3. The B2B Strategist: Marketing Interactions
Ardath Albee might write for a B2B audience at Marketing Interactions, but even B2C marketers will benefit from her common sense insights. You might not even realize your marketing strategy has gone awry until she reminds you to focus on correct priorities and goals.

4. The Web Analytics Maven: Occam’s Razor
Find out just how much your analytics can—and should—tell you with guidance from Avinash Kaushik’s aptly named Occam’s Razor. His real-world analogies and sense of humor make the sometimes-mysterious topic accessible to all but the most tech-challenged layperson.

5. The Mentalist: Neuromarketing
Marketing is an art—but it’s also a science. And Roger Dooley’s Neuroscience blog takes a close look at the scientific reasons people do what they do. In a recent post, for instance, he profiled a study that demonstrates just how far an apology will go toward appeasing an offended customer.

Don’t assume you know the correct keywords to optimize your site. You want customers, not visitors, to your site, so discover how your target market searches for your products/services. One way to do this is to ask front-line employees what words and phrases are used most frequently by your customers.
Don’t depend on a single keyword source. Analyzing the variation in results from services like Wordtracker and Trellian can give you a better sense of which keywords to use.
Don’t stuff your site with keywords. Create keyword themes for specific pages so that you bring targeted traffic from search engines. If a visitor winds up on a seemingly random page because you’ve littered your site with the same keywords, they’re not likely to keep clicking around looking for the right place.
If you’d like to see the slideshow presented by Ken Jurina, president of Epiar, the link is here.

43 percent — sender name or email address
38 percent — email content/body
35 percent — subject line
20 percent — I do not recall
13 percent — none of the above
The bottom line: Marketers think of spam as a textbook definition; customers, meanwhile, think of spam as anything they don’t want, for whatever reason.
The solutions-oriented discussion included some interesting ideas:
Include an opt-out link at the top of a page. If an annoyed customer wants to stop receiving your messages, they’re more prone to hit the spam button at the top of the page than to scroll down to the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page.
When you have something good to say, send it. If not, don’t. Focus on relevancy, not schedule.
Keep your list tight and performing, not bloated and underperforming. Size doesn’t if many of those recipients never open an email or click through.

Have a mantra. Tell your story in a few brief words–Bhargava’s is that “personality matters.” How do you describe yourself during a 30-second introduction?
Meet your rockstars. Sometimes it’s tough–they might disappear right after they finish speaking–but if they’re the reason you came to an event, make an effort by strategizing ahead of time.
Take better notes. Even if you’re not doing a running commentary on Twitter, thinking in microblogging terms can help you zero in on what really matters.
Follow the backchannel. There’s a lot of benefit in seeing how others interpreted the event. It adds some context, and highlights things you might have missed.
Be approachable. If you create a barrier around yourself–say, by staring at your Blackberry and appearing disinterested–you won’t have get much out of an event’s networking opportunities. Looking cool and standing in the corner gets you nowhere.
Follow up. That stack of business cards gives you the chance to build a relationship with the people you’ve met.

Though designed as an icebreaker, it turned out our 250 participants didn’t really need one. Several minutes later, the Grand Ballroom was still humming with animated discussion. Everyone was talking to everyone. If I remember correctly, Roy started singing in an attempt to get everyone’s attention back on the podium.

MarketingProfs CEO Allen Weiss
I’m back in Newport Beach, thinking about the last few days, and this scene seems to me the perfect way to explain what happened in Chicago: Marketers engaging each other in a productive atmosphere of ideas of enthusiasm.
It’s hard to convey the energy that bounced around the Renaissance Hotel on Monday and Tuesday–let’s just say that for those of us who were there, it was palpable.
And if you missed this one, you should definitely try to make the next. Because, as word gets out, I have a feeling it’s going to be even better.

To gauge the branding situation, he started asking the general public, “What is Kronos?” The answers he received were wide-ranging–and often woefully inaccurate. Some examples:
* It’s a clock company
* I don’t know–I never heard of them
* It’s a Greek bakery in the Bronx with the best baklava
Things weren’t much better with long-established customers, who often didn’t know the breadth of services Kronos offered. In short, concluded Itkin, the lack of identity was having a direct bearing on the company’s bottom line.
To support the funding request for a branding program, he did a little research that went a little like this:
1) What’s the first name that comes to mind when you want an inkjet printer?
2) What about a network router?
3) Or a laptop computer?
The nearly universal response:
1) Hewlett-Packard
2) Cisco
3) Dell
And guess what? For inkjet printers, HP was number one in revenue, sales productivity and margin. Ditto for Cisco and Dell in their respective categories.
“Brand matters,” said Itkin. “It has an impact on how much you sell, and how much you spend to make each dollar.”
And when he made a presentation demonstrating that a branding initiative would cost only 10 percent of the net sales gain, Kronos’ CFO helped Itkin sell the initiative.

