Every industry experiences evolutions. For some it’s hundreds of years before innovations are made, whereas others change in the blink of an eye. Like a well timed magic trick, one minute you see something, and the next minute it’s completely transformed.
Digital marketing is one of those industries that is always on the cusp of something new and exciting. Personally, that is one of my favorite parts of working at an agency like TopRank Marketing. Each day is an adventure with exciting new things to learn.
Many digital marketers today seem to think that they’ve nailed making marketing magic, but have they really? There are some that in my opinion are constantly making magic (Michael Brenner, Ann Handley and Lee Odden to name a few), while the vast majority are just trying to keep up.
Fortunately, there are conferences like MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston that focus on helping each marketer in attendance truly MAKE magic with their marketing strategy. I feel fortunate to be able to attend this event that is crawling with some of the best and brightest in the industry. If you are attending, or will be keeping up from afar, here are some of the sessions I’m most excited for at Marketing Profs B2B Marketing forum.
Participation Marketing: If You Want B2B Content to Be Great, Ask Your Community to Participate
Speaker: Lee Odden, CEO TopRank Online Marketing
Date/Time: Wednesday October 21, 4:00pm
As a digital agency, we often work with companies that want to create more content, but can’t quite figure out the formula for making it scalable. One of the approaches that our team takes is to help companies look inside and outside their organization for experts that can participate in a content co-creation program.
Tackling your first participation marketing campaign can be a humbling learning experience. You might find that the influencers or experts that you want to participate are giving you the cold shoulder, or that you didn’t completely think through your content concepts.
Fortunately, TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden is here to help you MAKE some participation marketing magic by giving you insight into the things you simply didn’t know you didn’t know about participation marketing and best practices for successful co-created content.
Now don’t go spreading this around, but I also heard that he’s offering a handy guide on participation marketing for attendees of his session.
The Four Corners of Conversion: Understanding the Intersection of Copy, Design, Interaction & Psychology
Speaker: Oli Gardner, Founder Unbounce
Date/Time: Wednesday October 21, 2:30pm
If you haven’t heard of or consumed content from Unboune I urge you to visit their site immediately (after you’re done with this post of course). Oil and his team have done a fantastic job of communicating landing page best practices in some of the most creative ways I’ve ever seen.
One of my favorites thus far has been their 7 day landing page bootcamp which offers a new set of best practices for landing page elements over the seven day course.
Understanding how all elements of a marketing campaign impact conversions is something that I’m very excited to learn more about.
The Power of Conversation: Preserving Human Connection in a Digital World
Speaker: Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date/Time: Thursday October 22, 8:45am
When you spend more time interacting with people online than in real life, it can become easy to lose sight of what your customers really need.
B2B marketers especially have traditionally had a difficult time approaching marketing in a way that focuses on the customer first (yes they are actual people making purchasing decisions) and features and benefits second.
I’m interested to see what advice Sherry has for creating stronger, transparent and long-lasting connections with customers and colleagues in our digital world.
How We Built An Employee Content Sharing Program That Drives A Bajillion Impressions
Speaker: David Honig, Vice President Dynamic Signal
Date/Time: Thursday October 22, 4:00pm
At TopRank Marketing, my job is to market our creativity, people and services in a way that allows us to be the best answer for our potential customers. As an internal marketer, I can relate to the struggle to make it easy and motivating for my fellow employees to share content on a consistent basis.
You will always have those that are interested an motivated on their own, while there are others that need more assistance.
I have high hopes that this presentation will provide me with some additional ideas that we can use at TopRank Marketing to continue encouraging employee advocacy.
Looking Forward to Meeting You!
As a first time attendee of MarketingProfs B2B, I can hardly contain my excitement for the learning and networking that I have the opportunity to participate in this week.
As mentioned above, our CEO Lee Odden will be speaking on Wednesday and I will be attending as many sessions as I can and will be live blogging them here on TopRankBlog.com. If you’d prefer to keep up on Twitter you can find us at: @TopRank, @leeodden and @azeckman.
I look forward to meeting some new marketers and seeing some familiar faces this week. Best of luck to all presenters on their sessions!
Image via Shutterstock
