Here I share some of my learnings and key take-aways from the SES Chicago conference (#SESchi). I tried to capture the most interesting tidbits for the sessions I attended. SEO, authorship, SEM / Paid search, B2B social media were some of my key interests for this conference.

Marketing and The Age of Participation [keynote]

Diana Middleton, Global Chief Executive Officer, Performics

• Consumer is participant
  • Brands should inspire participation
  • Dialogues for brands feel scary
  • Marketing through participation– mobile, real time actions are important
  • The participation way– discover (human desire for knowledge) – empower – connect with others = increased participation
  • Ads for content– this is a fair trade
  • “Nurturist” Marketer– your work starts when the campaign launches
    • Is your company nurturist friendly? What percent is test and learn? Do managers champion innovation?
    • If you see something that works, scale it
    • 30% of budget is testing and learning for progressive companies right now
    • Embrace failures in the pursuit of results
    • Innovate, don’t perfect– big mentality shift from past marketing tactics
    • We (marketers) are no longer the great persuaders
    • Persuasion marketing in its purest form is dead
    • Substitute word participant for consumer (to change the thinking)

Next Generation Paid Search: Reaching the Consumer in an Omni-Channel World

Mark Canabou, Vice President, Global Search Business, Yahoo!

• Seen huge increase in mobile traffic
• Search is cool again – lots of innovation based on where the users are going
• Future of search is mobile – will be as big as PC display
• Shopping activity is fragmenting and are more complicated
• Super Bowl was only 20% content – ads, halftime show, and other  content made up the rest
• Yahoo saw mobile and PC traffic spike during the superbowl
• You must have integrated marketing
• Review sites matter when users research purchasing decisions
• Search still most important to complete a shopping transaction
• Rise of native ads is important – integrated Facebook ads
• Integrated ads perform better – 38% vs 28% for regular display ads (like on yahoo.com)
• In-feed ads noticed as much as content
• Will be difficult to measure ROI
• Actions
  • Good ad copy matters – be fun, bold, up-to-date, entertaining, interactive
  • Ad extensions greatly increase engagement “super huge gains”
  • Site link extensions, call extensions, location extensions
  • Combine extensions to gain performance
  • Marriage of old and new tactics

Bill Mungoven, Director of Product Strategy, Advertising Solutions, Adobe

• What drives search?
• New trends
  • Infinite scroll ads (yahoo.com)
  • Convergence of paid owned, earned
  • The new super channel
  • Unified data repository – get all your data from online and offline
  • Make Analytics work for you
  • Capture device with URL parameters
  • Report on mobile vs. non mobile
  • Shopping ads– Product Listing Ads (PLAs)
    • PLAs Spike during holidays
    • PLAs perform well
    • Participate in PLAs
    • Bid at most granular level for best performance
    • Include good promotional text / ad copy
    • Email still works great as a channel
    • Last click attribution will go away – we will get smarter

SEO in the Boardroom: Leveraging Relevant Metrics

Alan K’necht, Partner, Digital Always Media, Inc.

• Know your audience
• Consider their needs- understand their motivations, bonuses etc.
• Don’t throw out technical acronyms – “reduce cost per acquisition” increases their bonus
• Keep talks simple
• Use a treasure map – major milestones on the map, where we are, what is the goal – ROI?
• Talk to financial department to get real ROI numbers for company investments to make comparisons. Also, the HR department can get cost per employee.
• Be concise. Set realistic expectations. Why should they care?
• C-suite might be skeptical. You might need data to back up your claims / presentation.

Ryan Jones, SEO Manager, SapientNitro

• Some metrics are best left to yourself
• C-suite does not care about technical metrics
• Simplify reporting
• Boss: Am I spending my money effectively?
• Find out what your boss’s bonus metric is
• Your job is to get to your boss promoted. Secretly they are thinking, “will this come back to bite me in the ass?”
• Reporting: what’s the number? Analytics: what should I do?
• Use storytelling when talking to c-suite
• Read the room- expand on what’s catching their attention

Conversion Optimization Tricks That’ll Leave You Singing, “Danke Schoen!”

Angie Schottmuller, Director of Interactive Strategic Planning & Optimization, Three Deep Marketing

• For every $92 spent on acquiring only $1 spent on conversions
• How compelling are your meta descriptions?
• Optimize your organic snippets like a paid ad.
• Rich snippets boost CTR 20-30%
• Use ratings and reviews | breadcrumbs rich snippets
• Explainer videos (show how something works) boost conversion 20%
• Caption images
• Gather testimonials and proof
• Google rich snippets can pull out of context information, perhaps to your benefit
• One page, one purpose for user queries
• Optimize font sizes for age – point size should be equal to half your target’s age
• Plan a clear path for goal completion
• Prove you are the best solution for a problem

Search Marketing Power Tools Set: SEO & PPC

Bob Tripathi, Founder, Instant E-Training

SEO Tools:

