SES Singapore 2011 – Day 1 Keynotes and Panel Discussions Live Blog

Day 1 of the 2011 SES Singapore is underway! With more than 50 speakers from several well-respected organizations and industries, we can expect to get another healthy dose of the latest trends, best practices, market insights and innovations in the fields of search and social marketing.

As media partner, B2Bento will live blog both tracks and bring you field reports at the end of the day. More updates will follow soon. Stay tuned!

[5:20pm] “SEM for smartphone and tablet devices” – Samuel Goh, SEM Manager, SingTel Digital Media; Adrian Tan, Digital Marketing Manager, clickTRUE; Christian Cadeo, Head of Mobile, South East Asia, Google (Moderator: Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ)

Christian Cadeo – Mobile Search: Advanced strategies for performance advertisers

The Mobile Landscape: Asia is driving the smartphone revolution à it is now very compelling to reach users on smartphones and tablets.

Mobile Advertising (Singapore example): 81% notice advertising at least sometimes – apps and search engines with highest advertising recall. 61% of users take some kind of “action” after ad attention.

Start by defining your mobile campaign goals: Be ready, Be found, Be smart.

Goals:

• Drive mCommerce or mobile site visits: mobile site links, product ads, communication ads
• Over-the-phone Sales: 1in 3 searches have local intent (85% contacted companies)
• In-Store Sales: 1in 3 searches have local intent (83% actually visited stores)
• App Downloads: download directly from a search ad with click to download

Set clear expectations for performance. Expand mobile with gdn text, display, YouTube, wallet.

Adrian Tan – Extending Search Marketing into Mobile via Google AdWords

Which mobile device do we think of when we want to do a mobile campaign? We should consider ALL smartphones, not just the highly successful brands and models. If people search on desktops, they search on mobile. Mobile advertising is the fastest advertising.

5 Tips for you AdWords

• Mobile Landing Pages: It is always best practice to optimize your mobile landing page for all relevant phones. Take note of loading performance because 1 second delay will result to deficits in page views, customer satisfaction and conversions.
• Keyword Length: Brevity has its benefits.
• Ad Position – Top Dog (first search result) wins … more so in mobile search.
• Call To Action
• Track & Optimise with Google Analytics / Targeting: ad serving is more precise on mobile than PC

[4.40 pm] Integrated marketing: Myth or reality by Mandeep Grover, Regional Marketing Director, Asia-Pacific, Johnson & Johnson Medical

• Integrated marketing: unifying different marketing methods to achieve specific objectives
• Brains have evolved little – but channels have multiplied and there is so little time
• Multi-tasking – the bane of media planning! But with integrated marketing, it can give deeper insight and better predictability of preference, e.g., search analytics during American Idol
• The evolving consumer journey: consumers turnover devices faster, talk a lot more about their products (see page 4 of this Branding in the Digital Age by David C Edelman in Harvard Business Review, Dec 2010)

• 4 Steps to Bring it All Together

• 1. Deeper understanding of insights – need to understand consumers better; not just researchers but ethnographers

• Foundation phase – what we already know through thorough review of relevant data; Discovery phase – what do we need to know through profound qualitative immersion in consumer’s world; Insight Focus – what will make the connection – true insight which can change your consumer’s behaviour
• 2. Know the media channels inside-out to assess how closely they can align with your marketing objectives

• What are the consumption habits for each media type (e.g., propensity to redeem coupons or enter competitions on product packets or labels)
• 3. Redefine the consumer journey – know how the customer buys (e.g., Acuvue relies on customer referrals)

• E.g., J&J: Permission-based marketing with brand taking a back seat – Online ads that offer trials leading to purchase. On Facebook, design a t-shirt and upload to FB to win iPad.
• 4. Clear metrics to demonstrate value – marketers should understand numbers

• “Trial to conversion”: leading indicator of sales
• “Net Promoter Score”: leading indicator of growth

• In Summary

• Understand and optimize the customer journey – avoid too many steps
• Consistency is king for integrated marketing: increase in strength, reach and frequency; IMC framework still works
• Set the right KPIs to measure success – integrated backend, number of downloads, leads and conversions; net promoter score

[1 pm] Special Address: Digital transformation by Arun Poojari, Senior Manager, Consumer Engagement, Marketing, SEA, Nokia

• Get the background right: have a vision, get stakeholder buy-in and assemble a great team
• Have the right principles – digital effectiveness, digital investments, campaign planning, campaign optimization, operations, etc.
• Digital Effectiveness – gauge what digital media is more effective for the purposes you are looking at – e.g., brand favorability, purchase intent?
• Digital Investment – Owned, Paid and Earned. Trend towards putting more in Earned and Owned, less on Paid.
• Campaign planning – have constant impact across owned, earned and paid media. Bought media is more effective in the “sustenance” phase of the campaign
• Campaign optimization: Constant optimization – Involvement factor vs campaign timeline – in newer models of CPC campaigns, effort is more in “execution” phase, while in traditional, it’s typically in “pre-campaign planning” phase
• Operations

• Capabilities considerations – Entry Points – traffic, interest, action, high-quality engagement
• Campaigns
• Digital share: overall marketing mix, digital type share (display/SEM etc.), digital buy share (CPM/CPC/CPA)
• Data: retargeting, capturing data – who, what, when, where, why
• Keyword driven marketing

• Media – SEM keyword buys. Measure things like share of impressions, cost per high quality engagement, and at the “always on/tactical” layer
• Offline – Above-the-line (ATL) and Below-the-Line (BTL) activities. Right-linking to the correct pages. Using anchor text for links. Optimizing PR releases – insert relevant keywords, add images, add videos, social buttons.

