The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

Anne, Adrian and Rob, 3 of our “performance focussed” Clickthinkers attended the Adobe Omniture Summit in London, Europe’s biggest digital marketing conference. This year’s theme was all about social media and while most marketers focus on how to efficiently leverage social media in order to communicate with their customers, the real deal is to determine its actual value. The summit had a number of excellent guest speakers, sharing insights and value about brands, social, technical integrations and performance improvements within an extremely fast moving industry. An industry where customers are no longer only buyers of products, but are truly the centre of attention, empowered with choice through technology. And as much as customers are empowered with choice, we as marketers are empowered with access to data about our customers. We are in a powerful position to use this data to become better marketers!

Summit Mindmap

Anne Scharlow, Head of Conversion:

For me, one of the most impressive speakers was Shaun Smith (@ShaunSmith_CEM). According to him, being BOLD is the magic recipe in order to succeed in an environment where customers are increasingly marketing savvy and have the choice on where to spend their money. These consumers demand authenticity and consistency from their brands. Being BOLD means engaging and entertaining customers, rather than persuading them to buy a product, being honest and sticking to strong and sustainable brand promises.

Customer centricity is about designing products around your customers, and not to assume they will like what a commercial model will present them. When Richard Branson decided to move into the space industry and created Virgin Galactic, he was prepared to constantly fulfilling customers’ needs. The original space ship was not designed to allow weightlessness within the aircraft, but the new one will be. Because this is what they want and how you keep your clients engaged, make them part of the experience and ultimately make them participating in changing the future- with you.

We at Clickthinking design online experiences and focus on perfect customer journeys though the online environment. What I took away here, is that data becomes even more powerful. We love collecting data, review them carefully to unfold valuable insight and we are not ashamed to ask our online audience directly. Surveys, landing page optimizations, testing and solid web analytics tool implementation are key to truly understanding our clients’ clients online and pushing them in the centre of our business.

Rob Stanbridge, Head of Search

I was fascinated by Ann Lewnes, senior vice president of global marketing for Adobe gave an engaging talk that can be summarised as follows:
•Social is Everything
•Messaging is critical
•Marketing is the new finance
•It’s a great time to be in marketing!

There was also number of smaller breakout sessions. Key insights for me from these sessions relating to search marketing is the awareness that paid search and organic search campaigns should be managed together. To quote Josh Palau of razorfish “You don’t have paid goals and organic goals, you have search goals”. Furthermore, 60% of users do not know difference between paid & organic search. So it is critical to have a presence in both to ensure exposure to ensure brands receive share of voice within search results.

In terms of the conversion of paid vs. organic, there is a 4.2% average conversion rate for Organic against a 3.6% average conversion rate for Paid (Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Study).

For paid search campaign optimisation it is critical to give bounce rates of landing pages a higher focus when managing keywords. However it is still important to analyse keywords with high bounce rates within context of the buying cycle.

Another insights from the sessions is the requirement to have all changes to websites go through an iterative testing process to ensure continued improvement of conversion KPI’s.

Adrian Jennings, Organic Search Engineer

My personal highlight of the Omniture Summit was Brian Solis (@briansolis) who spoke passionately about engaging with your customers via social media. It is not about having a social media presence but rather offering your customers what they want through Social Media. 52% of people un-follow a brand on Twitter because the content becomes repetitive or boring over time. A further 41% of Twitter users un-follow a brand when they become overwhelmed by all the marketing posts.  After the summit I ordered his book called “Engage” and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

An interesting from one of the breakout sessions on search marketing is that organic search accounts for 10% of the search engine marketing spend but is responsible for 70% of the clicks.

My key take away from a search perspective was that we too often see paid and organic search as separate entities but these need to work together to achieve our search engine marketing goals.

View the Adobe Omniture Summit Highlights here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euJ0VOqSAeU