Live coverage: Digital Marketing Conference

John Powell: Our live coverage of the Digital Marketing Conference has concluded. Below and on the subsequent pages linked to at the bottom of this page, you will find the archived coverage of all the major presentations and insights presented at the 2011 Digital Marketing Conference.

Build Partnerships: Capitalize on Third-Party Comparison Websites

In 2009, 21% of financial product online applicants used a third-party online comparison website. Financial companies must therefore learn from and consider partnering with these sites in order to maintain and increase their market position. Learn: How to target your marketing based on the areas of comparison consumers are most interested in, How to emulate the features of these sites in your own digital channels to maximize traffic and sales, How to partner with or advertise on these sites to benefit from their popularity.

Kelvin Mangaroo, Founder and President, RateSupermarket.ca
Derek Szeto, General Manager – Deals, Coupons, and Shopping, Yellow Pages Group
George Favvas, Founder and CEO, SmartHippo (Montreal)

Kelvin Mangaroo: We aim to educate and empower our consumers and have them take control of their personal finances.

Kelvin Mangaroo: 73% of Canadians comparison shop online. 66% solicit opinions from friends and families online when it comes to buying a product.

Derek Szeto: We see it as “early days” for the financial services market. Our mission is to help Canadians to save money and connect Canadian consumers with businesses. We compare credit cards, TSFA products, savings-checking accounts, etc.

Derek Szeto: The audience is there and hungry for content to save money. Canadians want to engage but tools are limited.

George Favvas: We are the Yelp for personal finance. People come to us to compare mortgage rates and find financial advisors. Consumes can rate lenders on our site too. Our traffic comes from cobrand partners, API partners and organic traffic.

George Favvas: People are looking to compare rates between different providers, third party feedback – what real people have to say – we see a segment of people who cannot find the information they want on the financial institution’s own site. User generated content is driving a lot of traffic now.

Derek Szeto: People coming to our site are in discovery mode and there are those looking for specific financial information. Our huge community forum is driving our SEO content.

Kelvin Mangaroo: People come to our site in the research and discovery mode. We educate them on financial services. Rates, reviews and our forums build our volume.

Derek Szeto: People come back to our site for the community. They want to hear what other unbiased Canadians think.

George Favvas: People coming our site are looking for us to help them through the research of the product or service they are interested in.

George Favvas: FaceBook will always be FaceBook and it has deep penetration in Canada but there are just some things you will not ask there. It is not the forum for such research.

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Digital Marketing ROI: How to Measure, Analyze and Predict Results
All companies need to measure the effectiveness of ongoing marketing campaigns. But with many different digital strategies, how can one find a common standard of ROI for comparison and evaluation? Learn: How to decide which models of ROI measurement in digital marketing will be most accurate for your strategy, How to measure your market impact in social media where ROI is much harder to gauge, New measurement models for mobile media, and early indications of their success.

Silu Modi, Vice President, Digital Marketing, North America, Macquarie Banking and Financial Services
Mladen Raickovic, Head of Partnerships & Product Development, Network Portfolio, Olive Media
Peter Olsson, Web Analytics Program Leader, Sun Life Financial

Silu Modi: How do we define success in social media? What do you measure? The reason why people don’t think it is measurable is because they don’t know what to measure. People also don’t know where they started. The baseline is not there. Some people don’t have time to analyze. Other don’t want to know the answer, if things are negative.

Silu Modi: What is advantage of digital marketing? Date correlation is a huge advantage. There are two things you can measure: qualitative (brand awareness, brand sentiment). They are not easy to prove though. Quantitative are impartially measurable.

Silu Modi: Some digital quantitative measures? Page ranks for keywords. Email permissions. Email click through rates. Newsletter subscriptions. Landing page visits. Qualified leads and sales numbers too. The key is only pick a few goals. Every campaign, pick one or two targets.

Silu Modi: Get your baseline and understand what is happening. Understand where the spikes are or drop off points. Execute specific landing pages. This makes it easy to track your campaign.

Silu Modi: Track and measure regularly. Do A/B testing if possible. Try different messages. It is a great way of doing market research. Segmentation tests are important as well to measure what resonates with your audience. Look for inflection points.

