Along with serving as the Founder and Evangelist of aimClear, Marty Weintraub is well known in our industry as an engaging personality and prolific speaker on all things marketing and paid campaigns. Marty is speaking at our SEJ Summit Marketing Conference in Chicago conference on April 15th. If you would like to attend, we still have a few free tickets available!
The SEJ Summit conference ticket cost for all attendees is being covered by our partner, Searchmetrics, which delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting, and reporting for companies who want potential customers to find them faster.
If you aren’t in the Chicago area and won’t be able to attend this next marketing event, don’t lose hope! SEJ Summit will be at four other locations this year: London, NYC, Miami, and Silicon Valley.
We are excited to have Marty at SEJ Summit, so I sat down to ask him a few questions before the event.
1. At SEJ Summit, your presentation is going to discuss social marketing hacks businesses can use to beat their competition using social data. How big of an impact do you think social marketing makes on an overall marketing plan?
The data’s in and speaks volumes! From Berlin to Spain, London to San Francisco, savvy marketers are pioneering award-winning techniques to turn readily available huge-social-data into attributable conversion. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand social targeting data, creative constructs, and conversion. Marketers who truly understand social psychographic targeting data know how to create disciplined, high intent, active, audiences.
Some marketers have become discouraged that social traffic, both paid and organic, often yields too little first touch conversion at too high a cost. This is myopic and short-sighted. The “new” social marketer understands that social’s place in the marketing mix is essentially about purchasing audience data, bringing qualified users into the marketing system and the journey to scalable, attributable conversion.
2. You are covering selling with social psychographic data. What does that mean and how can brands use it to get an edge?
At the end of the day, we’re marketers. We sell things by marrying the true value of a product or service with the wants and needs of potential customers who may or may not be looking to buy at the moment. There is a staggering array of data available for social marketers to leverage in order to reach customers. Psychographics means interests, affinities, proclivities, biases, sexuality, occupation, education, intentions, politics, health, and thousands of other attributes. Targeting is explicit. Also, the ability to add in layers of financial qualification is incredible. There’s no reason to market to users who won’t be able to afford your product or services.
The real question is how marketers can glean intent from social data and get the sales job done. In my Chicago session, I’ll walk attendees through targeting examples and techniques that more often that not can be ridden to sales. I’ll discuss data in the main channels (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter) and about 30 other data services like BlueKai, DataLogix (both Oracle companies), TrueSignal, and others. In other words, we’ll discuss pretty much the entire data universe as pertains to psychographic targeting.
3. As social media becomes more integrated with other aspects of marketing, how do you see the social marketer’s role changing?
There’s a whole new level of responsibility for social media marketers, above traditional brand representation, engagement, eyes and ears on the ground, etc. Because there is so little free social propagation, social marketers need to amplify content to highly targeted psychographic audiences, in order for the content to be seen and consumed at scale. As such, social marketers must be comfortable navigating paid, organic looking, social, psychographic content distribution against content marketing KPIs.
Also, social media marketers in the future (now actually) will/are held responsible for creating cookie pools with audience/creative segmentation. These cookie pools representing curated audience data, are turned over to performance marketers for use in RLSA search and Internet wide audience themed retargeting campaigns. Retargeting/remarketing to “owned” psychographic audiences is the new display.
4. You are a prolific speaker at industry conferences all over the world, and are known for being high energy. What is your best advice for less experienced speakers?
Invest in pitching conferences. Each year I spend a considerable amount of time thinking out content, carefully crafting them and making sure that the topics pitched will matter to conference attendees. Take time to study the actual agenda verbiage and make sure to understand what the conference organizers are after. One cool technique is to repurpose your blog posts as conference pitches. After all, your blog is where you should be offering public thought leadership. To me my blog posts, conferences pitches, and presentations are essentially one in the same.
After you’re accepted to speak, make sure to attend any organizational meetings the moderator may hold. If you sense a lack of moderation leadership, don’t be shy about reaching out by email for clarification as to what the other speakers on your panel are covering, your role, etc. Bryan Eisenberg, a storied digital marketing conference keynote rock star, once told me, “After you make your presentation and you believe it’s the right length, then cut about 20% of the slides.” The last thing you want to do is feel time pressure or go over the allotted time. Run through the deck a few times but don’t over-rehearse, which could risk the spontaneity. Make sure not to pack your slides with text. For many slides, just the image and a word or two should suffice. The audience is there to listen to you, not read slides.
Once on the podium, don’t rush the start. Choose audience members at all 4 corners of the room, the front middle, middle and back middle. Make sure during your presentation to check in on these people once every two minutes. if you are lucky enough to not go first, study the audience whilst your fellow speakers present. Make eye contact. Feel feelings. Make friends with your eyes. Don’t read the slides. Paraphrase them. Stagger the pitch of your voice and the speed of delivery. Hold the mic closely and speak softly. Hold the mic further away and shout. Make every move intentional and use hand gestures.
Thanks for such great insight and tips, Marty! We’d love to hear audience feedback and experiences with paid social campaigns in the comments below.
Remember, spots are still open for our upcoming SEJ Summit in Chicago on April 15th. The SEJ Summit will also be at these other locations later this year: London, NYC, Miami, and San Francisco.
Featured Image: Shutterstock
