15 Ways to Supercharge Your Digital Marketing #DSMPLS

15 Ways Supercharge Digital Marketing

Good marketing programs involve strategy, goals, target audience, tactics and measurement. Great marketing programs often include a special ingredient to really supercharge the engine of leads and sales.

To help you supercharge your marketing success, I’ve reached out to some of the most trusted voices in the digital marketing world speaking at the upcoming Digital Marketing Summit Minneapolis conference for their quotable advice. Marketers from companies like 3M, Thomson Reuters, IBM, The Economist Group, BMC Software, Pandora, Salesforce, Adestra, Schwinn Bicycles, SEMRush and our own agency, TopRank Marketing have joined experts including Seth Godin and Ann Handley to share their pithy tips on a variety of digital marketing topics.

What topics you ask? How about: Content Marketing, Influence, Social Storytelling, Artificial Intelligence, Email Marketing, Social Customer Service, Purposeful Marketing, Reputation Management, Thought Leadership, Audio Marketing, Creative Content & Promotion, SEO, Design Thinking and Marketing with Microinfluencers. Enjoy!

The Misfit Advantage
“You’re more powerful than you imagine. In our new connection economy, it’s the misfit who has an advantage. The artist that we seek out, the maker of ruckuses.

What we need are your generosity, hubris and insight. The true voice that you’ve been hiding… the world is ready for it now.”

Seth Godin @ThisIsSethsBlog
Best Selling Author
Digital Summit Presentation: Opening Keynote

Less is Better
“What’s one thing marketers can do to supercharge how they approach content for marketing?

Supercharge your marketing by (ironically) doing less.

Why? “”Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged,” wrote poet Robert Browning a century and a half ago.

In modern marketing parlance (probably an idea Browning couldn’t fathom!), Less Is More means you focus on creating less content that will have greater impact.

Better content.

Content that has real value for your audience.

Content they will love.

And content that will sustain your organization, and (importantly) that you can be proud of.

Sounds like too lofty a goal? Too high a bar? Not in my view. (And that’s what I’ll be talking about in Minneapolis!)”

Ann Handley @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
Digital Summit Presentation: Lunch Keynote – Good Content vs. Good Enough Content: A Sight for Sore Eyes

Co-Create to be Great
“When buyers are overwhelmed with information and distrustful of advertising, marketers can improve reach, trust and engagement by co-creating content with peers, experts and influencers. If you want content to be great, ask your brand’s community to participate!”

Lee Odden @leeodden
CEO, TopRank Marketing
Digital Summit Presentation: Closing Keynote – Supercharge Your Content with Influencer Marketing

Engage Where They Live
“While every brand is facing the same challenge: where should we spend our time? Stop debating the platforms and which one is better (ex: Instagram vs. Snapchat) and start placing a higher emphasis on engaging your community, including prospective customers, on the platforms where they live through content that’s fun, creative, or educational. Storytelling is the new content marketing.”

Carlos Gil @CarlosGil83
Head of Global Social Media, BMC Software
Digital Summit Presentation: Snapchat Strategies for Marketing Your Business

Clean Data = Smarter Insight
“When experimenting with new machine learning applications from technology vendors, make sure you have LOTS of good data (clean and comprehensive) or the machine output of analysis, content or recommendations may be of low confidence, or worse – wrong or inconsistent with your brand.”

Loren McDonald @lorenmcdonald
Marketing Evangelist, IBM Watson Marketing
Digital Summit Presentation: AI and Machine Learning Technologies: What They Mean for Marketers Today and in the Future

First-Person Marketing
“Become a First-Person Marketer, someone who looks at a list of email addresses and sees people, with needs, interests, goals and attitudes, not just records in a database. They use email addresses to identify customers across channels and incorporate data to sharpen their targeting and messaging. The more marketers who do this, the better off we all will be.”

Ryan Phelan @ryanpphelan
VP Marketing Insights, Adestra
Digital Summit Presentation: First Person Marketing: Using Data to Drive Higher Email Results

Engage with Purpose
“Be proactive in your social listening and then engage with a purpose. Remember that you’re a human writing to other humans – be real, be transparent, and take your time with one-on-one interactions. People don’t want to hear from a lofty brand figurehead, they want to hear from a person. Be a person.”

