LeadsCon East will be here before you know it, and MediaWhiz will be right in the thick of things at this annual conference for vertical media and direct response marketing.
Daryl Colwell MediaWhiz Senior Vice President
Daryl Colwell, MediaWhiz’s senior vice president of business development, will moderate a panel of experts discussing their brands’ experiences with performance marketing. Does it live up to the hype? Or has performance marketing become a channel that marketers must unwillingly implement into their marketing strategies? Find out at the Aug. 14 LeadsCon East panel, “What Brands Really Think of Performance Marketing,” moderated by MediaWhiz.
Panel: What Brands Really Think of Performance Marketing
Date: August 14
Location: Hilton Hotel, New York, NY
Performance-based and lead-gen marketers are obviously biased participants in the value you ascribe to a pay-per-action model. Having heard from large agencies, it’s time to hear from some of the better known customer acquisition-focused brands. Do they have a love-hate or a love-love relationship with performance marketing? It should be a no-brainer given their many direct response initiatives, right? Find out whether they truly find value from the channel or whether it is a necessary evil they would rather do without. Plus, find out what it takes to not only earn their business but keep it.
Keith Weinberger, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Empire Today
Brian Dominick, Director of US Payment Options – Digital Acquisition, American Express
Mike Venables, Media Director, Neo@Ogilvy
Lou Cohen, SVP – Head of Search and Affiliate Marketing, Citibank
About LeadsCon Founded in 2007, LeadsCon showcases the best people and companies in vertical media media and engagement advertising. More than 5,000 people rely each year on LeadsCon for unparalleled insights and access to marketing leaders. Click here to view the conference agenda.
Over the past three years online education inquiry generation has undergone a major shift in responsibility. Previously, it was about a 50/50 partnership between schools and marketers. Marketers used creative messaging and various online advertising channels to attract prospective students while the schools utilized strong recruitment and CRM practices to gain new enrollment.
As new legal and regulatory guidelines emerged around marketing messaging and recruitment practices, the responsibility of enrolling a quality student has shifted more toward the marketer. The quality and intent of the prospect needs to be well defined before she is passed to an admissions counselor. A university’s ability to develop the prospect’s enrollment intent is more limited than ever.
Schools are left to consolidate efforts to their highest-quality partners and online channels. The aggregate traffic model and an inquiry driven to multiple schools are no longer of great value; rather they are considered more of a “volume filler.” Admissions counselors can’t get into a sales competition for inquiries who express interest in multiple colleges. An admission representative should not be a salesperson, but rather a guide that aids in the process and helps the prospect make an informed decision about attending their college of choice. (more…)
Editor’s note: “Around the MediaWhiz Nation” is a regular editorial series in which MediaWhiz employees discuss the intricacies of their work.
Recently, I sat down with Fiona McGovern, an account executive in MediaWhiz’s SEO division, and learned more about her life both within and outside of MediaWhiz’s downtown New York City walls. We talked about her interest in travel, including her trip to Iceland last summer!
Sultan Riaz: If you had to explain your job description in one tweet, what would it be? Fiona McGovern: I help clients improve their presence on the Internet.
SR: How do you commute to work? FM: I live in North Jersey, so I commute into Penn station and take the 2 or 3 train downtown. Also, in the summer I have the option to take the ferry into work.
SR: What is the first thing you like to do (work related) when you get in the office? FM: The first thing I like to do is check my schedule for the day. This way I can map out what I need to get done. Doing so helps me highlight the important tasks of the day and knock those out first. I also respond to emails that I may have received the night before or in the morning prior to arriving at the office.
SR: What is one thing you could not be without during your typical workday? FM: There are probably two things: espresso and my cell phone. If I ever step away from my desk I don’t want to miss any emails, so it’s important to have my cell phone with me so I can stay on top of everything at all times.(more…)
Marissa Mayer’s choices have been under the microscope ever since she left Google to head its major rival, Yahoo. Despite criticism over some of Mayer’s major decisions concerning Yahoo’s operations, I find her strategic moves both smart and interesting. She appears to be repositioning Yahoo as an online media buyer’s dream – a company that places a greater focus on ad-tech investment and development while still delivering a huge number of quality impressions, something that has always been a core strength at Yahoo.
Mayer initiated her grand plan to change the tech behemoth’s image as a slow, out-of-date Internet giant when she lead the company’s partnership with arch-rival Google (her former employer) for display advertising.
But she took the change-now, change-big plan one step further last month with the surprise announcement of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr. By acquiring the most influential microblogging site in the United States (Tumblr hosts more than 112 million blogs and almost 60 billion posts per month), Mayer laid down the future of Yahoo. It’s a future built around smart online advertising opportunities and digital content.
So what does the acquisition mean for Yahoo? (more…)
If you are having trouble with your conversion rates or generating leads from your mobile site, then Conversion Conference in Chicago this month is a must-attend event. And our Giles McGrath, creative director, has all of the insight you’ll need for designing your mobile site with lead generation in mind.
In his presentation, “Don’t Just Replicate: Designing for Mobile Lead Gen,” Giles will distill our top-10 best practices for mobile lead-gen design. As he writes in the introduction for his presentation:
Mobile websites shouldn’t be a simple reproduction of your brand’s desktop site. Effective lead generation with mobile requires thoughtful consideration about how consumers interact with brands on Donttheir mobile devices, how they share content and the type of content and features that grabs their attention. In this session, you’ll see how you can unclutter your mobile website or app to improve conversion and generate more qualified leads.
Conversion Conference brings together expert speakers from all walks of digital marketing to help you increase your conversion rate and lead generation. With Digital marketers ranking conversion rate optimization as one of their top priorities of the year, it makes Conversion Conference an important event to attend.
