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.

Speakers

• Moderator: Daryl Colwell, Senior Vice President, MediaWhiz
• 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.

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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.

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What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.

That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.

About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services

MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!

We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.

By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers.

Must-Have Information

MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at the APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, at Rosen Shingle Creek resort, Orlando, Fla.

Meet us at booth #708.

Contact Kristen Pulver for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

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LeadsCon, a lead-generation conference, wrapped up its West Coast show in Las Vegas last week. The MediaWhiz team was all over the conference, starting with the first day’s Buyers Summit (March 18), and ending with an afternoon panel March 20 on mobile lead generation.

Beyond the ideas and insights our own team brought to LeadsCon, we learned a lot from the dozens of other speakers and vendors who were in attendance. Below is a quick synopsis of our top-3 takeaways from LeadsCon Las Vegas 2013.

RELATED: Check out our photo slideshow on Facebook from LeadsCon Las Vegas. 

Trend #1: Mobile Here, Mobile There, Mobile Everywhere

Not surprisingly, mobile dominated many of the panels and presentations at LeadsCon.

Taking a page from that meme, we launched MediaWhiz Mobile at the conference. Serving as our official mobile performance marketing practice, MediaWhiz Mobile offers clients and publishers mobile performance marketing campaigns and offers across a wide range of online marketing channels, including affiliate marketing, email, social media, display, search, SEO and lead generation.

In a March 20 panel hosted by MediaWhiz (“Taking Lead Gen Beyond the Desktop”), panelists discussed best practices for mobile lead generation. One issue panelists highlighted was the need to prepare call centers for the potential flood of incoming calls that could result from making mobile landing pages too easy to convert.

Trend #2: The Rise of Performance and Affiliate Marketing

While mobile’s value in performance marketing continues to grow, so does the industry as a whole. This is particularly the case with affiliate marketing, which seemed to capture the attention of many LeadsCon attendees who are looking for an edge in their lead-gen campaigns.

In a March 19 panel moderated by MediaWhiz Senior Vice President Peter Klein, a quintet of speakers ranging from representatives of an affiliate network, SaaS provider, major brand and agency executive, debated some of the biggest myths surrounding affiliate marketing.

This point was driven home by Neustar’s Chris McArdle. He ended the discussion on a high note, stating unequivocally: “Affiliates are amazing. They generate far more traffic [for brands] than traditional advertisers.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, Chris.

Trend #3: The Evolution of Lead Generation

Every so often, talk rises up within the performance marketing industry over whether lead generation is dead, or at least dying off. As DM Confidential’s Jason Hahn noted in a wrap-up article from the LeadsCon Buyers Summit, several end-buyers of leads are openly questioning the value of the very thing they buy: leads.

Writing about the panel, “What’s in a Name: Is ‘Lead a Bad Word?” Hahn notes that some marketers consider “lead” a bad word and are seeking to replace it with a more relevant term. Reactions of the panelists ranged from “It’s somewhere between bad and confusing” to “it’s a perception” problem when describing what they think of the term “lead.”

What do we think? As we wrote on Twitter in response to the DM Confidential article, “lead” isn’t a bad word. Quite the contrary. But to dispel the perception issues, performance marketers should focus more on profitable customer acquisition for clients. Ultimately, that is what brands are looking for when they engage a performance marketing agency or affiliate network – customers.

Did you go to LeadsCon Las Vegas? If so, what were some of the big trends you took away from the conference? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter at @MediaWhizInc or in the comments section of this post. 

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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications

Where will you be March 19 and 20? If the answer isn’t LeadsCon Las Vegas, you need to rethink your plans. You can find us at booth #511 at LeadsCon and throughout the conference at a series of events and panels.

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.

RELATED: Read our exclusive interview with LeadsCon founder Jay Weintraub.

Must-Have Information
MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at LeadsCon, March 19-20, 2013. Meet us at booth #511.

Contact Keith Trivitt for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the conference.

The MediaWhiz booth at LeadsCon East 2012 in New York City.

We’ll be right in the thick of LeadsCon, hosting a number of panels and events. Below is a quick rundown:

Buyers Summit

First up is the Lead Buyers Summit March 18. Held one day prior to the official start of LeadsCon, this exclusive, invitation-only event brings together the end users of leads for a day of networking and expert insight.

Not only are we a sponsor of the LeadsCon Buyers Summit but we will also be presenting at the event. MediaWhiz Vice President Daryl Colwell will give a presentation on MediaWhiz’s lead-generation services at 3 p.m. PST March 18 during the Buyers Summit.

Industry-Leading Expertise

We will also bring our unique brand of industry-leading performance marketing expertise to the main LeadsCon agenda.

