I recently returned from the first annual Visibility_14 Conference in Chicago. I had some great conversations with the Searchmetrics Team and a number of attendees, and, although it is tough to summarize, here are three things I learned.
#1. Chicago is a beautiful city. I’ll definitely be back.
Cloud Gate (“The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park
Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millenium Park
#2. Don’t pick the cheapest hotel available – see anonymous scathing review on hotels.com.
#3. (and this is a big one…) We live in highly advanced world where potential customers exist everywhere, and the ways in which they find us is a perpetually evolving process. The amount of data that we, as product and service providers, can capture on these customers is enormous, but the tools at our disposal, and the rules we must abide by change constantly. SEMs (Search Engine Marketers) are familiar with this fluctuating ecosystem thanks to Google’s Penguin, Panda and other unnamed updates. Adaptation is the status-quo, and data is how you survive (and thrive).
Point #3 won’t be news to many of you. But as a Sales Guy entering an SEO conference, I had a wonderfully blank canvas that was quickly painted with insights from industry experts, journalists, and thought leaders from conference attendees.
John Curtis, SEO Manager at Walgreens led a great discussion on why you are leaving money on the table if you are ignoring what current customers are looking for and aiming only to find new customers. Sales 101: It is easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find new ones. Paying attention to what your current customers are searching for, John argued, builds customer loyalty and grows customer satisfaction.
Marty Weintraub, Found and Evangelist at aimClear, contrasted this theme by suggesting that not only should SEMs target certain demographics, but refine that targeting with Psychographics. The value here is to direct marketing efforts at highly segmented and well-thought out slices of your potential customer base. Refining your target audience enables the delivery of focused content with the goal of maximizing results.
In each of these cases, massive amounts of data, mashed up and manipulated by highly skilled people allows businesses to make actionable decisions that improve their bottom line. Searchmetrics provides an industry leading suite of products that enable these decisions. But SEO is only one piece of the marketing data ecosystem, and marketers need to account for web analytics, social media, email marketing and lead generation. This is where Klipfolio starts to shine.
Searchmetrics keyword click throughs combined with Google Analytics goal completion information.
Klipfolio is a platform for creating and sharing business dashboards in the cloud. We recently developed the ability to plug into Searchmetrics’ API to connect with, and visualize data on customer campaigns. This integration allows you to combine rich SEO insights from Searchmetrics with web analytics, social media insights and sales data from hundreds of different sources to get a complete view of your marketing kingdom, and of your business.
Easily expose your Searchmetrics information in Klipfolio Dashboard.
Klipfolio customers can now pull all their SEO data together to create stunning, real-time dashboards. And, Searchmetrics customers can build powerful custom reports that compliment and enhance existing, out-of-the-box reporting from the Searchmetrics environment. It’s a win-win for Klipfolio and Searchmetrics customers.
As the presentations and conversations at Visibility_14 proved, SEMs are entering a new data landscape. While marketing data is clearly the key for building better customer relationships and generating quality lead, consolidating this data and getting a clear view of this data is still a challenge. The partnership between Searchmetrics and Klipfolio takes a big step in resolving this and providing marketers with a holistic view of their performance.
To help you get started, we’re offering Searchmetrics customers a special 90-day trial of Klipfolio Dashboard. Don’t dally, either, as the offer expires on Aug 31, 2014.
Start your 90-day trial of Klipfolio Dashboard
All the best,
Zach
Zach Kathnelson
Channel Manager, Klipfolio Inc.
zkathnelson@klipfolio.com
@klipfolio
http://www.linkedin.com/Zach-Kathnelson