We hope to see you at Conversion Conference Chicago, where we’d be happy to answer your mobile creative and lead generation questions. If you’re planning to attend Conversion Conference Chicago, please contact us so we can meet you.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a series focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.
Online performance marketing remains the most cost effective form of marketing and advertising. As society becomes more digitally focused, and consumers increasingly user their smartphones and tablets to run and organize their lives, advertisers will recognize additional opportunities to reach out to them directly to share the benefit of their perspective goods and services. Colleges and universities are no different.
In the 10 years I have worked in online marketing, I have worked with many of the nation’s top educators and administrators. In that time I have been a witness to the incredible growing demand of online education. The reach of the Web is endless. Educational opportunities that were once unavailable to many people are now available to almost anyone, anywhere and at any time, throughout the world. (more…)
The evolution of search engine algorithms has added to the complexity of search engine optimization. More significantly, it has impacted the level of integration that is needed with other forms of Web optimization. SEOMoz has a great page that shows the updates year by year.
Search engine optimization is no longer strictly about publishing quality content and building the authority of the content. SEO now involves engaging consumers and building relationships.
The new paradigm of SEO is that it must be implemented in tandem with other website optimization efforts. These include user experience design and social media marketing.
Optimizing for the Desired User Action
Getting qualified traffic to a website is only half the battle; once visitors arrive, they need to perform an action. Whatever the desired action may be, whether it’s filling out a lead form, signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase, the landing pages and the site in general must be optimized in such
a way that makes the desired action clear and compelling to visitors. Otherwise, the SEO efforts and investment that drove people to the site will have been done in vain.
Given the importance of both driving traffic to a website and influencing that traffic to execute a conversion, it is important not to think of these as two mutually exclusive tasks. The ability to drive traffic is partially dependent on the actions completed once visitors land on a website.
The engagement value of a website is a ranking factor. If a website has low engagement, the site’s organic search rankings can be negatively affected. For example, search engines can easily determine that a website has a high bounce rate if users click on an organic listing then quickly return to the search engine results page. This is a strong signal to the search engines that the site has either poor-quality content or simply provides a bad user experience and, therefore, the search engine will no longer want to send its users to that site. This results in lowered rankings. For this reason, it is essential that SEO efforts are integrated with usability/user experience optimization. (more…)
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a series focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.
The tide is changing in higher education. A more diverse student population can be found at most college campuses throughout America. The opportunities — and challenges — for universities to find, enroll and retain students have never been greater.
Two recent reports underscore this emerging reality.
A press release from the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) reported that a surprising 92% of current students meet one or more standards of a non-traditional student. A glut of undereducated employees in the workforce — 90 million of them, according to APSCU — has helped widened the gap in the labor market. With an expected 85% of new jobs requiring a postsecondary education, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for higher-learning institutions to close the gap.
Institutions are facing challenges with student recruitment, retention, employer advocacy and more while striving to gain a competitive advantage.
Through years of admissions management experience I have gained an in-depth understanding of the ever-changing realm and unique marketing challenges of private higher-education.
What’s the silver bullet to achieving online marketing success in higher education? While it may seem rudimentary, the quick answer is clear: put the student first. Develop and maintain a student-centric approach. This requires higher education marketers to make all decisions with the student experience as the main priority.
ByKeith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Native ads here, native there, native ads everywhere. That seems to be the prevailing theme of digital marketing nearly halfway through 2013. Native ads — or sponsored stories, or advertorials, or whatever is the trendy buzzword of the day — are all the rage at the moment.
A recent eMarketer report puts some numbers behind all of the hype. According to eMarketer, native ads are providing new ways for marketers to reach target audiences and new avenues of monetization for content sites that are under intense revenue pressure.
But, as we wrote back in February, native ads aren’t without their detractors. Some media and marketing executives are concerned about the potentially negative effects of blurring the lines between content and advertising. Others questions the return on investment of these ads, arguing that native ads cannot scale for multiple placements (we happen to agree on latter).
Despite those concerns, there is no doubt that native advertising has grabbed a significant foothold within the online marketing industry. eMarketer estimates that native ads will generate $4.57 billion in revenue in the U.S. by 2017, up from $1.63 billion in 2012.
So what makes for a great native ad? As my colleague Sultan Riaz wrote last February, a powerful native ad comes down to two crucial factors: a seamless blending with the editorial content and a non-disruptive message that is relevant to the consumer.
Below is an example of native advertising on Twitter.
ByKeith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Today’s announcement by Twitter of the launch of its new Lead Generation Card represents a major milestone in the evolution of both the microblogging site and performance marketing. Lead Generation Cards are part of the suite of Twitter Cards, which are essentially expanded tweets that allow organizations and businesses to promote their content and offers.
For Twitter, it is a recognition that engagement and social media buzz are great but the days of advertisers being able to live solely off of that as justification for investing in social media campaigns are quickly coming to a close. As Twitter said in announcing the new direct marketing offering, the key goal for many marketers “boils down to one more theme: generating leads and ultimately driving purchases.” We couldn’t agree more.
For performance marketers, Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards should become a useful tool in their performance social marketing campaigns. Performance marketers have longed argued for more lead-gen-specific capabilities within social platforms. As we wrote recently, Facebook’s recent development of CPA bidding for direct marketing advertisers is an important step toward making that social network a more performance-marketing-friendly advertising platform.
So how do Twitter Lead Generation Cards work? Here is how Twitter explained them on its blog:
Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.
When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.
a way that makes the desired action clear and compelling to visitors. Otherwise, the SEO efforts and investment that drove people to the site will have been done in vain.