Peter Klein, MediaWhiz’s senior vice president of media services, will moderate a March 19 panel, “Debunking Affiliate Marketing’s Myths: Making Sense of the Mayhem.” The panel will feature speakers from GMAD/Globe Life and Accident Insurance Company, Neustar Information Services, Cake Marketing, CPA Detective and Telic.

Daryl Colwell returns to the LeadsCon stage at 2 p.m. PST March 20 when he moderates a panel on mobile lead generation. The panel, “Taking Lead Gen Beyond the Desktop: Generating Leads In a Mobile-First World” will feature speakers from the Performance Marketing Association, MyFreeScoreNow and Lead5 Media.

What are you looking forward to you at LeadsCon Las Vegas? 

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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications

SMX West comes to beautiful San Jose, Calif., in two weeks (March 11-13, 2013), and the MediaWhiz search and SEO teams will be there in full force. If you’re in San Jose for the conference, be sure to visit booth #321 to chat with us about our search marketing and SEO products and services. Several of our SEO and search marketing experts will be on site to discuss best practices for improving your brand’s SEO and search marketing campaigns.

MediaWhiz Vice President Daryl Colwell will take that discussion a step further during his March 11 presentation, “Content Marketing Like a Pro: Tactics and Techniques to Increase Search Engine Visibility.” Here is a brief overview of Daryl’s presentation:

Time/Date: 3-3:20 p.m. PST, Monday, March 11, 2013
Location: Theater B, San Jose McEnery Convention Center

Session Description
It’s no longer enough to have great SEO for your website. In today’s Google-controlled era of search engine marketing, brands need great content that is engaging, informative and sharable to rank well and generate leads. Join MediaWhiz’s Daryl Colwell to learn about his best practices and techniques to increase your brand’s search engine visibility through content marketing. You’ll come away from this session with a top-10 list of content marketing best practices that the pros use to generate leads and improve their brand’s SEO.

Must-Have Information
MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at SMX West, March 11-13, 2013. Meet us at booth #321.

Contact Keith Trivitt for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the conference.

What to Do in San Jose
San Jose is one of America’s most innovative cities. Centered at the heart of Silicon Valley, it is the home to many of the world’s leading technology companies, including Cisco, Adobe and eBay. It also has a vibrant night life and plenty of fun, free activities. Here are some helpful resources you can use to plan your time in San Jose during SMX West.

• Visit San Jose
• Best Things to Do in San Jose
• 65 San Jose Attractions

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Where will you be March 19 and 20? If the answer isn’t LeadsCon Las Vegas, you need to rethink your plans. With the industry’s premier lead-generation conference a month away, we recently sat down with LeadsCon founder Jay Weintraub to get his take on the state of performance marketing, how he got into the business and what marketers can expect at this year’s conference.

Haven’t purchased your pass to LeadsCon yet? No problem. Click here for a discount and receive $175 off the price of admission, courtesy of MediaWhiz. Don’t delay: the discount is only available through March 1. Discount is valid for new registrations only. Refunds are not available for past purchases.

Be sure to stop by the MediaWhiz booth (#511) at LeadsCon to chat with us about lead generation and performance marketing services. We’d love to see you. Email Keith Trivitt to schedule a meeting.

Below is an edited excerpt of our interview with LeadsCon founder Jay Weintraub.

How did you come about founding and managing LeadsCon?
When I started LeadsCon in 2007 I was living in Los Angeles. I moved there from Baltimore to join the specialty ad network Oversee.net. Its core business focused on monetizing large portfolios of domain names. The company also owned a large portfolio of premium domains, including two marquee names in education and mortgage. Old timers will remember Adteractive and its LowRateSource offer. That inspired me to develop some of the domains using lead gen as the monetization.

Fast forward five years and I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a conference that focused just on lead generation. After a while, I decided that it was what I wanted to do, and if I didn’t give it a try, I would be forever upset at myself. 

For those who are unaware of LeadsCon and its role in the performance marketing ecosystem, what should they know about the conference? Who’s the main audience and how do you cater to them?
I love the term performance marketing. At the same time, it is a very broad term, and it can be co-opted to describe a wide range of marketing activities that may not be very “performance” oriented.

In that wide range of performance marketing lays a subset of brands and advertisers from whom their business relies on connecting with potential customers, being able to begin a dialog that will hopefully consummate in a business transaction. These advertisers have a business process that is at the same time trackable. They are generally service providers within specific consumer focused segments of the economy, e.g., financial service providers. The opposite would be a consumer packaged goods. Their transactions take place primarily offline. While they can purchase clicks and likes they have very indirect ways of measuring advertising effectiveness. 

Those who operate in the LeadsCon ecosystem can absolutely measure their advertising activities. Not only can they measure, they prefer to base their online advertising and marketing spend around how their activities translate into customers.

