Today I attended the Women in Technology seminar, "The Intersection of Marketing and Technology" held at Viget Labs. Very excited to see it was a packed house!

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Panelists for this event included:

    Matt Goddard: The web is a buying engine, not a selling engine. You don’t own your customers, your customers own you. With social media, customers are controlling the process. Don’t fight it, understand the process – build your infrastructure, strategy, and technology around that. how do they want to purchase – not how do you want to sell.

Marketing is a digital ecosystem. Ask yourself the question – does your tactic make it easier for someone to buy a product?

Digital ecosystems are made up of three pieces. The user experience, tech/systems, social networks and social media. All contribute to an approach for ROI. Take a new view of your CMS and CRM. In the future, in a B2B environment with a sales cycle – you need to connect the dots between visual marketing and salesforce automation and CRM.

Digital marketing incorporates SEO, SEM, E-mail, social, and display (advertisements etc.). You must drive people to your ecosystem. This gives you a way to be engaged, have great technology, and bring people together.

RIA is the changing face of the web. Flex and Silverlight are changing experiences online, and allows you to connect databases.

This is one thing that is changing the engagement side. On the social side – we’re seeing movement beyond the curious passive and active users, we’re now seeing people search out relationships. This translates into customers. When you build a digital ecosystem (social engineer) – make sure you are reaching out to your customers to build these relationships.

Jennifer Krupey: Social media marketing can have an impact on business. The marketing landscape has changed. Audiences are fragmented and hyper-connected. Yesterday was TV, newspapers, radio, phone, etc. Today it’s on the web, e-mail, mobile, RSS, etc. – and now it’s social media. Through networking tools to share, communicate, and collaborate, communications is changing.

90% of consumers regularly or occasionally seek advice on products or services. 34% of internet users post opinions about products and brands.

Bottom line – nearly 50% have made a purchase based on a social recommendation.

The controversial Motrin Moms commercial. One well known mommy blogger caught sight of the ad, and the hours that followed showcased the power of Twitter and blogs. The YouTube video got over 7,000 views over the weekend and was the 3rd result for Motrin on YouTube. The story is being picked up across the blogosphere and then some. The Motrin website actually went down for a brief period, before they posted an apology.

The lesson – discover social media tools. Motrin could have identified this active group ahead of time and tested the ads accordingly. Listen – social media monitoring provides companies 24/7 access to what customers are saying. Engage – look for creative opportunities to share information and connect with your customers when they are online.

Matt Goddard: This is an example of a company trying to sell something online, and losing control. They didn’t make it a two-way conversation, and it came back to them.  Failing to ask how the product would impact the end user cost Motrin in the end.

Brian Reed: The silver lining to Motrin – is that awareness is very high of the company and product. The seven habits of highly effective (marketing) people):

Be proactive (go where they are), begin with the end in mind (model pipe & process), put first things first (no database, no deals), think win/win (what’s in it for me?), seek first to understand (buyer personas), then to be understood, synergize, sharpen the saw.

Buyers are learners. Learn your buyer personas. Increase your website traffic, increase your sales.

  1. Impluse buyer – has to quickly solve the problem
  2. Buyer needs to replace a product
  3. Buyer learns and takes a long time to make a decision, gathers all facts

Links to buyer personas:

 

    Flash demos and free stuff speed up the sales cycle. Buyers that can see results and how to use a product are more likely to buy if they can try. Make it free and useful, as well as something that people can easily pass on to each other.In a down economy, it’s important to show your buyer how your product will save them money.A cost saving tip? Partner on surveys. You get to share all leads and all results, at half the cost. Blogging, commenting, events, partnerships, PRWeb news releases, etc. – all contributing to BoxTone coming up in Google searches for key terms, "BlackBerry Management, BlackBerry Monitoring, BlackBerry Support, etc." Every quarter, your search engine hits should increase, you should move higher and higher up.
    Susan Kearney: Voxant was seeking to syndicate news online – Reuters, AP, etc. We would then find bloggers and publishers to put that content on their site. We started with 1,300 registered with "no campaign" (did not come through Internet ads, viral ads, e-mail blasts, etc. – they were purely word of mouth), and almost 7,000 registered distributors.Breakdown of those registrants: Distributors were categorized by category.  For example, business, entertainment, and life were top categories. Knowing your users was key – news aggregators were a big distributor – they wanted a variety of news on their site. Topical sites were also important, and they anted news based on their specific category topic. 37% were personal blogs.
    Word of mouth programs seemed to be the most effective. We used a variety of tools to get our numbers. We used Google Analytics, Quantcast, and so many more.

      Sample of the Q&A

        Katie: What is a technology that is changing the market?
        Matt: Eloqua allows monitoring of potential customers who are engaged on your website, and then customize their experience. The salesteam is also armed with competitive intelligence as to what customers are looking at. Eloqua can be $1,000 – $15,000 a month, depending on the size of the organization.
        Jen: Everyone rushes to things when they first launch. The bright shiny object syndrome. Be careful as marketers and technologists – make informed decisions.
        Brian: Video is going to continue to grow in importance. But, be very careful how you use it.
        Susan: Marketers are making the transition to a two-way conversation. Communities are a great example.
        Katie: How are B2B and government marketers using social media?
        Susan: Blogging is one. A blog can be terrific for a B2B company.
        Matt: The big challenge with B2B is they don’t understand social network theory and social media. Social network theory is the behavior that people have – asking friends etc. for opinion before purchasing. The bigger the risk, the bigger the question. Social media are tools that unleash this behavior. They make it more scalable, make the message move at increasing speeds.
        Brian: When you do buyer personal, you have to think about where people are reading things. Most buyers were reading on BlackBerry – so we had to change our methods to manage that.
        Katie: What is the one thing people should invest in?
        Susan: Whatever gets results. The top priority is the company. Think about your business goals.
        Brian: Call 50 prospects and customers. Have the dialogue, figure out what they like about you – why they bought from you and why they didn’t. Marketers are the mouthpiece for the buyers.
        Jen: In terms of online and what’s working – bottom line is that buyers are going to hopefully end up at your website. Make sure it’s operating at its optimal level.
        Matt: Utilize free tools at your disposal. Part of the benefit of social media is that so much is open source.

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