Schedule
Think Tank Live! Milwaukee Schedule
| 8:00 - 9:00 Check-In & Registration | Continental Breakfast and Voluntary Website Reviews | ||||
| 9:00 - 10:00 | Opening Session: New Marketing Business Strategy Keynote -David Dalka | ||||
| 10:00 - 10:10 | Break | ||||
| 10:10 - 11:00 | Unlocking the Power of Search Engine Optimization for your Website - Mert Sahinoglu, Chris King & Anthony Verre | Winning with Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising - Jo Stumpner | |||
| 11:00 - 11:10 | Break | ||||
| 11:10 - 12:00 | Search Engine Optmization (continued) | Online Advertising (continued) | |||
| 12:00 - 1:00 | Lunch & Networking |
||||
| 1:00 - 1:50 | Opt In and Go Social - Social Media Optimization - Mary A. DuQuaine, Seng Weiland, Ryan Evans & Mari Luangrath | WebPages are More Than a Brochure James Bird & Chris Campbell | |||
| 1:50 - 2:00 | Break | ||||
| 2:00 - 2:50 | Inbound Marketing & Online Reputation Management - Mert Sahinoglu & Christopher Campbell | Building Online Community with WordPress & BuddyPress - Lisa Sabin-Wilson | |||
| 2:50 - 3:00 | Break | ||||
| 3:00 - 3:50 | Tracking, Measuring and Making Sense of it All - Chris King | When Local Means Business - The Secrets of Local Search Marketing - Anthony Verre | |||
| 3:50 - 4:00 | Break | ||||
| 4:00 - 5:00 | Open Forum - Chris King, Jo Stumpner, Mert Sahinoglu, Mary DuQuaine, David Dalka, Ryan Evans | ||||
| After Event | Afterparty & Networking Event to Follow at Piano Blu 179 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Pewaukee, WI | ||||
Opening Session: New Marketing Business Strategy Keynote
By: David Dalka
A never ending stream of new and often confusing marketing terms emerges each day – search marketing, social media, Adwords, Youtube, SEO, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It never seems to stop! What you would really like to know is how does this increasingly replace traditional marketing in print media and Yellow Pages?
What should one consider to manage marketing business strategy issues more effectively to make my business or the company I work for more profitable? David Dalka will lay a foundation for you to think about your business strategy differently which will set the tone for your exciting day of learning transformational marketing techniques at Think Tank Live!
.
Unlocking the Power of Search Engine Optimization for your Website.
By: Mert Sahinoglu, Chris King and Anthony Verre
Search Engine Optimization is the fine art of getting your website noticed on the internet. In this session you will learn how to think like an SEO and a Business Owner/Marketing Professional at the same time.
One of the biggest questions people ask is where to start? This panel will first introduce the basics of website optimization.
Whether you want to learn SEO for yourself, or get an understanding of how it works so that you know how to communicate with your “in house” SEO professional or agency, this is sure to be a fascinating session.
Each of our panel members have a variety of backgrounds working with top name brands and local small businesses in Milwaukee and Chicago.
Through this session, you will learn how online channels and inbound marketing can help you run all aspects of your business. The topics will include: Site Architecture, Keyword Research, Link Building, Content: Writing Copy & SEO, and Advanced Search Tactics. They will also share important resources and tools to help you drive customers to your website to increase profits.
.
Winning with Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising
By: Jo Stumpner
Winning with Search Engine Marketing takes skill and organization and a passion for site conversions.
Before starting a Pay-Per-Click campaign it is important to ask these questions:
How do SEO and Search Engine Marketing connect?
How do I decide if PPC is right for my business?
What are my goals for my online marketing campaign?
What is a realistic budget for my campaign?
How can I use tracking and analytics to make real-time business decisions?
Online Advertising: Pay-Per-Click Best Practices:
Define “Quality” = Releveance + Targeted Ad + Good User Experience
Identify hot keywords to make sales.
Bid management and optimization strategies.
Key straategies to evaluate Adwords performance.
Up-to-date tools to help with search engine marketing.
Tips on writing ads and testing “creative.”
.
WebPages are More Than a Brochure
By: James Bird & Christopher Campbell
Everyone wants to have a nice looking website. But what is even more important is that your website communicates what you want to sell. We will help you leverage the potential for your website to make money. Your online web presence can be a monetization channel for your business. We will discuss ways to increase traffic to your site while quantifiably making more money per site visitor.
Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click Marketing is a tool that can drive customers to your site. What will they do once they get there? We will give tips on writing ads, creating banner ads that sell, tracking conversions, and making real-time business decisions based upon results. We will also discuss how to reactivate past customers using E-mail marketing.
Additional Topics:
Online Lead Generation / Performance Based Marketing
Conversion Optimization of Websites
Moving From Direct Mail to EMail Marketing
Creating and Selling Digital Products Online / Affiliate Marketing
Outsourcing – Elance, Odesk, Craigslist
Social Network PPC – Facebook, Myspace, Stumble Upon
.
