July 6th, 2012
by Aaron Aders
Digital Cream San Jose is an opportunity for senior client-side digital marketers to discuss the reality of digital marketing as well as best practices with the online marketing industry’s ‘cream of the crop’ in an exclusive invitation-only roundtable event.
The two keynotes of the day were a presentation by Chris Tolles, CEO and co-founder of Topix, and a presentation by eConsultancy on the latest in digital marketing trends. Tolles focused on parallels between brand campaigns and presidential election campaigns. It turns out that election campaigns know much more about who you are than you may think. Data is cross-correlated across social profiles, voting history and even credit reports to calculate the likelihood of you voting for any particular candidate. Just exchange ‘candidate votes’ for ‘product purchase’ and it’s easy to see parallels to the marketing world. The second keynote, by eConsultancy, provided in-depth analysis of the latest digital marketing trends.
The roundtable discussions throughout the day served as an excellent format for valuable information exchange between attendees. This format allowed a much more intimate and in-depth discussion with digital marketers, where we discussed challenges, goals and best practices. I served as the expert for the SEO roundtable, which received over 30 attendees during three 75-minute roundtable discussions. Other attendees also enjoyed the roundtable format, including Moe Rubenzahl of Maxim Integrated Products. “Most industry get-togethers focus on hearing from experts [and] the roundtable format let us share community knowledge from our peers in different industry sectors. Being in B2B, I always find it valuable to hear from those on the consumer side,” said Rubenzahl.
The hot topic of the day at the SEO roundtable was online conversion attribution. In fact, two of the three SEO roundtable discussions began with questions regarding multi-touch attribution. Jeremy Post of Mod Cloth found value in Slingshot SEO’s multi-touch attribution study, adding, “Your multi-channel attribution study was timely. Attribution modeling is something we all know we should be considering as we plan marketing strategies. But until recently, it’s been difficult and/or costly for all but the largest advertisers. With MCF reports now available in GA, at least the analysis of this data is within reach.”
Many of the roundtables also discussed departmental siloing at their particular organizations. Post noticed this trend, noting, “Website analytics, customer analytics and marketing are still very siloed teams/strategies within many organizations.” Even though these issues exist, it was refreshing to see that marketers are savvy enough to recognize that holistic integration of digital marketing strategies is crucial to success.
The Digital Cream event structured a comfortable exchange of the latest best practices and ideas between professionals in the digital marketing space. It was an invaluable experience to explore the top pain points and challenges of the top digital marketing managers in the industry. Attendance at this event is a must if you are a top digital marketer and are lucky enough to receive an invitation to the eConsultancy Digital Cream event!