Where this differs from more traditional affiliate marketing, which is a major component of the performance marketing ecosystem, is that in more traditional affiliate marketing, the transaction takes place online.

Besides the transaction not taking place online, in the LeadsCon ecosystem, the products and services generally fall into the “considered purchase” category. They are not impulse buys, even if they might be considered immediate needs, such as hiring a plumber to fix a leak.

Ultimately, it comes down to a) the type of product / service being advertising; and b) who controls the budget. If it is something that can be purchased online, it is most likely not the focus of LeadsCon. If it is an agency with a set amount to spend that isn’t hyper-focused and held accountable on how that spend translates to a business relationship, that, too, is not LeadsCon.

It would be easiest to say LeadsCon is a lead-gen show, but the world of lead generation today is no longer just form; it’s clicks and calls. It’s any way to connect consumers with companies that can help.

What is your career background? How did you get into lead gen and performance marketing?
As I like to joke — although I suspect there is some element of truth — were I a better marketer, I would have continued doing that versus starting LeadsCon. I spent the eight years before founding LeadsCon in operational roles at performance marketing companies, including the place where I cut my teeth, AOL’s Advertising.com. I joined right before the dot-com crash, so my experience has been shaped by the need for accountability in advertising spend. While I always had a proclivity towards direct response marketing, the experience of surviving the dot-com crash and seeing 30% of your peers let go forever shaped my perspective on the industry.   

What is your opinion on the state of performance marketing? Is it improving in terms of its reputation and respect among marketers?
There is an interesting divide within the performance marketing community, in my opinion. This comes back to the broad applicability of the term.

That perspective is how Google has been able to have advertisers think that paying for visitors is performance, and it is how Facebook has made brands think of “Likes” as performance-based marketing. In other words, the term “performance marketing” has become more mainstream.

Within the classic performance marketing ecosystem, which is largely driven by direct-response advertisers, continuity offerings and commerce purchases, there have been some reputation issues. As media has become more expensive that has led some marketers to engage in behavior that is misleading, so much so that the Federal Trace Commission has gotten involved and major traffic platforms have made rule changes. That is why there are almost two worlds of performance marketing — one that is controlled by agencies a major traffic platforms that use the term “performance marketing” to increase digital’s percentage of spend and the other of performance-based marketers looking for offers to run. It is the latter that needs help if it is to continue to grow.

What major opportunities and challenges do you think await the performance marketing industry in 2013?
The biggest challenge in 2013 will be proving the value of performance marketing. From an advertiser’s perspective, being able to pay for results is a hard to beat value proposition. But, as we’ve seen, it’s not a fool-proof value proposition. If it comes with too many brand and customer service headaches, it is simply not worth it. That is why there are more and more companies taking their programs in-house. 

Who do you look up to in the digital media and performance marketing industries? Is there any one person or persons who have had a big influence on your career?
The list is probably too long if I try to name names, but here are two: John DeMayo and Carl Watzack. John is probably the original “growth hacker,” and Carl allowed me to move from media buying to new product development where I worked on the precursor to the modern reg path.

If there was one thing about the performance marketing industry that you would change, what would it be? Why?
It’s a real business. Treat it like one and not a get-rich quick plan. That way we can minimize reputation issues and, from the publisher perspective, avoid the closing of networks that have plagued the industry the past 12 months. 

If you’re going to LeadsCon, here are some useful links to help you get the most out of the conference:

• Exhibitor List
• Companies Attending
• Conference Program
• Speakers
• Housing

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The Online Marketing Summit has become a perennial favorite for us at MediaWhiz. Often held in a sunny, relaxed city, such as last week’s event in beautiful San Diego, the conference features the best and brightest in online marketing, advertising, search and SEO.

This year was no different. OMS San Diego featured a stellar lineup of speakers, a well-stocked exhibit hall and plenty of attendees to stoke plenty of debates and discussions about the trends shaping online marketing.

And MediaWhiz was right in the thick of it.

Our SEO business TLA exhibited at the conference, holding the coveted first exhibitor spot on the trade show floor. The TLA team spent much of their time discussing on- and off-site SEO strategies with conference attendees, including how to generate and promote content as a means of improving a brand’s SEO.

A packed house greeted Daryl Colwell’s OMS presentation, “Content Marketing Like a Pro”

But we didn’t stop there. Our own Daryl Colwell, vice president of business development, presented at OMS. During his 45-minute talk, “Content  Like a Pro: Tactics and Techniques to Increase Search Engine Visibility,” Daryl entertained and informed the audience of 200-plus with his insight on how marketers can use content marketing to not only improve their brand’s SEO but generate actual leads and sales.

Judging by attendees’ tweets and photos, the presentation was a big success.

#omsummit session: #ContentMarketing Like A Pro…by @mediawhiz Most packed session so far. Standing room only! Hot topic? Oh yeah!

