Digital Strategy Archive

October has been a wonderfully busy month with Team Delightful appearing at several digital marketing industry events throughout the US.

At the beginning of the month we were at SMX East in New York with the Bing Ads team and Majestic.com. Watch the wrap-up video we helped produce for Bing and see how much of a blast we had there!

A couple of days later, our founder, Mel Carson, was honored to MC the US Search Awards and shared some insights on Personal Branding at Pubcon. Read an article from Bruce Clay’s team on the personal branding & social strategy advice Mel and his fellow speakers shared on the stage.

We also attended =LIFT, the first annual social media conference by Simply Measured. Here’s the top takeaways from us from that event on social analytics and technologies.

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A couple of weeks ago, along with more than 150,000 attendees, we were at Dreamforce in downtown San Francisco to learn from numerous amazing keynote speeches, educational sessions, and networking events.

Salesforce, soon to be the 4^th largest software company in the world in 2016 according to its CEO Marc Benioff, presented a mind-blowing event again with guests such as Satya Nadella, Jessica Alba, Susan Wojcicki, etc.

Surrounded by a ton of new technologies and insights over 3 days at Dreamforce, here are some of our biggest takeaways on digital marketing from the event:

The Marketing Cloud is Becoming More Intelligent & Predictive

According to Marc Benioff, the cloud computing market will be worth 270 billion dollars in 2020, so we looked forward to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud session where CEO, Scott McCorkle, kicked off the their keynote with a bunch of big brands on stage telling compelling stories of how personalization and predictive analytics were driving incredible results in engagement and ROI from their target audiences.

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We recently remodeled our house in Seattle. It was quite a large job which included replacing the roof, furnace, windows, doors, floors, and adding a new kitchen and bathroom.

In all we needed 8 specialist contractors to do the work and we needed it done quickly. While early summer is not the best time to request bids as it’s a busy time in the lives of contractors, I was amazed by some of these businesses lack of communication and marketing skills.

Channeling my frustration into some lessons learned, here are 4 of my takeaways from an experience that EVENTUALLY has helped us renovate a home we love living in.

Establish a Response Protocol

When emailing in requests for bids I’d like to think I was pretty thorough with the ask. I’d detail what we needed doing and within what timeframe, and wait patiently for an answer. Sometimes there would be none, sometimes it would take days and sometimes someone called or emailed within 24 hours.

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In the information age, we are all influenced by the inexhaustible flow of digital media, content, and messages.

All of the time.

The Internet makes it more difficult for brands to manage their online reputation and consumer sentiment because they themselves are not the main source of their own message anymore.

Brands are simply not as authoritative as they used to be:

• Fewer than 10% of shoppers actually visit manufacturer websites when researching a purchase.
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations while just 33% trust ads.
• 43% of people say they turn to blogs when they are looking for inspiration.
• 48% of consumers discovered new brands and products, mostly while browsing content online.

(From Influence Now)

So who are sending out the messages that actually influence your consumers? How can you find them in order to build healthy relationships? Should you start an influencer program or campaign in the first place?

A recent e-book >> Influence Now by Linkdex and Momentology answers all these questions for you.

Mel Carson, Delightful’s Founder, has shared his thoughts in the book on what makes a successful influencer.

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Social marketing is increasingly raising companies’ attention as an integrated marketing channel to the business. According to the CMO survey in 2014, Social media spending of marketing budgets is expected to increase 128% to 21.4% in the next five years.

However, many social marketers are still struggling to demonstrate the value of social marketing. Although tons of new social marketing analytics tools are emerging, measuring ROI is still the number one challenge for marketers, according to the 2015 Social Media Marketing Trends Survey by Simply Measured and TrustRadius.

A webinar with Kevin Shively, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Simply Measured, and Megan Headley, Research Director at TrustRadius, discussed the challenges social markers are facing and provided some insightful tips on what they can do about the challenges.

Here are our top learnings from the webinar on how to make the most out of social marketing and demonstrate its value:

Set Right Goals and Metrics

Why are you using social media? This should be the very first question you ask before setting up the social marketing strategy as it’s crucial for defining the value of any social programs.

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Twitter is a must-have for brands who want to build an engaging community, raise brand awareness, drive web traffic and generate leads. Most marketers are aware of it, but how many of them are utilizing Twitter properly?

A few weeks ago, Mel Carson, Founder of Delightful Communications, was asked by Momentology to provide some thoughts on how brands should effectively use Twitter for marketing.

