On Thursday, July 8 I had the distinct honor of speaking in the afternoon keynote panel of the Online Marketing Summit held in Philadelphia.  Over the course of about 30 minutes I and the other panelists, including Ross Kramer (founder/CEO of Listrak), Gary Spangler (eMarketing Leader at DuPont), Simon Heseltine (sr. marketing manager at AOL) and Bryan Eisenberg (author/guru) answered questions from the moderator Aaron Kahlow and the audience.

Though we didn't have time to go into much detail, one of the most interesting questions Aaron asked was how to prioritize which online marketing tactics to use when there are so many.  Social media, for instance, is the hot topic these days but should it be a focus instead of email, paid search or SEO?

The consensus among the panelists, including myself, is that every e-marketing tactic should be considered in terms of its relevance and alignment to the organization's marketing objectives and its potential ROI vs. other marketing tactics.  In other words, don't spend your time building out a Facebook fan base if your target audience is not known to use Facebook heavily and other tactics like email might be more effective.

From an analytics perspective, the answers can often be found in the numbers.  Does traffic from Facebook convert at a higher rate than traffic from other sources like email or natural search?  How does the quality of traffic generated by different tactics compare to each other?  What does it mean that display has a high bounce rate, but yet generates increased brand awareness that can influence a decision to buy?

Other interesting sessions at the Online Marketing Summit were Elea Feit's presentation on "Why Analytics Now?", a topic after my own heart of course.  Elea is Research Director for the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative.  And Patrick Bultema's keynote on "Decoding Customer Behavior.  Patrick is CEO of CodeBaby and is a very engaging speaker who shares a similar passion for understanding why people do what they do online.

Special thanks to Gary Spangler for recommending me to the panel and to Aaron Kahlow for hosting such a wonderful and informative event.

- Aaron

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