The Digital Marketing Upper Hand

Had the pleasure of attending a great speaker series put on by Denver’s Red Door Interactive on Tuesday. The topic was Local Marketing for Larger Brands and was the third panel event I attended from RDI. (See write-up on first and second panels)

The panel consisted of an excellent mix of  strategists, large brand marketers, and local marketing experts:

• Jami Zakem, Director of Client Services, Yelp (blogger note: I love this site)
• Deborah Jourdan, Director of Consumer Marketing, Cricket Communications
• Martin May, Co-founder, Brightkite
• Tony Felice, Senior Strategist, RDI

Here are my notes from the day – very educational:

• When deciding which marketing channels to be in, it’s essential to go where your consumers are. Try hard to avoid the ‘bright shiny object’ syndrome of pursuing the latest channel.
• Field of Dreams is a fine movie, but its lesson of “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work for social media. Again, make sure you are where your consumers already are as best as possible
• Difference between Social Media and Social Networking
  • SM: It’s what advertisers engage in
  • SN: It’s what users engage in – building networks and sharing information across them
• Good audience question – why should we focus on letting consumers comment about us on social media sites when we want them to contact us directly?
  • Yelp: Review sites are here to stay. Yelp receives 33 million monthly visitors – it’s where consumers are sharing information. And, 83% of reviews posted to Yelp are positive.
• Another good question – how can a company possibly manage all of the social conversations?
  • Panel agreed that you can use popular tools such as cotweet and hootsuite to manage posting and listening. Still, Martin May (Brightkite) noted, today’s consumer expects a 24/7 response from companies, and we can’t possibly work 24/7
  • Other helpful social media listening tools (from expensive to free): TNS Cymfony, Neilsen BuzzMetrics, Radian 6, Social Mention, peoplebrowsr, filtrbox
  • Deborah (Cricket) mentioned how her company developed a ’10 Commandments of Social Media’ which governs Cricket’s social media participation. Specifically, it encourages ALL employees to get involved and support the dedicated social media team.
• Why go local? One panel member nailed it when they said that it can be used to publicly demonstrate a company’s commitment to customer service
• How does a company track social media conversions?
  • Answers: Links to brand site, coupons (excellent!), and a tracked phone line.
• Best practices of local SEO – make sure your company has other ‘citations’ on the web. Citations are address listings for your company that are posted on other sites. Google sees this as more evidence that you deserve to show up when a user searches on a nearby location. Examples would be to have a Google Places, CitySearch, and Yelp listing.
  • The great thing about talking to people performing local searches is that they are further down the purchase funnel (i.e. someone searching “dentist wash park Denver CO”)
  • Companies should consider buying keywords down to the neighborhood level
• It’s important to send people on mobile devices to your mobile site. Smart phone growth will continue to grow at incredible rates. Consumers will have a mini-computer in their hands and will be on the move, near a business, and companies need to give them something to do.

Filed under: Educational Presentations Tagged: | local marketing, mobile, social media