Virtual vs. real world events, corner pieces, video SEO
What’s your corner piece?
One of the things lots of folks have been doing during the pandemic is jigsaw puzzles, something to pass the time while staying safe at home. My folks have been tackling the big 1,000 piece puzzles, and one of the first things they do is sort the pieces. They find all the pieces with straight lines (edge pieces), and then critically, they find the corner pieces.
No other piece of the puzzle tells you as much information as the corner pieces. Regardless of what the puzzle is or how it’s printed, the corner pieces are distinct and orienting – they help us begin to grow the rest of the puzzle.
When you’re faced with a marketing challenge, what’s your corner piece? For some folks like author Simon Sinek, they start with the why. Why does the company exist? Why does the problem exist? What’s the purpose, the raison d’etre of the company?
Unsurprisingly at Trust Insights, we start with measurement. How do you define success? How do you currently measure it? What do you wish you could measure but can’t? Those questions help define the “corners” of the project and better understand where we need to start.
So, what’s your corner piece? What’s the organizing principle that you use to make sense of marketing problems? If you haven’t sat down and given that question some thought, take the time to do so. Once you understand it, you can bring order to chaos much faster.
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we discuss convenience marketing. Lots of companies offer products and services to outsource parts of your marketing, but when is the right and wrong circumstances to do so?
Watch/listen to the most recent episode of In-Ear Insights here
And in last week’s So What? (which airs Thursdays at 1 PM Eastern on YouTube), the team tackles Video SEO Basics. Based on what we know about YouTube’s algorithm, how should we be creating content optimized to be found by it?
Watch the most recent episode of So What? here!
Coming up on this week’s So What?, we’ll be tackling small business MarTech basics. Tune in on Thursdays at 1 PM Eastern Time on our YouTube channel.
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In this week’s Rear View mirror, we want to look at a major conference year over year to see how virtual events compare to real world events in terms of audience connectivity. To do this, we’re going to look at the network graphs of engaged INBOUND attendees from INBOUND 2019 and INBOUND 2020. How do the two events compare in terms of connections among attendees in social conversations on Twitter and Instagram?
Let’s start with a hypothesis. Even though virtual events make it easier than ever to share an experience socially, the overall experience isn’t as immersive as a real world event. Thus, we’ll begin with the hypothesis that virtual events are 25% less effective at connecting people than real world events.
We need some kind of measure of this. The best measure for determining how interconnected people are in a network graph is something called path length; path length is how many degrees of separation exist to go on average from one end of the network to the other. Think of it like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon; the path length there is 6.
Let’s dive in. First, let’s put the digital interactions among attendees into a network graph:
We see clearly that INBOUND19 was a much more dense event; in looking at the data, INBOUND19 had about 36,000 digital interactions among attendees. INBOUND20 had about 18,000, so about 50% fewer.
When we examine the path length, INBOUND20’s path length is 3.722, an increase from INBOUND19’s 3.671. That’s only a difference of 1.4%.
Finally, if we examine the number of connections each attendee has on average – the number of interactions with any other given attendee, in 2019 it was 2.752, while in 2020 it was 3.026, an increase of 10%.
What do we take away from this? Virtual events don’t lend the same experience to attendees that real world events do, but in the case of INBOUND, we see that the degrees of separation remain largely the same, while connectivity slightly increased. That means if you attended and fully participated, you likely got more digital interaction with other attendees in 2020 than you did in 2019. Additionally, there was 50% as much volume, which means for those who wanted to stand out from the crowd, you had to shout 50% less to achieve the same results.
If you’re marketing at a virtual event, it might be easier to stand out in the crowd this year than in previous years, so jump in and participate as much as you can!
Methodology: Trust Insights used Talkwalker’s platform to extract social conversations on Twitter and Instagram for the INBOUND 19 and INBOUND 20 official event hashtags. The dates of extraction are August 1, 2019 – October 14, 2020. The date of study is October 14, 2020. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Convenience Marketing
- Marketing Analytics, Data Science and Leadership via October 12, 2020 Week In Review
- So What? Video Marketing and Video SEO
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Shiny Object Syndrome and Tech Arrogance
- So What? Core Web Vitals
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Rapid Response Marketing
- Where Can I Get The Slides? Will The Slides Be Available?