— Stephanie Hackney (@brandingmasters) February 12, 2013

Lead Gen 101 A few best practices: #omsummit listening to @mediawhiz twitter.com/Julienbrandt/s…

— Julien Brandt (@Julienbrandt) February 12, 2013

PRNewswire’s Paula Henderson has a nice recap of Daryl’s presentation. Below are some of the points she found most interesting:

Benefits for SEO writing:

• Attracts Authority Signals (links, social shares) – improves SEO performance
• Positions brand as authority on relevant topics
• Increases conversion rates
• Educates users on topics that are difficult to understand.

While it is important to write with these SEO tips in mind, you’re not a computer so write for humans!

Top-5 tips MediaWhiz provided for Content Marketing:

1. Know your audience: Write for a specific reader or customer. Know what they want and how/where they consume information.
2. Include images: Images will “pop” when content is shared.
3. Commit: Not a one-night stand. Establish an editorial calendar and publish often.  Give customers a reason to keep reading.
4. Engage the right buyers with the right content. Write content for all levels of the sales funnel.
5. Repurpose content. Turn blog posts into white papers; white papers into infographics, etc.

We hope you enjoyed Online Marketing Summit San Diego as much as we did. Let us know in the comments some of the highlights and insights you learned from this year’s conference. 

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Source: The Express Tribune

By Michael Velasco | @MichaelVelasco | Managing Director, Digital, Ryan Partnership

“Facebook has failed!” screamed the media, as Facebook’s stock price continued to tumble off its IPO price. Indeed, the headlines have been bleak. But Facebook is a microcosm of a macro phenomenon afflicting all of social media.

Facebook, the once great social network, is in danger from itself, and the promises either it made, or expectations heaped upon it by its users. It can either move on and evolve into something greater than itself, or suffer the fate of other great Internet companies before it, (GeoCities, Yahoo!, Netscape, MySpace … the list goes on and on), possibly dragging the rest of the social media industry down with it. 

And while I could chalk up the recent history of the Internet’s failed companies as a source of endless cautionary tales, two particularly valuable and relevant examples come to mind: Aol and Yahoo! 

Both were pioneers and innovators in their time and both are examples of what not to do when it comes to running an Internet business. What they lacked is the ability to move beyond the business model that made them great, and evolve into one that provided sustained growth and success.

Facebook finds itself in a similarly troubling situation — it must evolve or die.

Similar to Aol and Yahoo!, Facebook fans find it indispensable, or, at the very least, interwoven into their daily lives. The trick will be to not only enhance that feeling and its associated behaviors with users, but extend it into new areas, or drastically improve the experience of features and areas that its users find appealing. This requires making the features that its millions of users rely on even more indispensable, and dare I say, innovate exactly how people use Facebook or other social media. 

All of which begs the question: What is that one thing so closely related to our friends, word of mouth, communication, commerce and fun conversation that can bring us to the steady, social second wind that the social media industry needs?

This issue, and much more, will be examined during a Sept. 28 panel, titled, “What the ‘Social Media Hype Cycle’ Means for Brands” at Social Media Week in Chicago. Details and registration info can be found here.

Michael Velasco is managing director, digital, at MediaWhiz’s sister agency, Ryan Partnership. 

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Why? Because Social Media Week is almost here! This year, MediaWhiz is partnering with its sister agency, Ryan Partnership, to host a Social Media Week panel in Chicago.

Titled, “What the ‘Social Media Hype Cycle’ Means for Brands,” MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership’s Social Media Week session will explore how the social media hype cycle is impacting social media marketing, social commerce and social advertising. Panelists will use the hype cycle model to demystify social media marketing and explain what is needed to deliver measurable value to brands.

Following this lively session, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of how the hype surrounding social media impacts brand marketing and what you can do to generate measurable value from your social media marketing spend.

#SMWHYPE

What:             MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership Present … What the ‘Social Media Hype Cycle’ Means for Brands

                        Moderator:

                        Steve Goldner (@SocialSteve), Senior Director, Social Media Marketing, MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership

                        Panelists:

Michael Velasco (@MichaelVelasco), Managing Director, Digital, Ryan Partnership
Keith Trivitt (@KeithTrivitt), Director, Marketing and Communications, MediaWhiz

E.J. Schultz (@ejschultz3), Reporter, Advertising Age

Autumn McReynolds (@AutumnMcRey), Content Strategist and Community Manager, TalentMinded

When:             8–9:15 a.m. CDT, Friday, Sept. 28, 2012

Where:           Tribune Tower — Huron Room

                        435 N. Michigan Avenue

                        Chicago, IL 60611

If you have any questions, please contact Keith Trivitt, director of marketing and communications, MediaWhiz. 

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