How do you close the loop? SDAMA Art of Marketing Recap

The theme of the SDAMA Art of Marketing Conference on November 3 was Closing the Loop and Creating Opportunity. Here’s the run-down of the tips, trends, and insights into closing the marketing loop I took away from my 10 hour day. 

This blog post is part of "Your Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing" blog series.

'Generational Motivation'

Gordon Fowler, 3 Fold Communications

In our personal lives we know best how to motivate different people, but we rarely do thus with our teams and our customers. Gordon gave a great example: If you want to motivate your 75 year old mother and your 22 year old to join you for dinner, how would you do this? You wouldn't approach them in the same way or with the same pitch, right? You would call your mom on her landline and ask her to join you and her grandson for an early bird dinner on you but you would text your son “Buffet dinner on me.”

So why then when we get to the office we forget to tailor our motivational approach to our team and our customers.

Here’s the [quick and dirty] breakdown of what characterizes and motivates each generation:

Civics (born 1925-1945)

• Referral builders
• Want face-to-face relationship, no hassle experience, authentic communication, you to deliver on your promise
• Motivate with storytelling, history and credibility, include title of position, personal stories

 Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964)

• Are characterized by work, self-involvement, personal gratification and community, optimism
• Want individualized service
• Motivate by keeping the focus on them, making them feel they are the center of your universe, staying positive

 Gen X

• Characterized by fierce independence, skepticism, techno-literacy
• Want freedom, change, balance, sense of family, fun
• Motivate by being hands off, giving them freedom of choice, letting them get the information themselves

Gen Y (Millennials) 

• Characterized by optimism, fun, morality, confidence, technofusion, skepticism, DYI
• Want collaboration, civic engagement
• Motivated by guiding and leading, but not telling, affirming their confidence, FYI’s

To learn more about marketing to millennials, check out our article on the subject.

 'Creating Inspirational Brands'

Aaron Carpenter, ACB Consulting

 Here are the steps to take to determine your brand DNA and how your brand will inspire (in this order):

1. Defining your purpose
2. Outline your values
3. Determine your points of parity
4. Decide the reasons to believe in your brand
5. Find your points of differentiation (both emotionally and rationally)
6. Determine your brand personality
7. Decide what your brand’s promise is to your customers

Rig the Game: How To Design Flexible Campaigns That Learn And Evolve

Justin Gabbert, Red Door Interaction

The key steps often missing from your marketing campaign plan are:

1. Collectively defining KBO’s, KPI’s and learning objectives (i.e., what can we learn even if the KBO’s and KPI’s aren't met)
2. A campaign evolution strategy – how will we gain insights as our campaign is running?
3. Actively evolving campaign – how will we turn insights in action?

The Future Belongs to Optimizers

Chris Goward, Wider Funnel

The principles of conversion optimization work across industries, from B2B to B2C, humans are humans after all! But, you should be skeptical of so-called “best practices” because most have never been tested or tested in a completely different context.

Chris presented the LIFT model to help you get into the mind of what your users are experiencing when they are viewing your landing page. The model presents 6 factors that either drive conversion, or inhibit it.

You should ask these questions when evaluating a landing page:

1. Value proposition– Is the full set of perceived benefits and costs to taking action clearly presented?
2. Distraction: are there items that could divert the user form the desired goal?
3. Anxiety: What potential misgivings could your visitor have about taking the action, do you address these or limit these?
4. Relevance: Does the page relate to what the visitor though they were going to see?
5. Clarity: Does the page clearly articulate the value proposition and call to action?
6. Urgency: Is there an indication on the page that the action needs to be taken now?

To increase conversion your page should reduce distraction and anxiety, and increase clarity, relevance and urgency.

Engaging New Customers with Video

Groovy Like a Movie

The must do’s for video in 2016 (& 2017):

1. Optimize for mobile! Did you know Facebook has turned vertical video into it’s new standard?
2. Use CTAs in your videos! A CTA inside a video converts 380% more than one in the side bar next to it.
3. Personalize your videos to the user – you can place people’s names, pictures, or anything other information you have about them right in the video. This takes some pricier tools to accomplish but if you can afford it, by all means!
4. Make your logo bigger! This will make clients happy and designers crazy, but most people are viewing videos on mobile so that tiny logo in the corner just wont cut it anymore.
5. Optimize for silence. Can you video engage someone viewing it on their phone without sound? Facebook even has a specific metric that shows you how many people are viewing your videos in silence.
6. Tailor your video to the medium (each platform is unique and it's always changing – so here’s the most recent guide)
7. Don't forget about your KPI’s, not just view count but also play-through rate, autoplay count (Facebook), social engagement, and conversion rate.

Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing Tips from the Pros

Nicole Pereira, Campaign Creators

Panelists: Matt Parisi, Pilar Bower, Tony Rindsberg

This panels was chalk full of knowledge and tips on the tools and tactics to use, and the pitfalls to avoid with your marketing automation and lead nurturing programs. You can watch the full session here.

Evolve Your A/B Testing Skills

Cara Harshman, formerly of Optimizely

Ideas are useless when it comes to A/B Testing unless they are transformed into hypotheses. To develop a hypothesis to test start by looking at your analytics (funnel report, heat map, from error submission report, exit page and bounce report, and high traffic/low conversion landing pages) and then check in with the voice of your customer (email survey, page walk-through, pop up questionnaire). Use the information gathered to craft a testable hypothesis:

If we do this then this will happen because of this reason.

Cara also had great ideas for garnering buy in from your organization. You can place bets on A/B tests or host an A/B test “hack-a-thon” where people from other departments come up with hypotheses to test. Optimizely has a great free toolkit for A/B testing. I also recommend checking out our vlog series on Statistics for Digital Marketing.

A strong marketing campaign starts with a killer lead generation strategy. To get some insight on your own, check out our Introduction to Lead Generation. This free guide will help you with all of the basics of lead gen; just click to download here.

Did you catch a session we didn't? Have any additional insights from the conference? Let us know below.