10 Questions: Integrated Marketing Summit

Earlier this month St. Louis was lucky enough to play host to the Integrated Marketing Summit. That’s right I said St. Louis. A decently large marketing show came to St. Louis. I’ll let that soak in a bit…

I was lucky enough to hear about IMS early on and help spread the word about it with Social Media Club St. Louis. It’s an event series put together by Shawn Elledge and Elizabeth Usovicz. IMS is similar to shows like the Online Marketing Summit and Search Engine Strategies, yet puts the spotlight on mid market cities like Kansas City, St. Louis and Dallas rather San Francisco, New York and Seattle. It was an all day event with panelists covering topics like modern PR, twitter for business, social media & search engine marketing. The best part was reading the stream of tweets from the audience. I compiled them all over at SPOTonChicago last week, take a look.

I had an opportunity to ask IMS organizer Shawn Elledge some questions after the event about the market and the future of IMS, including Shawn’s reaction to Pepsi deciding not to run Super Bowl ads in 2010.

Click through for the full Q&A,  Let me know what you think on Twitter: @JavaSTL

This is the first time you planned an event like this?

Not really, I had served on the board of the Kansas City Business Marketing association for 6 years, 4 of which as program director. We held 10 monthly meeting/luncheons each year including one large annual banquet called the fountain awards, similar to the St Louis BMA’s TAM awards . I would invite speakers and thought leaders locally and around the U.S to talk to our members about marketing related topics. In regards to the “Integrated Marketing Summit (IMS) St Louis this was the second event. The first event was in KC back in October.

What advice would you have for others trying to plan something similar?

You really need to have a well rounded background in the theme or topic of the event you want to host. For me it was marketing. Over the years I held several positions with various marketing technology firms so I had a lot of contacts and knowledge about the space.

I’d also stress the importance of partnerships. IMS would not be possible without our relationship with Jigsaw who provides our marketing list, BKV who helps update and maintain our web site, or Thumbsup who helps drive registrations via their telemarketing services. It really is a team effort. I also think you have to have the right motive. We didn’t go into this endeavor to make money. While money would be nice, our primary goal is to help sales and marketing professionals drive revenue rapidly through educational events.

Where there any surprises for you from the audience response?

I was surprised how well our events have been received. The buzz and positive comments are a testament to the need for events like IMS in mid-tier cities. As an employee I had the luxury of attending many of the nation’s largest marketing events that I could not otherwise have afforded. My last employer paid 900 dollars to have me attend a one day SES conference in NYC last March. I think most companies find it hard to justify sending staff to events like SES or Ad Tech once you add travel, lost production and this economy into the equation.

We kept IMS as affordable as we could. It takes $25,000-30,000 to host an event like IMS before professional speaker fees.

What panels seemed to go the best?

The Social media and SEO panels seem to be the most popular. After the St Louis event we learned to not have more than 3 speakers on a panel. The audience didn’t have enough time to engage the speakers, something that will be taken into account at future IMS events.

There’s a fine art to making these events informative for the audience yet beneficial to the businesses on stage. How do you tread that line and benefit presenters without it becoming an event full of sales pitches?

We tell all the speakers in advance that this is educational in nature and while they follow our guidelines pretty well, you can’t blame them for tossing in a plug now and then. I think people should respect the investment the companies make in providing valuable content. It costs a lot of money for these guys to fly someone out and put them up so hopefully our attendees don’t mind a shameless plug now and then. I do tell speakers that if they provide good content they will not have to pitch, people will see them as thought leaders and invite them to a conversation.

There isn’t a faster way to turn off an audience than pitching a product or service. I think for the most part it works, I don’t recall a single compliant regarding this topic but I am sure it will happen sooner or later.

How do you see IMS changing over the next year or two?

Programming is always tough. Integrated Marketing covers so many topics you can never cover all of it in a one day event. We try to have a natural progression to our events i.e. start they day of with more remedial content ending with more advanced programs but it never seems to work out like that due to speaker schedules travel etc.