Silu Modi: Once you have the numbers, you can tell which campaigns worked and why they worked.

Peter Olsson: We understand the value of ROI but find it difficult to figure out. The complications are: money is worth more today than tomorrow, the residual value generated from marketing and correlating revenues and costs. For these reasons, you should befriend your finance people.

Peter Olsson: Why interest in ROI? It is a universally applicable metric, it is well understood and accepted, it is aligned with corporate objectives, accountability feeds excellence and helps justify marketing budgets.

Peter Olsson: Once you have your goal, you need to break things down into smaller metrics. People launch things and forget about it, don’t do their measurements.

Peter Olsson: Most popular reports and site wide averages are close to useless. Without segmentation there are no insights. One technique is to add meta data to your reports. When you see trends, you can set benchmarks.

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Coordinating Your Marketing Strategy Across Digital Channels for Optimal Profit

With the digital world expanding into even more channels, segments and communities, it is increasingly necessary to maintain an overarching brand and marketing strategy if you are to benefit. Take away best practices for maximizing your company’s digital brand presence, and learn: What to keep constant through all channels and what to customize to each, How to e-purpose apps designed for one channel to be used in others so none of your investment is wasted, How to maximize profit by cross-selling across channels and sub-brands.

Su McVey, VP Customer Communications and Marketing, BMO Financial Group.

Pritesh Gandhi, Senior Manager of Enterprise Digital Strategy, BMO Financial Group.

Pritesh Gandhi: The landscape is changing and we are a little slow to adapting to the technology itself. The marketing is still the same but classify consumers according to how they use social media. Keep up with consumers not necessarily with emerging media. Adoption rate is a lot faster when the idea is right.

Pritesh Gandhi: Sometimes we focus so much on the competition that we forget the consumer. Keep up with the consumer.

Pritesh Gandhi: If content isn’t relevant, you will not generate influencers. Generate conversations, manage and provide the right environment for those conversations. Listen to consumer conservations and respond.

Pritesh Gandhi: Your campaigns need to integrate more of a long-term strategy.

Pritesh Gandhi: The consumer is in control. They used to have to listen to the messages you send them but now they are in control. They trust you less and have less of an attention span. There are more product choices as well. If you understand the consumer is in the middle of everything, you will be able to create a better marketing campaign.

Su McVey: I don’t think there will be an end to traditional media. I am a firm believer that every campaign has to be integrated. The biggest lesson I have learned is that producing a television ad is a lot easier than working with social media. It is the challenge of this dynamic marketplace. You have to keep feeding the social media beast. It can be a constant process and is tiring at times.

Su McVey: You have to repurpose your content and converge everything into the different channels.

Su McVey: It is about building relationships with your audience.

Pritesh Gandhi: We made a conscious effort to build a long-term relationship with consumers. It take effort to continue this momentum. The conscious effort is not to sell a product. We are focusing on loyalty. We are giving consumers the information they are looking for not trying to sell them on a product.

Pritesh Gandhi: From a social media perspective, we are turning more into a help desk. You have to find a balance. Our Twitter account is our help desk. It is like a 24/7 call centre for us.

Pritesh Gandhi: Our content strategy is to figure out themes. Depending on what the themes are, we break things down by topic. The topics are then put into slots during the calendar year.

Targeting Your Digital Efforts to Niche Markets for Best Results

Because different demographic groups – age, interests, financial status, etc. – use digital media differently, there is no “one size fits all” marketing strategy. Learn how to get maximum ROI by strategically targeting each group by different media.

Steve Mast, President, Delvinia

Steve Mast: For Titleist, we found a group of people who like marking their golf balls. This niche community shared their designs. Why thought about how to capitalize on this and built a campaign around them. We interviewed pros and found out that people were paying others to create marking designs for them.

Steve Mast: You have to understand your market. What motivates these people and what connects them? The other big thing is how do you cost effectively reach them? How do you stay engaged with a niche market?

Steve Mast: How to best target a niche audience? Understand what motivates them. Where, when do you reach them? How do you engage them?