• DomainTools
• builtwith.com
• whoicompete.com
• SEOquake
• quantcast.com
• alexa.com
• imnijas.com
• SEOmofo
• Google Structured Data Testing Tool
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• tools.pingdom.com
• Keyword tools
  • soovle.com
  • AdvancedWebRanking
  • Piktochart – create infographics

Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

SEM Tools:

• AdWords and Bing (Ads Intelligence) have great tools that improve over time
• AdGooroo – competitive tool
• Acquisio – bid and budget management algorithms
• Ad Guardian – saves money when site goes down
• AdAlysis – notifies you of statistical significance changes in AdWords

Creating Campaigns That Count: The Impact of Converged Media [keynote]

Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit | Daina Middleton, Global Chief Executive Officer, Performics | Adam Singer, Analytics Advocate, Google

• K- consumers influence, not clients
• D- illusion of control
• A- technology is not an excuse for bad creative
• A- brand is becoming performance
• D- today’s marketing environment is like gardening – must nurture
• A- example – convert first, then market – get your processes right then generate demand
• A- diversify sources of traffic – be safe
• A- it’s easy to measure when you know your users – Google Universal Analytics – move from client side tracking to server side
• A- stitch sessions together from mobile and desktop
• A- I think social is better for B2B than B2C because of the nurturing process
• D- you can’t go into marketing now without math skills
• A- you need data analysis skills to be in marketing
• A- ads are useful – the future of ads? They are invisible to the user.

Big Data Uncovered: How to Gather, Analyze, and React to New Customer Behavior

Thad Kahlow, CEO, BusinessOnline | Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit

Thad:

• Enterprise value paradigm
• Greatest company asset – customer relationship
• Comparison between GM and Facebook – fortunes rise and fall in short times
• Every marketing dollar must be shown to offer value – this is the future
• Because barriers to entry are low, customer relationships are paramount
• Data framework
  • Close sales and marketing loop
  • Attribute success
  • Drive business outcomes
  • If you understand the buyers journey you can see 15-20% lift in sales – Forrester
  • Attribution model type – single touch / rules-based
  • Single touch assigns too much weight
  • Rules based is arbitrary
  • Setup click to chat only for high lead score / interested prospects. On average, $7 a chat
  • Company-level attribution
  • Use Demandbase to get company info via IP address
  • Predictive modeling – use to predict inventories, etc.

Kevin:

• Many faces of big data
• Big data helps to move the odds in your favor
• Increase conversions / larger purchase / etc.
• Google search network with display select
• Google hummingbird is an example of Google using big data
• Use big data to create inbound links
• My current mantra is audience
• Bid more based on market – higher basket amount, I can bid more. Knowing your audience gives you the edge
• Google using personalized search – should you change your site based on this? Device, location, etc.
• Google using structured data for paid ads: sometimes more relevant than organic results
• Facebook graph – people volunteer data you can leverage

Rethink B2B Marketing / How to Turn B2B Social into a Lead Gen Machine

Michelle Killebrew, Program Director, Strategy & Solutions, Social Business, IBM | John Lee, Manager, Brand & Social Marketing, Webtrends

Michelle:

• Personas help
• Focus your content – meet their needs
• Show not tell – video webinars, interactivity, sharing
• Use pre-populated tweets to share – make it easy for your users
• Hash tags for campaign names

John:

• Only 5% of brands are happy with their social
• 6,000 tweets / second. Your content can get buried
• Too much self-promotion – users will tune you out
• It’s not about you
• Plan all your steps after the first click
• Twitter can work for lead gen
• Twitter Lead Gen Cards
  • Tweets with photos get 3-4x clicks
  • Tweets with CTAs get 13% more clicks
  • Auto lead capture – no leaving Twitter
  • Slight problem – users don’t use corporate email address with twitter
  • Raw leads increased 996%
  • CPL decreased 500%
  • 3x ROI vs. Facebook and LinkedIn with same content
  • Put tips in the content – not “here is a new white paper”
  • Encourage immediacy
  • Be clear about how users will get their information / asset
  • 200% higher open rates on twitter lead gen cards emails to leads
  • 4x improvement in CTRs

Social Media and the C-Suite: Building a Compelling Business Case

Michelle Stinson-Ross, Director of Social Marketing, Digital Always Media | Jasmine Sandler, CEO, Agent-cy

Michelle:

• Get your CEO involved in the brand voice
• What can we do to make their life easier
• Audience of one -CEO
• Is your CEO concerned about maintaining the company’s reputation?
• Demonstrate how social media can cut costs with customer service

Jasmine:

• Why lack of c-suite buy-in?
  • No clear ROI
  • Identify the social media team
  • Social can build brand lift
  • Measure sales from social
  • When you have leads, you can sell social media to your CEO
  • Analyze what your competitors are doing
  • $100-200k /year – social media is a real investment
  • 60% of online corporate buying decisions are influenced by the CEO brand. CEO must be involved – branding themselves helps the company