Opt In and Go Social – Social Media Optimization for Results
By: Mary DuQuaine, Seng Weiland, Ryan Evans & Mari Luangrath
Social media is a term that encompasses a whole world of connection on the internet.
Learn how to create a footprint in the social media landscape.
We will consider Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Wikis, Forums, and more.
We will show how creating content with Search Enging Optimization in mind is still important in social media.
You will see how some of the best content for your website is the content created by users.
We will discuss “terms of use”, social media policy, and privacy issues that surround social media sites.
And we will share a real world case study to show how customer engagement in social media can help increase profits, build customer loyalty, and strengthen community ties.
.
Building and Growing Your Community with BuddyPress on Your WordPress Powered Web Site
By: Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Lisa introduces bloggers to BuddyPress – a suite of plugins available for the WordPress platform that is rich with features that allow you to take your WordPress site to the next level by engaging a community on your own web site through dynamic features such as:
- Extended Profiles
- Friends
- Private Messaging
- Activity Wires
- Blog Tracking
- Status Updates
- …and more!
My session introduces you to the features available, aimed toward helping you make the decision if BuddyPress is right for your site, and has features that you would like to add to enhance and grow a social community on your own domain. Many people, wrongly, state that BuddyPress is “Facebook in a box…” – – I think even I have wrongly made that statement in the past. It’s not Facebook, at all. Running a BuddyPress community on your own site makes it a good deal more targeted to your specific niche community, allowing you to build a full and interactive social network around the specific niche topic and interests that you have full control over on your own site. Where Facebook covers everything from Farmville to Mafia Wars – – your (BuddyPress powered) community can hone in, and concentrate, on specific topics and interests that you determine and guide.. My session explores the types of communities that are using BuddyPress, and how they are taking advantage of the available features to build, grow and sustain their own social community on their sites. I will give you some suggestions on useful plugins that will help you extend the available features on your BuddyPress powered site for your community members to take advantage of as they socialize, network, engage and interact within your community.
.
Inbound Marketing and Online Reputation Management
By: Mert Sahinoglu & Christopher Campbell
This session will offer a clear, highly actionable vision of how to utilize online marketing tools in an effective and relevant manner.
The question is no longer limited to, “How will we reach the customer?” Now we must ask, “How will the customer find us, and how will they engage and connect with our brand when we meet?”
This is a very exciting time in the world of marketing, allowing us to move in new creative directions. We also have unprecedented access to analytics to help us ask the right questions in order to make quick business decisions.
Topics:
Marketing & Reputation Management through Search & Social Media
How to generate sales leads through consumer feedback.
Simple keyword alerts/tracking to generate leads & track brand mentions. Creating loyalty/retention program to generate a word of mouth campaign. How to react to a business complaint? And why speed matters? Different case studies of marketing & online reputation on different platforms…
Customer Service/Community Creation Online
How to promote an online community (whether it is through Facebook or forum software? How to handle the moderation/liability/spam hurdle?How to spread the word using your community and through third party communities? How to direct your loyal followers for a positive brand reputation/word of mouth campaign?
.
Tracking, Measuring and Making Sense of it All.
By:Chris King
This integrating session will take a look at the power of knowledge. They don’t call this the information age for nothing. At times, the problem is too much information. We will spend some time considering different ways to track information to help us make sense of the who, what, where and when of the traffic on our websites. What are the questions we should be asking to turn analytics into a real time decision making tool.
When Local Means Business – The Secrets of Local Search Marketing
By: Anthony Verre
It used to be that most businesses relied on their local yellow pages to get reliable business in their community.
This session will explore the movement from print yellow pages to online local business listings. Learn how to make a splash on your local scene without turning to the big yellow book. These strategies are essential for local businesses in Wisconsin. Strengthen your presence online and you will help to strengthen the local economy.
Learn about:
The basics: what are search engines looking for?
The importance of consumer reviews on many different platforms: (Yelp, Google Local, Angie’s list, Superpages.com, etc). How search engines are affected by user input of multiple websites.
Tactics & Case studies of how to encourage customers to put in positive reviews.
Using social media platforms to broacast yourself to your community.
Connecting locally with LinkedIn Groups to build business relationships that last.
Optimizing press releases for local search.
Blogging as a strategy: Personality wins! Create fresh and relevant content with the local community in mind.
How to make a user generated content strategy into a customer retention/loyalty program?
How to decide on the strategies to encourage users to create content for you?
Open Forum.
By:Chris King, Jo Stumpner, Mert Sahinoglu, Mary DuQuaine, David Dalka, Ryan Evans
Overview of the main points of the day. A lively discussion of the implications of an integrated approach to marketing on the Internet.
We will also revisit the concepts of new marketing strategies from the beginning of the day. By now, you should be more familiar with several terms like SEO, PPC, and integrated marketing. We will allow time for Q & A to help everyone process the information from the day.