Steve Mast: You are trying to find that one connection that brings everyone together. Online research, social media monitoring and keyword research helps.

Steve Mast: Get involve and participate in the communities. Observe those communities and study them, what they say and what they do. You need to learn about them.

Steve Mast: You are trying to create customer empathy and understand intimately the niches of your niche. Dig in and understand that nice market.

Steve Mast: There are a million digital marketing tools and things keep expanding. Mobile is a whole new category. How do you figure out the right thing to do? Start with your customer and understanding them.

Steve Mast: It is also helpful to create a “Day in the Life” to understand the niche market better. What they do from the time they get up to when they go to bed.

Steve Mast: Create personas for your niche market. It less about a profile or demographics but more about understanding your market. It is a very, very powerful tool.

Steve Mast: How do you engage this niche audience? Create a gathering spot for them. Create platforms for them to voice their opinions. Putting together an advisory or research panel is another way to engage the audience and allow them to voice their thoughts.

Steve Mast: Create an email program that listens and sends targeted follow-up messages based on an expressed interest.

Steve Mast: Including rewards or bonuses in your gathering spots increases engagement and participation with your niche audience.

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Embracing Social Media: Innovation, Leadership and Technology for Customer Engagement

How providers of multiple financial products and services can continue to innovate, and learn to: Grow your market share by implementing a relational social marketing model, Effectively manage brand reputation in interactive social media environment, Increase long-term consumer loyalty through concrete strategies for engagement.

Helen M. Overland,, Vice President, Search Engine People.

Helen M. Overland: We are going to look at engagement as far as Twitter and FaceBook. This is more about how it directly affects you. Regulation issues, at a high level it has been up in the air if social media can be used. IIROC has said you can use social media. You need to be smart of how you are using it and be careful of how they post on your site. You need to be careful of re-Tweeting information or liking someone’s post as you could be seen as endorsing them.

Helen M. Overland: Social media isn’t necessarily good for direct sales. Customer service is your low hanging fruit, if you can provide good customer service in a public forum. It is how you handle the unhappy customer that is important. You can create more loyal customers than ever before.

Helen M. Overland: When customers had problems with Android phones and were posting in a forum, Rogers went into the forum and posted a well-crafted message. People started calming down. People actually started defending the Rogers representative and were engaged online. What Rogers decided to do was offer a trade-up to the new operating system. The final outcome was by directly addressing the unhappy customers where the conversation was taking place, some very unhappy customers were happy again. It is good to know if you Tweet negative comments about Rogers they will respond to you.

Helen M. Overland: The first thing to do when starting a social media strategy is define your goals. How often are people talking about you? Are people positive about your brand? How much traffic are your getting from social media? Are customer service calls up or down? You will get more links and could make more money by investing in social media. You also need to identify your audience. Where do they congregate? What does your audience want? Examine blogs, social networks, forums, Q&A places like Yahoo! Answers and business forums. Don’t just jump to FaceBook or Twitter.

Helen M. Overland: You will have to decide who will own social media in your company. The PR team, customer service or superstar CEOs can help in that regard. Look at your resources and who should own this in the company. Check with the lawyers constantly to understand what you can and cannot post. Difficult situations may come up but you need to respond in a timely manner.

Helen M. Overland: You need to get buy-in and commit to this strategy. Social media is not something you can turn on or off. If you stop doing it, you will stop ignoring people. You have to make a long-term commitment.

Helen M. Overland: People want to be heard. Your customers have problems and you want to fix those problems.

Helen M. Overland: Companies that don’t use social media, their stock has generally went down 2%. Those who do use social media, their stock went up 3%.

Helen M. Overland: Using social media allows people to see you have great customer service. The reason why people use FaceBook is to share information, including deals with their friends. People are using FaceBook and clicking on content. Make your content shareable and write really great titles.

Helen M. Overland: People click on mobile advertising to check out a product or service and to get more information about a deal. People love deals. People love saving money. If you can offer a deal or free gift, that is going to get people to your site and share your message and content.

Helen M. Overland: Online video viewership increases time on your site. People are viewing a lot online. Video gets people’s attention and is more impactful than a story. It will have more of an emotional impact. If you can, make your video funny. They get shared more than anything else.