AI Academy for Marketers is an online education platform designed to help marketers understand, pilot, and scale artificial intelligence. Join Katie Robbert, CEO of Trust Insights, and Christopher Penn, Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, for three separate courses in the academy:
- 5 use cases of AI for content marketing
- Intelligent Attribution Modeling for Marketing
- Detecting and Mitigating BIAS in Marketing AI
The Academy is designed for manager-level and above marketers, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning you do not need a background in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses, an invitation to a members-only Slack Instance, and access to new courses every quarter.
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Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.
Data Science and AI
- Get to know Your Data Using Exploratory Data Analysis
- A step-by-step guide for creating an authentic data science portfolio project
- The Martech Show Episode #5: Avoiding Bias and BS in AI and Machine Learning via Chief Marketing Technologist
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- What is Technical SEO? 11 Best Practices
- Study: Comparing the data from 8 SEO tools
- Adjusting Featured Snippet Answers by Context via SEO by the Sea
Social Media Marketing
- From awareness to acquisition: Creating a content funnel that converts via Sprout Social
- Twitter Best Practices for New and Advanced Social Media Managers
- How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience Based on Your Customer List via Jon Loomer Digital
Content Marketing
- 23 Tips to Make the Most of Your Content Marketing Budget
- Video Content: 10 Types of Videos to Include in Your Marketing
- Top 20 Best Content Marketing Examples of 2020
Get Back To Work
We’ve changed things up in Get Back To Work, and we’re looking at the top 310 metro areas in the United States by population. This will give you a much better sense of what the overall market looks like, and will cover companies hiring in multiple locations. Want the entire, raw list? Join our Slack group!
What do you do with this information?
By looking at this data, you’ll see what the most popular titles are; use any of the major job/career sites to ensure your resume/CV/LinkedIn profile matches keywords and phrases for those titles. For companies, search job sites for those companies specifically to see all the open positions and apply for them.
You can also hit up LinkedIn and see who you know at companies listed, and see if your connections have any inside tips on hiring.
Top Marketing Positions by Count, Manager and Above
- Marketing Manager : 449 open positions
- Digital Marketing Manager : 284 open positions
- Social Media Manager : 213 open positions
- Marketing Director : 134 open positions
- Director of Marketing : 115 open positions
- Account Manager : 102 open positions
- Product Marketing Manager : 85 open positions
- Project Manager : 84 open positions
- Product Manager : 75 open positions
- Marketing Operations Manager : 68 open positions
Top Marketing Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above
- Google : 141 open positions
- Amazon.com Services LLC : 86 open positions
- Deloitte : 71 open positions
- Thermo Fisher Scientific : 66 open positions
- Amazon Web Services, Inc. : 38 open positions
- Pearson : 38 open positions
- Intuit : 37 open positions
- Verizon : 36 open positions
- JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. : 32 open positions
- Microsoft : 31 open positions
Top Locations of Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above
- New York, NY : 581 open positions
- San Francisco, CA : 322 open positions
- Chicago, IL : 266 open positions
- Atlanta, GA : 247 open positions
- Austin, TX : 234 open positions
- Boston, MA : 230 open positions
- Los Angeles, CA : 230 open positions
- Seattle, WA : 229 open positions
- Remote, NA : 222 open positions
- San Diego, CA : 155 open positions
Methodology: Trust Insights uses the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from a geographic area focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations, with a filter to screen out the most junior positions.
Featured Partners
Our Featured Partners are companies we work with and promote because we love their stuff. If you’ve ever wondered how we do what we do behind the scenes, chances are we use the tools and skills of one of our partners to do it.
- Hubspot CRM
- StackAdapt Display Advertising
- Agorapulse Social Media Publishing
- WP Engine WordPress Hosting
- Techsmith Camtasia and Snagit Media Editing
- Talkwalker Media Monitoring
- Otter AI transcription
- Our recommended media production gear on Amazon
Join the Club
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Upcoming Events
Where can you find us in person?
- MarketingProfs, November 2020, virtual
- MadConNYC, December 2020, New York City
Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!
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In Your Ears
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Stay In Touch
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Required FTC Disclosures
Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.
Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. All Featured Partners are affiliate links for which we receive financial compensation. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.
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