Online Marketing Summit
OMS 2009 #oms09
San Diego

Wrapped up a full day of the online marketing certification program (Online Marketing Institute) yesterday -- tons of notes to go through there, all major domains of online marketing covered in about nine hours.

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92% of consumers go online 1st to research a purchase but less than 10% of marketing budgets are online (lots of opportunity!)

Key question that marketers need to answer: in today's economy, are looking to just survive or capitalize?
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Biggest trends off the top of my head:

1. FaceBook is tough for marketers to get any value from -- fan pages, yes. But in general, FB users are there to engage with their circle of friends and see pictures of dogs and kids. They are not there to engage with your brand in a meaningful way. They may want to go to your Fan page/fan your brand, and see occasional updates, but they don't want to have marketing material pushed to them.

2. On FaceBook, 'fanning' you may be a move to show off their love for your brand to your friends, they may add some graphical flair to their online cork board, but that's the sum total of most user's wishes on FB.

2. Instead of FaceBook, online marketers in specific niches should consider setting up networks of their own. Professional white-labeled networks that cater to specific user groups. That's where they'll engage with you. They'll login, know they're with their peers, open up, and share. Not on open networks.

3. Counting conversions of incoming traffic/users into filling out forms, getting trials, signing up for newsletters, is falling away as a key metric of success. More important is pulling in users and traffic using Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to buy keywords, create landing pages of specific interest to those keyword responders, then funnel them into your lifecycle messaging and qualify those leads and help sales turn those hits/searches into sales.

4. With the above, it makes it more important than ever to have the systems in place to track clicks and interest through your emails, onto your website, and through the process to a sale. Tying stats from email campaigns to website stats and through to your internal sales system (Salesforce.com, etc.) through to a hard Return on Interest investment in all aspects of your marketing.

5. With 32 distinct marketing channels out there -- from print all the way down to Twitter -- it's key to be educated, be positive, and wrap all of our messaging together across all of the channels that make sense. Running distinct URLs that direct customers to special landing pages with specific content, with a clear call to action and signups for future email pings, is key, with your Twitter information, etc. All ties together.

6. Human behavior is changing online. 120 million blogs, 2 million emails per second, Twitter is the new IM tieing the most active users together (key for customer support to tap into real time comments and questions about your company) -- it's more important than ever to be engaged online in an active way, checking channels 2-3 times a day for big wins to stay in touch.

7. Branding: Branding activities present your corp. image to the world. Marketing efforts DEFEND your brand.

7a. Branding isn't push anymore, it's pull. Branding = a nurtured experience. You must be engaged in real-time communication online and talking to your customers.

7b. It's not a target audience, it's communities, engaging them where they live. How do they think, what are they doing online? Engage them there. No longer one to many, it's one to one. How do they prefer to be messaged to?

8. Budget/funding focus: A/B testing is key for messaging and landing pages. Pull in user data, tweak your communications/personalize the communications based on their choices, wring out the max clicks/traffic and conversions, then nurture the relationship via email and real-time Twitter and elsewhere. SEM activities are key over smaller email campaigns.

9. No longer campaign-oriented, it's a nurtured user experience over time.