We are talking about adding a second day workshop for people who want a more hands-on experience. These will be more expensive half day and full day workshops. An example might be how to get started with social media. You will be asked to fill out a questionnaire beforehand so the host of that workshop can get you started on the right path.

How do you think Integrated Marketing will change over the next few years?

It will be imperative to have an integrated marketing strategy as opposed to a nice to have. Thanks to technology advancements it will become easier to accomplish. Today marketers are faced with disparate technologies and processes that don’t talk to each other, not to mention siloed data on their customers and prospects that they can’t take advantage of to be effective. As an example I am passionate about sales lead management / demand generation. There are applications out there like Eloqua, Marketo, Market2Lead etc that will track a persona across all marketing channels, score that activity and drip marketing messages to that person based on sales readiness and actual behavior. Tools like this will make it easier for marketers to understand their prospects and customers while tracking the effectiveness of the marketing spend. The prospect/customer will have a much more relevant experience and the marketer will see higher returns on marketing spend. It’s a win-win. Social Media is smack dab in the middle of this integration. It impacts all aspects of a brand like customer support, branding and demand generation to name a only a few.

No matter what type of company you are there are two common themes I see the most when working with marketers:

1. Lack of resources. The only answer to this problem is to increase efficiency through automation and do more with less.
2. Lack of effectiveness. The only solution to that problem is integration. You have to integrated disparate solutions to have an integrated marketing solution)

Where do you see St. Louis fitting into the mix of marketing hubs? Did your experience here differ from KC and other cities?

KC has a few more larger advertising agencies so we saw more agency participation in KC while in STL we saw more corporate registrations. Outside of the midwest we are seen as ‘Ag towns’, at least from an agency perspective, which surprises me when you consider we are home to companies like AMC Theatres, Energizer, Garmin, Monsanto, Enterprise, InBev, Russell Stover Candies. Hallmark, Nestle Purina etc. I love nothing more than to point that out to people when I’m traveling the country.

I used to think that big cities like NY, San Fran and Chicago were filled with more talented people than smaller middle tier cities like STL or KC. After traveling for the past three years throughout the U.S. and Canada as well as Singapore and Australia, I can assure you there is no shortage of talent in the midwest. I hope IMS gives us a chance to showcase that.

What do you think about Pepsi’s decision to not have SuperBowl ads for the first time in 23 years in favor of niche marketing?

I applaud Pepsi’s decision not to advertise during the super bowl. I don’t think advertising for the sake of advertising or because our competitors are doing it makes any sense, especially in these economic conditions. I think the idea of taking that money and putting it toward an effective cause marketing strategy makes complete sense. If done properly they will be able to integrate their cause marketing efforts into everything they do both online and offline for the entire year, if not longer. It sure makes sense considering the cost of running a 30 second spot is 3 million dollars.

Think of the possibilities of a “viral marketing campaign” that was integrated with their cause marketing strategy. You could launch a viral campaign integrated with your cause marketing strategy using social media to drive eyeballs for a fraction of the cost. The question will be can you get more brand value than the estimated 90 million eyeballs watching your 30 second super bowl ad.

If you look at some of the recent viral campaigns like Evian’s “Live Young” where they feature babies break dancing on roller skates, the numbers start to make sense. They have had over 45 million views since last summer. While most viral campaigns are humorous in nature some brands have a done a good job of integrating cause into their viral campaigns like Guinness and their Bring it to Life or Heineken’s Know the signs video, Drunk Pole Dancing Gone Wrong. If beer companies can do it why not soft drink companies? Look at Dove’s Evolution Commercial on YouTube with over 2.5 million hits. Personally my image of Dove’s brand has improved as a result of these sort of campaigns. Analyst report an integrated marketing solution will perform as much as 800 percent better than a non-integrated solution.

If you made it this far you’re either clued in or you’d like to be. It’s not just a ‘marketing’ issue or a ‘social media’ issue. It’s taking a look at business problems and applying solutions and channels that didn’t exist five years ago. Here’s to making St. Louis a part of the solution. Did you go to IMS?

Drop a comment and let us know.

-Brad (@JavaSTL)