Category: Writing

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-linkedin-to-amplify-live-event-experience/

Want more leads, connections, and exposure from the live events you attend? Wondering how to use LinkedIn to build rapport with people who follow the event? In this article, you’ll discover a strategy for using LinkedIn to build awareness for your business before, during, and after a live conference or trade show. Why Use LinkedIn […]

The post How to Use LinkedIn to Amplify Your Live Event Experience appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/03/5-reasons-virtual-meetings-suck-and-5-ways-to-fix-them.html

With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.

I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.

Some of them have sucked.

But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.

Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …

Problem #1 – Increased distractions.

Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.

Problem #2 – Lack of audience.

The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.

Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.

If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.

Problem #4 – No accountability.

When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.

Problem #5 – One-way interaction.

Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.

So, how do we fix these issues?

It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.

Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:

Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.

If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.

Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.

While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.

Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.

Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.

Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.

In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.

Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.

Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.

Is the future about virtual events?

I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.

I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.

We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/tEvQQz2JRxI/

Search marketing strategy is undoubtedly vital for most B2B brands today, yet there are several elements that play important roles in its ultimate success that may surprise you.

Leading the search engine optimization (SEO) program for a major brand is a vital role that’s only taken on greater importance over the years, as even the rise of social media marketing hasn’t eliminated the need for B2B marketers to have a strong search marketing strategy.

With search marketing influencers at top brands facing a nearly constant barrage of new SEO challenges, how do smart search industry leaders build successful campaigns?

Non-paid organic search efforts have some of the lowest website visitor traffic bounce rates for B2B and B2C campaigns alike, which is why SEO practitioners at major firms continue to play such an important role in successful marketing efforts.

Having a sound search marketing strategy comes not only from long-standing traditional on-page technical elements, but more than ever before three additional tactics working together help to build a new type of cohesive SEO success:

• Building a Best-Answer Content Strategy
• Utilizing Knowledgeable Industry Experts for Influencer Marketing
• Tracking & Adjusting to Search Industry Changes

Let’s take a look at each of these three key areas that combine to form the type of strong search strategy that top B2B marketing leaders rely on, and then we’ll look at 14 search innovators working at major brands.

Building a Best-Answer Content Strategy

Part of building a successful best-answer content strategy is learning the questions that your audience is asking:

• What is your audience looking for?
• How is your audience searching for answers?
• Where are they looking?

Getting to the heart of the questions that are most important to your audience is a powerful way to provide what we like to call best-answer solutions.

Learning what your audience is searching for, where they’re looking, and how they are going about their searches is an entire branch of search marketing, and a number of dedicated tools exist to help in this area, as I cover in “10 Smart Question Research Tools for B2B Marketers,” including offerings such as SEMrush’s helpful empathy map.

[bctt tweet="“How can you be the best answer for your audience if you don’t understand what questions they’re asking or what problems they’re trying to solve?” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

To help you create or expand you own best-answer content strategy, we’ve gathered together four resource articles our team has written about the various aspects of building great content that instills trust:

• The Science and Art of Best Answer B2B Marketing Content
• Trust Factors: How Best Answer Content Fuels Brand Credibility
• How B2B Marketers Can Win at Search with Best Answer Content
• How A Best Answer Content Strategy Drives B2B Marketing Results

Utilizing Knowledgeable Industry Experts for Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing may not initially spring to mind when looking for areas important to search efforts, yet it can have tremendous impact on both paid and organic efforts. Brands that haven’t yet utilized B2B influencer marketing have the most to gain.

B2B influencer marketing is at the core of the services we’re known for at TopRank Marketing, providing successful programs and campaigns to major firms from LinkedIn and Adobe to Dell and 3M. Such successes led Forrester to list us as the only B2B marketing agency offering influencer marketing as a top capability in its “B2B Marketing Agencies, North America, Q1 2019” report.”

Successful B2B influencer marketing uses knowledgeable industry experts to increase trust, create best-answer content, and offer customer experiences that are tailor-made for increasing search findability.

