Last month I had the pleasure of reconnecting with the SIIA community during its Digital Marketing Bootcamp and picked up a few pieces of information worth passing along. During my panel, “Using Social Media to Raise Awareness and Drive Change,” I had the opportunity to hear firsthand tips and tactics from one of my favorite performance marketers, Jonathan Dane of KlientBoost.

Jonathan reminded us about the importance of usability in getting to a conversion event – you must minimize the number of clicks and remove friction wherever possible. Testing multiple landing pages is critical for improving performance and knowing with precision the audience you want to reach allows you to spend your available budget with laser focus.

We also discussed the increasing role of video in social media. With 8B videos day posted on Facebook, and 10B on Snapchat, “snackable” video content (10 seconds or less) still works.  And speaking of Facebook, with 1.89B accounts globally, it was mentioned repeatedly how it continues to be an under-utilized platform for B2B marketers.

Using Facebook is also a great way to create “ancillary audiences,” or to find people you didn’t think were your audience. Dane suggested “taking the temperature of your audience” based on how much time they spend with a boosted post. From there you can include/exclude people from audiences for future paid targeting efforts based on an increasing likelihood of their interest.

On Twitter, the most interesting (albeit inauthentic) tactic mentioned was to create multiple twitter accounts to follow, share and stimulate excitement for a campaign.

Throughout the day, I picked up a few other tidbits worth sharing:

 ON MARKETING AUTOMATION

• Sales and marketing are collapsing

• A qualified sales lead is when a salesperson is willing to open an opportunity

• Prospects won’t engage until they’re ready. Marketing’s responsibility is to make sure you are in the consideration set

• Marketing automation success is based more on design than what tool is selected

• If you don’t know what you’re spending, you’re not optimizing

ON CONTENT MARKETING

• Talk about what your audience wants to talk about, not what you want to talk about

• Define success metric up front – there is only one bottom line

• Make your head of sales sign off on the definition of a qualified lead

• An editor can make a piece of content more marketable

• Be a curator of content - share the work of others and they will share back

 

Above all, quality, crafted content is what truly commands attention and gets results. As one panelist put it, “without content, there is no marketing.”

If you are interested in the SIIA’s plans to revive the Technology Council of Southern California, more information about membership can be found at http://www.siia.net/tcosc.