Curve Trends Blog

A little over 2 years ago, I started putting together the Vermont Web Marketing Summit, somewhat out of sheer frustration and with no expectations. The digital marketing world had started to explode for the rest of the country but for Vermont, it was still very fragmented. My initial thought was to have a scaled down version of SMX or SES, the larger Search Marketing conferences around the country. But as the first VT web marketing summit started taking shape, I realized that it had to be something more complete than just search. Having always believed that the different pieces of marketing should constantly be communicating with each other, all along my effort has been to keep every channel included, both traditional & new media.

What particularly struck me at this year’s event was how diverse the attendees were - larger firms like Dealer.com, Seventh Generation, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, MyWebGrocer and Burton shared experiences, platforms and lunch tables with smaller, actually much smaller Vermont business entities. I guess that’s just Vermont defined!

The growth and increased profile of the web marketing summit in only its second year is very professionally gratifying to me as we start planning for the 2012 summit.

Here are my key take away from this year’s conference:

Fundamentals stay same - Just scale it.
It was interesting to see how the fundamental principles of digital marketing are broadly applicable; there’s never one set of tools and strategies for large companies and another set of tools for smaller firms. There are differences of scale, of course, but more similarities than differences.

You are a media company - regardless
Seventh Generation is typically thought of as a green products company, and so the murmur was prominent when the Summit’s keynote speaker, Robin Kamen described Seventh Generation as “a media company” and said “we are all inventing media.” It’s apparent that no matter what your market segment -- diapers, cleaning products, web sites for car dealers, coffee -- it’s a media-rich environment with a multitude of competing channels fighting for marketers’ attention and their creative and analytical energies.

Conversation - the new (qualified) metric for success
In this new digital marketing environment, it’s not what you say, it’s what others are saying about you and your brand. How you respond is what differentiates your brand from others in the social arena. And yet it’s important not to lose sight of the bottom line. Conversation is not an end in itself . Without goal achievement, conversation and engagement have little value.

Multi Touch Points
Resonance is marketing - strengthening your brand presence and reiterating your customer trust. Building every campaign, every messaging, and every conversation to resonate across media channels is what differentiates success from failures.

There’s no place like home
Lessons learned locally have value even for very large organizations that serve national and even international markets. Digital marketing, based on technologies that can stream data unobstructed around world for free, sometimes loses this perspective. Local audience can be your ultimate testing ground. The insights gained from local customers can be particularly invaluable. Scale your strategies but start local for testing new ones.