influencers, then build an audience
5. Open up your wallet

Pulizzi also noted the “Holy Grail” of content marketing metrics – 4:1:1. He explained, one tweet can be sales/promotional; one tweet can be content (whitepapers, videos, etc.); and four tweets to be influencer sharing OPC (other people’s content).

View Joe’s presentation slides here.

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of ANNUITAS, a B2B Demand Generation Strategy firm designed to help enterprise organizations Transform Demand Generation wrapped up the evening with a comprehensive talk about marketing automation. Hidalgo found that 58% of b2b buyers spent more time researching their purchases than last year; and 41% of B2B buyers stated they waited longer to initiate contact with a vendor. “Map content around your customer’s goals.” How do marketers respond to these challenges? -Purchase technology -Increase amount of spend on “lead generation” tactics -Create more content -Look for more headcount

View Carlos’ presentation slides here.

See what others have to say about the conference in their recaps here and here.