Reaching More Customers, Higher in the Search Funnel

Jordan Koene, Head of SEO & Content Development, eBay

• Users consider 3-5 brands during the purchase process
• How do you find users in the research phase?
• Customers love reviews. Amazon has reviews- eBay needed to compete with them and their high rank
• What did eBay do?
  • Create long-form content
  • eBay Guides – new creation to build content
    • Asking users to write 250 words. Big investment ask from people.
    • eBay incentivizes users to write guides
    • Internal links do make a difference for traffic
    • Reducing bounce rate will cause a rise in search ranking pages
    • Use SearchMetrics tool to gauge performance
    • Iterate on your experience – constantly change
    • Think mobile, get links

Joining the Dots: Maximizing Marketing Returns in a Socially Connected World [KeyNote]

Nick Burcher, Head of Social Media, EMEA, MediaCom

• The world is getting less bored
• Google searches triggered from TV watching
• Two types of audiences- passive and active
• Original communication model needs updating sender -> receiver
• Feedback loop is expanding
• APIs enabling personalization
• Use social listening to listen to consumers
• Patterns in the social data can help planning – “shopping” spikes on Sunday
• Listening goals:  what – where – which – who – when- worth
• Paid owned and earned coming together – paid boosts owned and earned
• Super Bowl TV ad can supercharge owned and earned
• Use paid when the time is right – but have the pump primed
• Use hashtags and link call to action
• Content acts as social fuel
• Why would they care and why would they share it?
  • Bring value to others
  • Define ourselves to others
  • Grow and nourish relationships
  • Self-fulfillment
  • Get the word out about causes or brands
  • See NY Times “psychology of sharing”
  • Tell the story in different ways – use the strengths of the channel
  • Create the content calendar
    • Top-line – lists all significant POE marketing activities
    • Rolling content calendar site underneath- more detailed and more responsive
    • Create a social brand voice – be human / approachable
    • Tap into cultural moments – coke capitalizing on royal baby
    • Product placement in content – Avicii music video / Sony / Ralph Lauren
    • The challenge is getting noticed
    • Little chains pass content now – not one huge network anymore
    • Native advertising – non-interruptive – relevant – visually integrated
      • Enables quick response
      • Social and data is now in everything – always on
      • See the big picture
      • The more connected your business, the better

Author Rank: Getting the Credit You Deserve

Eric Enge, CEO, Stone Temple Consulting | Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

Eric:

• You can use email address as validation for author linking with Google+ in addition to standard methods
• Use structured data testing tool
• Only use authorship markup for articles
• Can increase CTR 38% – take with grain of salt
• Google in-depth articles section will move around in the SERP
• In-depth articles seems to be driven by PublisherRank
• Build your authority with humans on the web
• The company you keep matters – authority of the publisher matters to you and your article
• Authoritative people sharing your content gives it juice

Shari:

• No authorship unless you’re not connecting to Google+ – some authors don’t care to be on Google+
• Keywords are most important and snippet – not perceived link attractiveness
• Keep a clear and consistent labeling system
• Easy access
• Validation – authoritative people connected to the content
• Title, URL, and headings should support each other
• Spell out your abbreviations
• Accessibility: shortest URL, no funky characters
• Don’t restrict access to content
• Link to related content – like academic articles
• You add more links to an article when you have more content
• Huffington post archives a good model for archiving content – pagination, snippets
• Link development still best vs. social signals
• Authorship can negatively affect rankings – it’s markup and at this time does not factor into the Google search algorithm
• Be the expert – people can sniff out fakers

Mobile Targeting: Using the Right Aggregate Data to Reach Your Target Audience

Lauren Moores, VP of Analytics, Dstillery | Ambrish Verma, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Lauren:

• Mobile is like display for search
• 59% of smartphone users made at least 1 purchase
• Location can create context
• Creative – audience segmentation
• Segmentation
  • People who travel to airports
  • Time of day, etc.
  • Use location for intent
  • Local search
  • Change content and messaging based on location
  • Find a segmentation and scale it – use cross-channel
  • Visualization – create heat maps to better understand the data

Verma:

• Mobile is driving discovery and decisions
• 84% of mobile users use phone in store to make decisions
• Categories drive mobile searches – some more, some less
• Mobile users looking to save time money and hassle– but the users offer more
• Device targeting – segment devices – they are different
• Click-to-call drives higher engagement
• Site link extensions provide ease of task completion
  • Shorten conversion funnel

Using Social PPC Content Distribution to Dominate

Marty Weintraub, Founder & Evangelist, aimClear

• Targeting is not the problem anymore
• Psychographic targeting / human life cycles for deeper funnel entry
• Want: insulation from harsh SEO updates
• Content is many things – Facebook post / Twitter post / Etc. – you can link build for these because they have public URLs for the content
• Content and distribution are two different things
• Conversion, SEO, friendship – what we want from content
• Paid organic amplification
  • Amplify what works organically
• Facebook ads can be very effective when highly targeted with good content
• Psychographic – interests, cultural, tech, heart & soul
• Drive traffic to Google+ page to get SEO benefit from friends of your target