You can dig in and explore some of our top recent influencer marketing articles, including the factors that go into making a great B2B influencer, here:

• 5 Key Traits of the Best B2B Influencers
• 25 B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign & Engagement Ideas for 2020
• Optimizing ABM with Influencer Marketing

[bctt tweet="“Influencer marketing may not initially spring to mind when looking for areas important to search efforts, yet it can have tremendous impact on both paid and organic efforts.” @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

Tracking & Adjusting to Search Industry Changes

The search marketing industry has been one of rapid changes since the days of Alta Vista, and keeping up-to-date with the ever-shifting machinations and technical intricacies can be a full-time job for top B2B SEO leaders.

I remember in the late 1990s when my old friend Brett Tabke — who used to call my 300-baud computer bulletin board system back in the 1980s — first started holding informal gatherings of webmasters and search industry professionals, a move that led to forming Pubcon, now one of the longest-running search-related conferences.

In-person networking events are hard to beat for not only search but whatever your particular area of marketing, as they offer the ability to form lasting relationships, build new client connections, and learn the latest from presenting keynote speakers, as we explore in “Content Marketing Gold Rush: How to Unearth Content Gold at Marketing Industry Events.”

There have never been more conferences, including those tailored for B2B marketers, and recently I compiled a list of 50, in “The BIGLIST of 50 Top B2B Marketing Conferences in 2020.”

Search marketing industry online news publications are also abundant as sources for staying abreast of the rapidly-changing world of SEO, including SEO Roundtable with industry veteran Barry Schwartz, and many others.

[bctt tweet="Tip for creating #ContentGold around industry events: Reach out to organizers, sponsors, or speakers that represent topics and brands of interest to your community to do pre-conference interviews. @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

SEO Influencers From Major Brands to Follow & Learn From

Learning from some of the savviest search marketers is a great way to expand your own SEO repertoire, and we’ve compiled a list of 14 to get you started, listed in random order.

Jesse McDonald @jesseseogeek
Global SEO Strategist, IBM

Carolyn Shelby @cshel
SEO Manager, ESPN/The Walt Disney Company

Melanie Mitchell @MelanieMitchell
Head of SEO, Chewy

Derrick Wheeler @DerrickWheeler
Senior SEO Marketing Manager, SAP Concur

Keith Goode @keithgoode
Senior SEO Strategist, IBM

Aaron Chronister @TheMadHat
Senior Director of SEO, CBS Interactive

Brian LaFrance @blafrance
Director of SEO, CBS Interactive

Milosz Pekala @mnbuzz
SEO Manager,  Mayo Clinic

Adam Audette @audette
Senior Vice President and Head of Global SEO, Merkle

Ash Buckles @ashbuckles
Global SEO Manager, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

Jim Huang @_jimhuang
Organic Search SEO Manager, AARP

Dan Perry @danperry
SEO Director, Turner Broadcasting

Dennis Goedegebuure @TheNextCorner
Head of Global Consumer Growth Marketing, PayPal

Gary Illyes @methode
Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google

This is just the tip of the iceberg however, and you can find many more top industry marketers in the following additional lists we’ve assembled:

• 10 Years of Women Who Rock in Marketing – CMO Edition
• 50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers
• 32 Top Social Media Marketing Influencers To Follow
• 50 Content Marketing Influencers and Experts to Follow

Educate Your Team To Deliver Knockout B2B Search Performance

via GIPHY

We hope that our look at how search marketing benefits from building a best-answer content strategy, using industry experts for influencer marketing, and keeping up-to-date with SEO industry news has given you plenty of ideas for taking your own search marketing to new heights.

You can learn even more about being the best answer for your customers and the importance of SEO and influence in a presentation TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be delivering in April:

April 22-23, 2020 – Content Marketing Conference — Boston, MA.
Be Best Answer for Your Customers with SEO and Influence

The post 14 Search Marketing Influencers at Top B2B Brands appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/03/5-reasons-virtual-meetings-suck-and-5-ways-to-fix-them.html

With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.

I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.

Some of them have sucked.

But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.

Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …

Problem #1 – Increased distractions.

Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.

Problem #2 – Lack of audience.

The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.

Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.

If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.

Problem #4 – No accountability.

When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.

Problem #5 – One-way interaction.

Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.

So, how do we fix these issues?

It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.

Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:

Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.

If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.

Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.

While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.

Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.

Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.

Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.

In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.

Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.

Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.

Is the future about virtual events?

I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.

I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.

We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.