Selling Search to the C-Suite

If you’ve finally gotten convinced of the effectiveness of search marketing yourself, it might seem a daunting prospect to prove its worth to your CMO, let alone your CFO or CEO. But as search becomes more important to every company’s marketing plan, it is critical to get the high level support for search as a more ambitious part of the marketing mix. Find out how to speak the language of the C-Suite to boost your search program to a new level.

Social Media Listening: Do You Know What Your Customers Are Saying About You?

Social media usage is exploding. All the cool kids are doing it. But how do you keep up with what people are saying about your brand? How do you know if they are positive or negative? Do you know how computers “listen” to social media?

To answer those questions, and many more, you need a social media listening program. You could start with a basic tool, such as Google Alerts, but many businesses find that they need more. At this event, see real-world case studies that show social listening in action. Discover what tools are available today (and what their shortcomings are) and learn how social media listening tools are evolving. Find out how to keep up with all the conversation about your company and their industry in social media, so that you can respond to protect your reputation

Five Things You Need to Know about the New Google Search

It’s not your father’s Google anymore. If you’re still dutifully optimizing your title tags and checking your rankings, you’re behind the curve. It’s not that those things don’t matter anymore–it’s that so many other things matter, too. In just the last few years, Google has introduced a world of changes to organic search that have upended both the way people search and the results that they get. More importantly, what marketers must do to stay in front of searchers has changed, too. And the combination of all of these factors means the true scope of the changes is even more complex. So, no, Google Panda has nothing to do with bears. Google+ could be a minus for you if you don’t take action. Google Search Plus Your World is actually about personalized search and social media. And Google Instant and Google Caffeine don’t mean they are going into business against Nescafe. Don’t keep running the same SEO campaigns that worked in 2010, because they might not work the same way now. Find out what has changed in Google Search so that you can change, too.

Inside the Google Search Panda Update

Whether you have heard about Panda or you haven’t, Panda is looking for you. Panda is a dramatically new approach Google is using to decide whether your content is high quality or not. You might have lots of links, and you might have lots of social activity. But it’s no longer enough. Panda actually relies on human ratings to give your content a gold star. Learn what human raters look for on your site, and find out how Google might be rating your site without even looking at it. See how Google can rate every site on the Web without going broke. What does Panda mean to search marketers? Tune in to find out.

Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules

It sounds odd, but the most successful digital marketers are doing it all wrong. Instead of spending countless hours getting their marketing right, they are doing it wrong and then quickly fixing it, based on customer feedback.

If you think that this could never work at your company, you’re not alone. Often, it’s other people’s attitudes and organizational culture that stop these vital experiments. Or your technical team patiently explains how they don’t work that way. Experimentation and fast changes are the only way to find out what’s right. Find out how to listen to what your customers say, watch what your customers do, and respond–quickly. Learn how to monitor the conversation about you in blogs, ratings and reviews, social networks and even hate sites. Discover how to measure the response of everything you do.

Accept the fact that none of us can predict what our customers really want. Learn how to find out what’s wrong and fix it—fast. Stop worrying about getting everything perfect and start experimenting.

Instead of killing yourself as you spend months obsessing over everything that could go wrong with your new campaign, it’s cheaper, faster, and more effective to just try something. If you know you need to adopt experimental marketing, but you don’t know how to make it happen where you work, this is where you find out.

Tracking Social Media ROI

Everyone’s talking about social media, but how do you know it is worth your precious marketing dollars, or even worth your time? Learn how virtually any business can use direct marketing principles to track its customer leads and sales from social media, whether those sales occur online or offline. Determine how to use any Web metrics system, such as Google Analytics, to identify which visitors to your Web site come from social media, and to track their activity all the way through to a sale. Whether you are considering using Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, or any other forms of social media, learn how to track your customer activity so you know what it is worth. Don’t miss your opportunity to turn your social media investment into increased revenue. Instead of seeing social media as the new cool thing, you can see it as a critical tactic that drives revenue.