Atlanta Integrated Marketing Summit

The other day I attended the Atlanta Integrated Marketing Summit (sponsored in part by the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association). Here are some takeaways:

  • If you want to do more with less (increase efficiencies) in Web marketing, add automation.
  • If you want more effectiveness in Web marketing, add integration.
  • The traditional marketing model of the 4 Ps assumes information scarcity, and therefore this model is no longer fully applicable.
  • Web searches are continuously growing for business-to-business.
  • Search results are continuously listing blogs today because they often capture the long tail.
  • 78% of business decision makers today are reporting less time spent with sales reps. This can be attributed to capabilities of Web search. That is, companies can quickly and easily search for product information without requiring a sales person.
  • Consumer Web behavior (for example, interests in profiles or demonstrated by search) can show a truer representation of consumer interests than web forms (i.e., how many people are completely honest and thoughtful in web surveys?).
  • There are more and more disruptive technology tools today enabling marketers to comprehensively profile customers and gather data in databases, coalescing traditional list tools, modern social media profiling and data from crowd sourcing (e.g., Jigsaw).
  • To sell expertise in B2B, make your website a living, breathing, thought-leadership tool. You can “sell” (or at least require form fill-out for lead generation) some content, but for optimal SEO ranking, you should often change content and give some away free (Michelle McMahon of Ariba).
  • For good, current theories on Web 2.0, read the book Socialnomics.
  • Chick-Fil-A provides good, current (award-winning) examples using Facebook and email marketing.
  • AirTran recently conducted a good, integrated and viral PR campaign (www.markonairtran.com) cross-linking major social media channels (and received a surprisingly high amount of hits on its Flickr account).

Tools to look at: TweetDeck (for syncing social media messages), Foursquare, ringLead (for Web lead gen capture).

Overall I give the summit a good score; it was a success. If you missed it check out the next one.

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Jake Aull | Marketing Strategy | Social Media & SEO | Digital & Creative
email | zenofbrand.com | @jakeaull | jakeaull.wordpress.com