Their comprehensive Twitter Marketing Guide covers every aspects of Twitter marketing including the characteristics of Twitter, how Twitter Advertising works, successful brand stories, and tips from industry experts, etc.

It is a perfect how-to guide to Twitter Marketing for newbies , but also provides interesting insights that will titillate experienced marketers as well:

• Among all online adults in the United States, 19% use Twitter. Men tend to use Twitter more than women.
• 90% of people consume content; 9% of people occasionally create content; 1% of people are power users and create the majority of content consumed by others on the network.
• More than 78% of Twitter users access the site using a mobile device.
• People who follow businesses online are influenced to take action on company information shared on Twitter more than on any other online channel.

For more insights and tips, see the full guide from Momentology.

And don’t forget to:

Subscribe to The Delightful Times

Follow @Delightful on Twitter

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Join us on LinkedIn

Thanks for reading,

Bianca Hu – Digital Marketing Specialist

It’s been a great month with lots of awesome industry events both here in the US and in Europe.

Delightful Communications has been busy attending MarTech in San Francisco on behalf of client Majestic.com,  The European Search Awards in Berlin, and HeroConf in Portland  with the guys from Bing Ads sharing and learning about latest digital marketing trends.

The 2015 European Search Awards, hosted by our founder Mel Carson, announced their winners last Wednesday at a glittering gala event in the heart of Berlin. You can read more details on Search Engine Journal in a piece by Matt Southern who Mel was particularly thrilled to have met at last!

Mel Hosting The European Search Awards

April also saw us launch a series of blog posts entitled Personal Branding: 10 Steps to Your Perfect Strategy. Please sign up to The Delightful Times so you don’t miss any editions!

Here are the first two steps:

Step 1: Get a New Headshot – Your New Image Starts With an Image

Step 2: How Discoverable is Your Personal Brand

Also don’t miss out Mel’s new articles on Entrepreneur.com:

Report Highlights Digital Trends Entrepreneurs Need to Know About in 2015

5 Ways to Tell If You’re Doing Social Media Right

That’s it for this month, thanks for reading!

Bianca Hu – Delightful’s Digital Marketing Specialist

Earlier this month, we helped the Bing Ads team create a video of the awesome #JanesOfDigital event that took place at SMX West in San Jose.

The evening mini-seminar slash networking opportunity is the second in an on-going series of get-togethers designed to celebrate women in search and digital marketing.

We partnered with our fabulous editor, Andrew Goddard, at Cherry UK to produce a promo which really captures the atmosphere and buzz surrounding this most excellent occasion.

A particular call out to Sarah Wulf who did an exceptional job as anchor and for asking some great questions, which as you can see, garnered some great answers from the evening’s esteemed panel!

So here is the video. Hope you enjoy…

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Regards,

Mel

2014 has pretty much been “the year of content marketing” for many. According to a study from Marketing Profs, organizations have spent 28% of their marketing budget on average doing content marketing this year.

During his session “Focus B2B: Leveraging Kick Ass Content to Drive Profits” at ClickZ Live Chicago, Rob Begg, VP of Enterprise Strategy at Hootsuite, reminded marketers that when it comes to content marketing, the competition is not only against other marketers in your niche, but everything that draws your audience’s attention.

How can you come up with a plan that can cut through all the noises and enable your content to stand out?

Adhere to the following three fundamental pillars Rob suggested to help you out:

Audience: Know who they are and engage with them

Thinking about who you are talking with is crucial before you start talking. Taking one step further on this, Rob recommended brands to think more specifically when segmenting their target audience. Firstly, make sure what actions you want the audience to take. The communication strategies should be different when you are talking to a customer or an industry influencer. Before moving on to the next step, make a decision about if you want to generate leads, encourage social shares, build thought leadership, or something else.

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One of the other speakers at the Digital East event I gave a talk at a few weeks ago was Andy Beal, CEO and Founder of online reputation tracking tool, Trackur.com.

I’ve known Andy since his SEO days and when he founded Marketing Pilgrim, so in this interview we talk about how he got into the online reputation management space, how he thinks brands and CEOs should approach online reputation and personal branding, and where he believes PR teams should start when letting the executives in their company start using social media to promote themselves and the company brand.

He also give us some advice on what to do with Google Plus, now authorship has been dropped.

Thanks to Andy and the crew from Digital East for lettings us film at the event!

Enjoy!

We’ll be having many more Delightful Conversations like this, so subscribe to our Delightful Communications YouTube Channel and you won’t miss a single one!

Cheers,

Mel