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Jake WengroffGlobal Director of Corporate CommunicationsFrost & Sullivan |
Last week I attended and spoke at the Integrated Marketing Summit, co-presented with the Online Marketing Summit, in Dallas. The event offered a full day of 16 sessions and 29 speakers. Following are some highlights and key takeaways.
>> The morning started out with a keynote titled “CRM on Demand: Connect Sales & Marketing, Drive Revenue, Reduce Costs, “ delivered by Scott Drewett, director of CRM on Demand for Oracle. Admittedly, I walked in late–coming directly from the airport. Drewett’s presentation was clearly in full swing when IMS Chairman Shawn Elledge cut him short to ask about how the topic related to the marketer’s big dilemma: What to do with the leads? Elledge went on to discuss how as many as 20% of sales leads that are generated by marketing programs never get followed up, principally because the majority are from companies with long buying cycles–as long as two years. As such, all agreed that marketers need to play a much stronger role in the sales process.
>> The next session I attended, “Will It Blend–The Convergence of Marketing & Public Relations,” was delivered by Michael Pranikoff, director of emerging media for PR Newswire. Pranikoff energetically explained how the news cycle has changed and will continue to change. Marketers, he said, must stay on the bleeding edge or else they will yield mindshare–which, in some industries, is market share–to competitors. Indeed, demonstrating such media and technology savvy to one’s paymasters–bosses and clients–can keep the communicator at the top of the go-to list.
>> After the lunch keynote, “Enhancing Your Brand with Cause Marketing,” led by Mike Swenson, president of Barkley PR/Cause, came a session about “Integrating Offline Advertising with Online,” from Chris Kovac, director of social influence at Nicholson Kovac. During the session, Lindsay Jacaman, director of multimedia sales for venerable media brand Wall Street Journal, presented a case study featuring Lexus and how the luxury brand developed a multiplatform campaign using both print AND mobile–specifically, with WSJ’s BlackBerry app.
When selecting a mobile partner, clearly it’s not only the app, but also the device–in this case, business-preferred brand BlackBerry–that comes into consideration. (If only all of us had a marketing budget the size of Lexus, or worked for a five-star media brand like WSJ–whatever we did to create engagement would surely end up in case studies delivered at marketing meetings and conferences for years to come.)
>> The session right before mine was a mobile marketing panel presentation led by Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered, a digital agency in Austin, Texas. Strout was joined by Brian Teague of PocketStop, Chris Hershberger of Alive Digital, and Sean Flaherty of ITX. The room was packed, and seated in the last row I watched as everyone believed in the gospel of everything and anything mobile–Foursquare, location-based services, QR codes, etc. Even good ol’ SMS marketing–yes, marketing through standard, 160-character text messages–had its day in court.
Strout delivered perhaps the best line at the conference: “Text messaging is very unsexy–it makes me throw up in my mouth a bit–but it’s still very effective for marketing.” I raised my hand and asked how Twitter, with its more-stringent 140-character limit–would play into the idea of sponsored marketing messages. All agreed that more will be on the way, as marketers discover what works and what ROI they are comfortable with. (For now, most marketers are not sold on sponsored tweets.) We all need to bite the bullet and make our peace with mobile. B2C or B2B, people are on their phones all day, and marketers need to reach audiences however and whenever they can.
>> I was in one of the two last sessions of the day, a social media best practices panel led by Allie Herzog of IntegratePR. I was joined by Chris Baccus, executive director of digital and social media for AT&T, Leigh Mutert, social media manager for HR Block (“Imagine marketing a product for an event that takes place only once a year,” Mutert told us), and Mike Merrill, director of marketing for ReachLocal and president of the Social Media Club of Dallas. We all stressed the need to find the right mix of metrics that demonstrate ROI–and that social provides the flexibility and scale to test various campaigns. We also stressed the need to find those other than corporate communications or marketing–customer service, human resources–to join the social media efforts within an organization and help fight the fight, one tweet or blogpost at a time.
About Jake Wengroff As Global Director of Corporate Communications at global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, Jake Wengroff is responsible for branding, media relations, Webinar programs, social media, communications training, and internal communications.