* Siemens is already well established with its core American market: The big hospital. As Broerman puts it, “You don’t have a new hospital popping up on every corner.
* And though one of Germany’s best known brands, with a presence in 130 countries and worldwide sales of €87 billion, the company has relatively low name recognition in the United States.
Further challenges for new lead generation:
* How to locate an estimated 14,000 small-scale customers.
* How to reach them when smaller deals don’t justify significant expenditure.
Siemens’ solution? “What sells our equipment,” said Broerman, “is the quality of the images. We need a great way to deliver them.” So they rely heavily on a digital marketing mix of online brochures with Flash-animated graphics, e-mail campaigns, podcasts and search optimization.
Then Siemens streamlines the qualification process by routing all inquiries through a single 800 number and a single e-mail inbox–between 6 and 8 percent typically qualify, and are forwarded to sales.

It’s like asking someone to go to Vegas for the weekend on a first date. The better approach, he argues, is to ease into the relationship with the business equivalent of meeting for coffee: Maybe start with a white paper, then an invitation to a webinar. Once you establish credibility with a prospective customer, she’s more likely to attend an event–and make a purchase.
McIntosh’s Top Ten list of what you should do with an event includes:
* Think hard about who should attend
* Develop compelling promotional copy
* Double check for scheduling conflicts
And on the Don’t list:
* Don’t take up too much of your attendees’ time
* Don’t forget to leverage co-sponsors
* Don’t schedule your events on Monday morning or Friday afternoon
McIntosh also offers a pragmatic warning: That great lead might actually be a prospect who has already made up his mind to go with another company, but has to go through the motions of checking out the competition.

The alliterative process includes three steps:
* Extract. Start by unearthing your unique promise of value–how is what you offer different from those with similar interests and experience? When we connect our passion with what we do, says Arruda, we’re unstoppable.
* Express. Build a personal media plan to heighten your visibility with those who can make you successful. Be clear about who you are, and who you’re not.
* Exude. Convey a consistent message in every aspect of your life, from your appearance to the design of your office to the briefcase you carry. Everything sends a little message about your brand.
I can’t argue with Arruda’s premise that personal branding–done well–has the potential for a great payoff. I absolutely agree with him. But I wonder about the effort it takes to stay on message 24/7. Despite the fact that it’s about being authentic and true to yourself, the execution sounds so deliberate, almost artificial.
What do you think?

* Keep the design as clean as possible.
* Make it simple for a visitor to take action.
* When testing, don’t change the design too dramatically. Instead, make gradual adjustments.
But this tidbit really caught my interest: If you’re going to make lots of tweaks to a landing page in search of elusive conversion rates, you need to have lots of traffic to that page. Otherwise, the data will be fairly meaningless–you’ll be basing future tweaks on the reaction from too few visitors.
And this all unfolded in the first five minutes of the session.

What are the odds she’ll get it right?
In a keynote speech at lunch today, Chip Heath–who co-authored Made to Stick with his brother Dan Heath–says someone took the time to conduct a study on this very topic. And it turns out that tappers give it a 50-50 shot. Sounds reasonable, right? But the tapper–who hears the song in his head–might be surprised to learn that only one in 40 listeners can correctly identify the song.
Heath calls this the curse of knowledge, and says the same principle applies to marketing. When you have a comprehensive understanding of your product or service, it’s all too easy to tap something out and assume your listener gets exactly what you mean. When she doesn’t.

We get detailed information on his personal life–married, with twin sons–and even more about his professional concerns. (He’s frustrated, for instance, with profit-oriented publishers who drain district funds he believes could be better spent elsewhere.) Thanks to a headshot, we even know what Antonio looks like.
But Antonio doesn’t exist. Not actually. Instead, he’s a composite “customer” created by Tony Zambito and Angela Quail of Goal Centric.
They explain that the idea behind creating a “persona” (the term for these composites) is that it’s easier to get a grasp on what your customers really need–and who they really are–if you give them an accessible, concrete personality. And when your entire organization shares a common vision of the typical customer–based on research and your own understanding of your clientele–you stand a better chance of maintaining a consistent strategy and goal.
What could you learn from your own Antonio?