Helen M. Overland: What not to do? The top reason why people “unlike” brands on Facebook is marketing clutter on their pages and the content that’s published is boring. You need to make sure your FaceBook content is good but don’t post too frequently.

The Digital Customer: A Blueprint for Customer Acquisition in the Social Age
The rules have changed. Marketing the digital era is about engaging with potential customers in an entirely new way. Learn how to accelerate customer acquisition, drive advocacy.
Scott Koester, Senior Product Strategist, Bazaarvoice.

Scott Koester: Why does social work? People trust their friends. We just take those conversations and take them to the online world. People trust customer reviews and ratings more than anything else. We want customers to be the centre of the sales loop. Today, our agenda is to look at : Acquisition, conversation, customer – product insights and common problems.

Scott Koester: Social media call to actions in display ads can improve the strength of your ads. Use social media to do the work for you when you want to improve your organic search on Google. Allowing consumers to post comments and write content for your site. They will use words that other consumers will apply in their searches. That drives more traffic to your site. Google also like fresh content. Customers can help your SEO strategy. User-generated content is key.

Scott Koester: There are a lot of companies who are afraid of negative content. If asked to share stories, most customers though will not submit negative stories to share or post under their name. More people will write reviews rather than fill out surveys. They would rather help out other people than fill out a survey for you. You can use FaceBook to solicit customer stories, reviews too.

Scott Koester: Remember you can take content and leverage it in multiple channels.

Scott Koester: 28% people who use FaceBook share content on their walls and usually have 130 friends. People who are very active to the point of “friending” a company, have on average 310 friends.

Scott Koester: Customers who wrote 1 or 2 star reviews on their site were 40% more likely to cancel their policy. 75% of negative reviews are based on wrongly worded marketing plans or advertising. Don’t be afraid of negative reviews. Be prepared on how to handle them. Reach out to your customers in the right way.

Scott Koester: The companies who use social media the best are those who employ it to make change within their companies and better their products because of the comments and reviews.

Scott Koester: “Engaging with consumers in a dialogue and being an effective listener is where the greatest innovations will come from.” — John Hayes, American Express, CEO.

Scott Koester: Four star reviews are what make five star products.

Scott Koester: How to handle legal concerns? Moderate your content. If you put the content on your own site, you have more control over the comments. Expect negative comments, learn from them and dilute them.

Scott Koester: Avoid ghost town communities. Infuse content throughout your site, so people can access it better. A community tab is not enough to drive interaction.

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Ensuring Compliance, Protecting Privacy and Managing Your Reputation

Many financial institutions have been hesitant to embrace digital marketing, especially social media. Hear how you can manage regulatory concerns and still capitalize on its benefit.

Richard Shimoda, Senior Legal Counsel, The Bank of Nova Scotia

Sarah Carter, VP of Strategy, Actiance

Stephanie Holmes-Winton, CEO, The Money Finder (Halifax)

Richard Shimoda: What you should watch out for when it comes to your social media sites? Misleading advertising: The competition act prohibits false or misleading representations. There is no difference between a television ad or a web video or blog post. Endorsements, you must be transparent about them. Contests, rules must be easily accessible and you must always be aware of minors. You must get someone’s consent to collect or use information for marketing purposes. Be aware of the upcoming anti-spam laws.

Richard Shimoda: In your social media involvement, have terms of use so you or your customers will not post copyrighted content. If you display another company’s trademark, make sure you do so correctly. Be aware of defamation and false statements made in your social media outlets.

Richard Shimoda: Monitor: What people are saying, your own sites for negative comments. As a general rule, you might want to retain or archive content for seven years.

Richard Shimoda: How to handle complaints? Have an escalation strategy, a moderator. Your reputation might be affected on other sites as well and only take legal action as a last resort. Develop a social media policy with your company, have terms of use on your site, monitor the activity on your site and respond accordingly.