[12.40 am] Executive address: eCommerce lead generation and search marketing overview by Marcelo Wesseler, Head of eCommerce, RS Component

• Customer discovery: Traditionally – word of mouth, press advertising; Now – SEM and social media marketing
• Knowing customers: as a company, catalogue response, intuition
• Marketing led e-commerce – Chief Considerations

• Understanding the B2B consumer
• Who is the real customer – the person within the company
• What engineers want and told them
• New approach to Search Led Generation

• Pulled PPC in-house and set up company wide automation tool
• Generated 1m keywords
• Remarketing
• Affiliate network
• Tips for PPC keywords

• Stay on topic
• Know how your customers speak (not your internal terminology)
• Be wary of “lost in translation” – ensure you “localize” and not just translate; work with local/regional experts
• Landing pages: match expectations in ad copy, use bulleted points, include credibility (awards and testimonials), compelling call-to-action, address all stages of the buying process
• Post-analysis – data and leads: conversions are (not always) sales
• SEO tips

• Target high-converting keywords
• On-page – follow the rules – content is king
• Build links “ethically”
• Blog and guest blog
• Use partnerships and your internal content experts
• Social Media Lead Generation

• Facebook/Weibo for customer service and public relations
• Design Spark – own social media platform for community of global engineers

• Resource site for electronic engineers
• Free-to-use tools, etc.
• 3D CAD program

• 3D models of component downloadable for free
• Design Spark PCB

• World’s most powerful, unrestricted, free PCB tool
• Tips

• Create valuable content – don’t influence too much
• Great customer experience is a good driver for positive sentiments
• Listen but don’t overreact
• Use customer service for a potential quick win
• RS saw 53% online sales growth – big chunk driven by SEM and social media marketing
• eCommerce as a multi-channel growth driver
• Additional Considerations

• Look at goal definitions – don’t track just digital revenue; mechanisms to co-relate digital to offline revenue; use click to call, chat and prominent contact data display
• Cookie duration – consider longer due to to longer sales cycle
• Multi-channel attribution – track multi-channel, work together with first click attribution
• Last click vs First click attribution – what keywords/channels led consumers to website; helps to understand effective channels
• Communicate value proposition clearly – use a good hook like incentives
• Employ local/regional partners
• Key Learnings

• Understand customer and purchasing lifecycles
• Start with Search – first PPC then SEO
• Focus on sSM campaign on customer centric value creation
• Don’t neglect onsite customer experience and lead conversion tactics
• Be diligent with traditional onsite web analytics – set up robust reporting mechanisms
• Use free tools, e.g., Google Analytics, seokeywordstracker, yslow and pagetest.org, before investing in expensive tools
• Build in-house expertise to complement agencies’ work

[10 am] Keynote Panel: “Managing Search and Social Media Marketing in Regulated Industries”

David Garceran Nieuwenburg, Head of Marketing and Services, HONG KONG JOCKEY CLUB (HKJC); Barry Lloyd, President, Webcertain Asia; Moderated by Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ When it comes to search marketing and social media, one of the most commonly heard phrases by marketers in regulated industries is “we’re not allowed to ”. While customers continue to actively search and thirst for information, marketers in the regulated industries have different approaches to sharing experiences and dialoguing online. David Nieuwenberg on HKJC:

• HKJC faces several regulations and restrictions in advertising their products
• Have to use Responsible Gaming Guidelines in all circumstances
• They use social media hubs under corporate brand contol to bring in traffic to their site, and listen to their customers
• Social media traffic results have been fairly impressive from Facebook and YouTube
• Facebook campaign: provide match and team statistics, using “gap-fillers” such as videos and sharing winning experiences, exclusive offerings, match alerts, news/highlights/videos and live match promotions – a detailed roster is prepared for each of these activities.
• Search engine optimization and marketing to support reach via purchasing of keywords – using words that don’t have direct association with club’s activities
• SEM starts around the time SEO strategy generates diminishing returns
• SEM focuses on campaign categories

[9 am] Opening Address: “Search and the Connected Consumer” – Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ

• Internet and World Wide Web are not the same.
• Information retrieval vs Data retrieval – making all previously gathered human knowledge accessible – let’s thank the Hypertext thinkers: Vannevar Bush and Sir Tim Berners Lee, and more recently Google: “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
• Shows how search engines work – a schematic diagram
• Crawling the web vs. Indexing it
• Building the inverted index and modeling using the vector space model
• Genesis of social network analysis – PageRank and Hits (Larry Page/Sergei Brin); Citation Analysis using influence weights (Pinski & Narin); Hubs, authorities and communities
• Not all links are equal – some links are more equal than others and some are infinitely more equal, e.g., when building links, look for one from the most influence, “who’s the Pope?”
• End user behaviour has changed
• The “taxonomy” of search

• Understanding user intent: information, navigational and transactional

• Strongest signals in a search engine: text on an HTML page, linkage data and link anchor text, social media – tagging, bookmarking, etc. Gathered most by toolbars and inbuilt browsers.

• End user data: query chains and user trails; what the user is looking for may not be the same as what they asked for
• User mediated content far exceeds “web” content – can’t be indexed in time!
• Shift towards information-seeking on social networking sites
• Preference for knowledge shared by one’s own networks – an “all about me” society
• Applications sidestep web browsers to deliver specialized content
• Search marketing has to change to reach out to the transient media consumer or the constantly connected consumer
• Connected Marketing

• Changing consumer behaviours, not about technology
• Complexities of modern marketing – reach to an entirely different kind of consumer