Alennah Westlund @lennerswest
Content Specialist, 3M
Digital Summit Presentation: Branded Social Care: Protecting and Amplifying Reputation Through Strategic Engagement

Optimize Experience with Authenticity
“Purpose and authenticity are the connective tissue between brands and customers. Create that connection by speaking with ideal customers face-to-face. Organize insights from conversations into their questions, feelings, and actions so you can fully optimize the customer experience.”

Mack Fogelson @mackfogelson
Founder & CEO, Genuinely
Digital Summit Presentation: Evolve to Survive: How Purpose and Authenticity is the Future of Brands

Audit Your Reputation
“To understand how your customers experience your products and brand online, run a search for your flagship products on all the social networks. If you don’t understand and like everything you see, you need to work on digital reputation management, starting with a detailed audit of the existing accounts.”

Casey Hall @CaseyHall_
Manager Social Media Business Communications, Thomson Reuters
Digital Summit Presentation: Digital Reputation Management and Social Media

Help Audiences Get Smarter
“Thought leadership is about solving, not selling. People wake up thinking about their problems, not your product. In our research, Thought Leadership Disrupted, only 28% of marketers cited helping their audience become more knowledgeable as a primary objective. True thought leaders don’t push product; they understand their audience and share ideas to help them tackle issues.”

Mina Seetharaman @minaseeth
SVP, Global Managing Director, Marketing Solutions, The Economist Group
Digital Summit Presentation: Thought Leadership Disrupted

When Voice Replaces Touch
“Consider the future importance of Audio. When Voice replaces Touch as the way we communicate using screen-less connected devices, marketers will need new strategies to build their brands. Audio is the one medium which reaches consumers across any device, any time, to deliver true cross-platform messaging.”

Gabe Tartaglia @gabetartaglia
VP Sales, Pandora
Digital Summit Presentation: Engaging in A Connected World Through the Power of Audio

Supercharge Content Reach
“When content promotion is treated as an afterthought, it’s like putting water in your gas tank. To supercharge content reach, take the time to create an amplification strategy that is creative, optimized and focused on the customer experience.”

Ashley Zeckman @azeckman
Digital Strategy Director, TopRank Marketing
Digital Summit Presentation: Mastering the Perfect Content Recipe

Focus on the Now of Search
“Be relevant in the moment! Use Google Analytics and Search Console to find the top pages driving non-brand, organic traffic and conversion. Improve engagement on page by adding or updating the content to focus on the now. Build internal links to those pages from new or existing content that supports that topic.”

Jacob Hagberg @jacobhagberg
Digital Marketing Strategist, SEMRush
Digital Summit Presentation: Real-World SEO Examples Every Digital Marketer Can Learn From

Design Sprints FTW
“Design thinking compels marketers to leverage the creativity of those around them. To make your next campaign truly innovative and deeply relevant, brainstorm—or better yet, do a “design sprint”—with colleagues in other departments that interact with your customers differently than you.”

Cliff Seal @cliffseal
UX Lead Salesforce, Pardot
Digital Summit Presentation: Death to Boring B2B Marketing: Driving Innovation with Design Thinking

Human Influence
“Be human – influencers do not want to work with a brand that treats them like a commodity. Invest a bit of yourself and humanize your brand. This dedication and compassion will keep your influencers active, loyal, and engaged, even when the contract is complete.”

Samantha Hersil @shersil
Associate Marketing Manager Schwinn Bicycles
Digital Summit Presentation: How Brands Can Work with Microinfluencers

Don’t forget, if you’re attending Digital Summit Minneapolis, you won’t want to miss the closing keynote on Tuesday at 4:05pm: Supercharge Your Content with Influencer Marketing. The deck cover is below and after the conference, I will swap it out with an embed from SlideShare.

Supercharge Digital Marketing

Here’s the abstract for the presentation so you can get an idea of what it’s about:

Content is both king and kingdom in the marketing world but what good is great content if no one sees it? Confronted by information overload, distrust in advertising and the growth of ad blocking, successful companies are adding an essential ingredient to their content marketing mix: influencers. By co-creating content with trusted experts that have active networks, brands increase both quality and quantity of credible content that is trusted by customers and stands out from the competition.This presentation will outline a framework, best practices, tools and examples for integrating influencers with content marketing that will help marketers attract, engage and convert more customers.

BONUS! Be sure to register for the Supercharged Marketing Cocktail Hour being hosted by TopRank Marketing on Monday night, August 14th.

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