Stephanie Holmes-Winton: I fight for my right to be heard. When my investment dealer brought down the hammer. What was more important for me was putting a message out there. The answer is not to shut us up? Maybe the answer is having a select few who are trained to represent the company. Social media is about authenticity and not about controlling what people think about you. We all have risks every day and If we don’t stop being afraid, there will be future problems with financial literacy. When the IIROC rules came out, they even went as far as to say reTweets could be considered a condoning the original person and their comment? How can you get advance approval for that? Work with those how have social media experience and compliance to figure out a solid strategy and trained to use social media effectively.

Stephanie Holmes-Winton: My suggestions are these: In most compliance department appoint one person for social media. Make people register and supervise them. Create a program and if people don’t attend they don’t get to Tweet for the company.

Stephanie Holmes-Winton: If ghost writing is okay in our industry, why isn’t social media?

Sarah Carter: In financial services industry, social media is becoming departmentalized and allowing sales, marketing folks to reach out with those tools. Even HR is becoming involved using social networks to do background checks and recruit staff. Advisors and reps use LinkedIn to send out messages which they get a 40% response. There is no email campaign that can achieve that. IT use social media to identify security breaches.

Sarah Carter: Requirements to meet regulations: Indentity management, grandeur application control, anti-malware, data leak prevention, moderation, logging and archiving and exporting of data.

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Optimizing Digital Signage to Maximize In-Branch Value

RCU implemented digital signage technology to improve its in-branch marketing efforts and member response time. It resulted in convenient streamlined deliverable messaging, increased on-site sales and service, enhanced community image and brand consistency.

Vicki Hoehn, Executive VP Marketing, Royal Credit Union (Eau Claire, WI)

Vicki Hoehn: It used to be that members had all the time in the world to do their transactions. Many of our employees were self-marketers. It was a nightmare from a marketing perspective. Things have changed. Everything and everyone has gotten busier. People are not just standing in line any more. In the early 90’s, we opened a branch that opened later and had a sleeker design. We added a video wall with five monitors. It was not so high tech and we invested $20,000 in that initiative.

Vicki Hoehn: We changed to digital signage but it was heavy text and didn’t appeal to our members. We evolved our digital signage to include more photos and videos. Eventually, we didn’t have any tellers in our lobby but monitors and a greeter instead. We put monitors at all of our “drive-ups” too.

Vicki Hoehn: Why did we go digital? Because we spend money on the design of our campaigns. We wanted to leverage the marketing and play our messages in our offices too, if they were timely and important. It is a budget factor. Most of our lobbies have two PCs, one for on-site transactions and one for the drive-up positions. We also run community messages on our digital screens too. It gives us a lot better opportunity to target our market.

Vicki Hoehn: Why digital? Repurpose video, timely promotions, community involvement, branch specific promotions, flexibility of messages, flexibility of length of messages.

Vicki Hoehn: We use digital to target specifics portions of our members and deliver messages which are just for them.

Vicki Hoehn: The results of the digital signing was it reduced wait times, sales inquires increased, increased the awareness of our product, members passively discovered our services and the atmosphere in the branches that have the digital signing increased.

Vicki Hoehn: The digital signing has become the standard, updating branches and adding music in the background has improved the environment for the members and employees too.

Vicki Hoehn: It is labour intensive to execute a digital upgrade but once you have a digital office, it pretty much runs itself. Since it is Web-based, it is easy to update and keep things current. It is one click of a mouse. It becomes very easy to manipulate.

John Powell: Good morning, everyone. Our live coverage of the Digital Marketing Conference begins shortly.

Profiting From the Newest Digital Wave

• Jason Tabeling, Associate Partner from Search and Media, Rosetta. Profiting From the Newest Digital Wave.

  Jason: Financial content is number two in content on mobile phones. That is second to only weather information.

  Jason: “Lots of people, lots of growth in this area.”

  Jason: Only .5% of media budgets are devoted to mobile budgets. There is some challenges to mobile. We are trying to reverse people’s thinking. It is not only a tracking media.

  Jason: People on mobile don’t search the same as they do on their computers. You cannot apply a desktop strategy to mobile.

  Jason: The pros of having a mobile site is: it is accessible, you will have the highest market penetration and there is no download. The negative is there is no direct access, the user experience is very different and there are additional hosting costs.

