Digital silos are collapsing right in front of us. Today’s social curated, lean, API hungry businesses built at the blurred intersection of design and user experience  are forcing CMOs and CEOs to adjust their marketing strategy accordingly.

• Recognize technology: apps, embed codes and platforms are all moving to an eco system where data is flowing freely from one environment to another at warp speed.
• If you are not measuring your ROI your competitors are: web site analytics, customer response times and granular interactions can now be measured in real time via services like MixPanel.
• Personal and professional lines are blurring across the social web and elsewhere. Your users are going to interact with your band in unexpected ways.
• Traditional marketing was based on ad spend, not ROI analysis (see: Broadcast TV, Print and PR). The best ROI bang for your buck is content marketing, it’s inherent built in measurement and syndication with embedded rinse and repeat cycles trump all other tactical marketing dollars.
• For B2B and consumer brands, great, curated content drives attention, which fosters lead desired marketing activities, revenue and engagement. Content syndication is a now a necessity.
• The best traffic is still and will always be content driven. Social derived traffic can drive significant volume but your bounce rates will pale in comparison to visitors being referred via search.
• 85% of Millennials sleep with their smartphones - a mobile strategy has to be baked in to your overall marketing strategy, especially content marketing.
• Brand persona is a discipline your business needs to go through: who is the target customer and what are their key attributes.

Ground Zero for Any Brand that Wants to Win in the Billion Dollar Economy is Design

• Do a big picture gut check of your marketing: whats the average order size, growth from quarter to quarter and cost of leads. Then, challenge your CMO to grow and/or reduce these.
• Layer your technology and marketing so you can scale a business and not have to go back and rework either: rapid scale and reduced time to market are the new success metrics for today’s billion dollar valuation driven world.
• Social media has moved from the “shiny new kid on the block” to a competitive advantage driver: an engaged social “audience” differentiates your business, drives brand and revenue and acts as a built in product marketing feedback loop on steroids.

Critical to Pick the Right Social Channel - Your Choices are almost Infinite (this graphic only lists top six)

SEO Is an Important Component of Your Marketing Strategy (but Content is a Key Marketing Driver)

Five Key Maxims for Effective SEO Marketing

1. Think of Twitter as Google’s new SEO discovery engine – use Twitter to tell Google what new content has been added to your site, with hyperlinks embedded in your Tweets to the blog post or page.
2. Build your site on WordPress with these page attributes to drive SEO: Title and Descriptions consistent with your copy. Use the Yoast plugin.
3. Make sure your page construction HTML “score” is correct – use the W3C Validator to check your code by pasting in a URL and checking.
4. Write shareable copy; by “shareable” we mean with excellent, well writte copy that educates and informs your audience and use the ShareThis WordPress plugin so visitors can easily share your content across their social accounts.
5. Don’t have a slow web site! Google penalizes sites with a negative ranking of 25% – checkout Pingdom’s site to understand your critical load times for a page. You want to be less than 2.5 seconds of load time per page.

Content Marketing is a Key Differentiators for Brands

Great Content Marketing Reflects these Dynamics

• Start slow: content marketing is a marathon and your brand will “self learn” over time if your paying attention.
• Establish benchmark measurements at the outset: traffic, conversions via a sales funnel, ebook downloads, webinars, etc.
• Keep moving forward: don’t get bogged down in the proverbial trenches.
• Align content marketing with other strategies.
• Involve your entire organization whether it’s five or fifty people: great content ideas come in all shapes and sizes: sales, customer service and/or exec staff.
• Great content marketers “newsjack” and “borrow” from others.
• Mix and match snackable short form (images, under 300 word blog post, videos) with long-form “evergreen” high value content.
• “Chunk” and repurpose content to leverage costs.
• Content Syndication is critical to success: create once but share across as many high quality sites as possible.

 Critical Takeaways

• Technology is moving faster than ever before: Moore’s Law is in the rear view mirror.
• Build 1.0/2.0 lifechycles into your business rules and marketing strategy #iteration is critical.
• Be ROI centric in all marketing initiatives.
• Social media requires an articulated content strategy, coupled with excellence in community management.
• It’s a mobile, global driven world and competition is coming at your brand in unforeseen ways.
• Less is more in scaling your business and marketing strategy.
• Data has no boundaries and cloud based tech is reshaping how/where it moves: it’s unfettered, even for SMBs/SMEs.