  Jason: People use their phones for financial services during morning and evening. During the day, they are on their computers. There is also a high uptake, heavy spike on the weekends. Biggest portion of traffic is during the end of the day.

  Jason: In financial services, you need to create easy registration for users. Many times, users complain about fighting through the process.

  Jason: Give the consumer what they want and get what you want as an organization. Decide what you need to get out of a mobile strategy. You need to call the right plays at the right time.

  Things to consider when building your mobile marketing campaign:

  • Custom mobile land page
  • Clear call to action
  • Think holistically
  • Track mobile independently
  • Test, optimize

  Jason: The tablet will not replace your phone. They are made to do different things but you might have a tablet for work and home. Tablets perform much more like desktops and not mobile phones.

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  Search Engine Strategies for Financial Services

• Michelle Corsano, Professor of Web Marketing Tools and Fundementals.
• Jose Martinez, Head of Financial Services and Travel Industries, Google Canada.
• Jeff Quip, Search Engine People.

  Jose Martinez: Every day people are telling you what they want and what they need. There are 24 million unique searchers in Canada every day. The complexities of the searches are growing. We have went from two word searches now to three word searches.

  Jose Martinez: Financial services queries are growing, although banking queries are quite higher. Retirement and pension queries are the lowest.

  Jose Martinez: You need to not only think of the key words people are searching for but when they are searching. The process of engagement with a customer can be a long one. You need to understand what your consumer is doing and when.

  Jose Martinez: The mobile searches for financial services is growing like crazy. We predict that mobile will be bigger than desktop in the future.

  Michelle Corsano: Search is the Number One online activity. Customer experience starts during search. Your potential consumers begin with search. There are 500 million web property options for them. SEO is about using tactics to drive them to your site rather than your competition.

  Michelle Corsano: Searches pay attention to the top left of their search page. You need to get higher rankings in paid and organic searches. How does Google decide who goes where? Google searches through indexes and looks for signals or clues to decide which listing goes first. That includes key words, most relevant terms, associated links or mentions.

  Michelle Corsano: The most important ranking factors are: 1. The trust people have in your site. 2. How many sites link to your site. 3. The anchor text in your links. 4. Key words on your pages.

  Michelle Corsano: More and more search engines are factoring in social signals, which are mentions in Twitter, FaceBook, etc.

  Michelle Corsano: The top paid search engine spenders are mostly financial industries. Many are spending $200,000 a day. It is a competitive space. You have to build a strategy that combines both paid and organic search strategies. It is not either, or.

  Jeff Quip: Search engines focus on in-page factors. It accounts for 30% of the weight in rankings. Most important elements for your pages are: key word in title tag, keyword in domain name, keyword in internal anchor text.

  Jeff Quip: Off-page factors are 75% of the search engine ranking weight. Off-page factors are links to your site from other sites. Links equals votes in how popular your site is on the Net.

  Jeff Quip: In-page factor are limited in their score while off-page factors are infinite. If you can get everyone to link to you, you could outrank Google. Links are important in effecting your organic search results. The quantity and quality of the links are what matter. The anchor text, quantity of sites and link relevancy are also major factors in determining the strength of off-page factors.

  Jeff Quip: You want powerful and influencial sites linking to you. That will boost your Google rankings.

  Jeff Quip: Build really good content and encourage people to share content and advertise it. You can submit your links to directories and syndicate your content to get links back to your site.

  Jeff Quip: Create a portable widget that others can post on their site with a link back to your site.

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  Potential clients are looking to digital media channels first when considering financial services. Social media, search engines and new mobile apps are among the channels financial services institutions need to use in marketing to the next generation and beyond.

  Bringing together thought leaders from all over North America, The Digital Marketing for Financial Services Conference provides an exceptional learning opportunity to source business intelligence from financial service innovators on understanding, creating and maximizing digital marketing strategies.

  The conference will cover such topics as integrating digital strategies, formulating social media strategies, profiting from the digital wave, incorporating SEO strategies and building parterships.

  Our live coverage begins here April 27th. Bookmark this page to join us.

• To learn more, visit www.financialdigitalmarketing.com.