He’s made his list, he’s checking it twice, but that isn’t stopping these top digital marketers from sending their last minute Christmas wishes to Old Saint Nick! From new platforms, attribution models and simply more hours in the day, here’s to hoping Santa works his magic and pulls off a true Christmas miracle that gives everyone what they’re looking for this year!
Did your digital marketing wish make our list? Take a look and see:
Antonio Johnson – Head Of SEO
All I want for Christmas, is my two front teeth. Also, for digital marketers and business owners to separate themselves from an unhealthy obsession over keywords. All too often, as SEO practitioners, we find that clients and industry cohorts alike tend to focus organic search efforts to simply improve keyword rankings. Yes, rankings are a strong indicator of success but it does not paint the entire picture. This obsession perpetuates an inaccurate perspective that keywords are what drive business.
In the end, it’s human activity that drives business goals, so we, as an industry, should focus on providing the best products and content we can imagine. “If you build it, they will come,” is too often a misguided mantra in the digital space. If you build it better, faster, and with more engagement… they will likely come is a lot closer to the truth.
Zellie Friedman – Organic Social Media Account Manager
The ability to add unlimited Instagram profiles to your phone. The 5 account limit definitely isn’t agency friendly when you are trying to monitor multiple clients on a daily basis alongside your personal account. While I am thankful that 2017 brought the opportunity to add at least 5 rather than only 1, I’m hopeful for that to become unlimited! If it’s not too much to ask… a platform that allows you to easily schedule videos, stories, and more would be much appreciated as well!
Kate Lobel – Director Of Public Relations
As a publicist looking to prove PR value more and more, I’d ask Santa for a platform that aggregates key metrics outlining a placements utmost value. This includes, but is not limited to, the placement’s domain authority, number of unique monthly visitors, social virality. In addition, I’d ask for a plethora of google analytics metrics including the sessions heading back to a website, the behavioral metrics on the site coming from a placement and last, but very not least, the conversions coming in from the placement.
Also, I’d like to see a graph watching specific keywords I choose at the anchor text within an article to see if that keyword grows in rankings because of the placement.
Patric Kreidler – Digital Account Manager
I want to see more digital marketers looking at the whole picture when trying to provide value to their clients. Too often in this industry I see agencies sticking to their KPI’s and touting their success to their clients if those specific metrics look good. Effective marketers need to understand the entire scope of a client’s business and sources of revenue to operate effectively.
If you have a client whose online sales increased by 300% month-over-month, but their in-store sales are down, you need to understand which of those two they will care about more. If in-store accounts for 90% of that company’s revenue, you need to understand how you can help in that regard, because moving the needle there is vastly more valuable to them. Digital marketers are notorious for sticking to their data, which has its benefits, but can also be detrimental because they’re failing to look at the whole picture.
Britney Schroeder – Director Of Content
Online to offline attribution! As a digital marketer, there’s nothing better than being able to track a customer’s path to purchase. While there are workarounds, it can be challenging to truly know which efforts to scale up and down. The more data we have the more we can help grow and scale our efforts.
Mike Opera – Director Of Social Media
All I want for Christmas, is improved Facebook advertising tracking from an attribution perspective, and easily available retailer partnerships for in-store purchase tracking for social.
We work to dang hard to not get credit for our hard work! But really… improved tracking please.
Nikki Lam – Digital Manager, SEO
I would love for all brands to invest more in user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). As an organic search focused marketer, my number one priority is driving qualified traffic to websites. And while I am always thinking about UX and CRO (and a zillion other things impacting SEO) they’re often out of my control. Consumer expectations for a high quality UX have never been higher, and while agencies can provide an opportunity analysis, brands need to prioritize providing consumers with a better user experience to truly capitalize on organic traffic growth.
Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines emphasize measurement of both “Page Quality” and “Needs Met,” so every brand should always be asking “How can we improve our user experience?” and “How can we better meet the needs of users?”
Alexa Engelhart – Content Marketing Strategist
An Email Service Provide (ESP) that combines all of my favorite tools from various ESPs into one! I want MailChimp’s user-friendly interface and drag-and-drop email builder, HubSpot’s workflow tool, ConstantContact’s form builder, InfusionSoft’s powerful segmentation capabilities, and Campaign Monitor’s analytics. If anyone can make this, you are guaranteed to have some very happy email marketers out there!
Sarah Stevens – SEO Account Manager
For everyone to move beyond last-click attribution to multi-touch attribution. In today’s world only looking at last click attribution means we’re not understanding the whole picture. This means looking beyond just digital channels to really understanding how marketing is driving effective growth. Essentially how can we better define and show the ROI of marketing – the “vanity metrics” are not enough.
With this, we’ll have more valuable data for testing and optimizing to improve ROI and performance. How we do this presents an exciting challenge for marketers and brands as it’s not a simple one-size fits all solution. But with that it means we can be innovative and redefine the status quo.
Samantha Wormser – PR Manager
All I want for Christmas is for more linking opportunities and the ability to cookie someone from viewing an Instagram post to track better! It’s so hard to define the return on investment with influencer outreach, specifically on Instagram, because linking opportunities are only within the Instagram bio and Instagram Stories. If there was a linking option on the actual photo post then we could better track performance.
If there was a way to cookie someone who viewed a post and hovered for over 3 seconds then we could 1) retarget with ads and b) if they convert down the line we’ll know the awareness started with Instagram influencers. As an extra stocking stuffer I want influencers to not buy followers and likes, so we can easily see if they are legitimate or not.
John Saunders – Director Of Web Development
Attention to detail! Too many times have we seen websites fall by the wayside because of a lack of attention to the things that make them great. Timelines can often cause rifts in a total outcome, causing functionality or purpose issues. A site that’s given the chance to succeed with design and development is a 100% chance of success in the long run. Also, a few more hours of sleep would be nice!
Wrapping Up
Who knows what presents Santa will leave under the tree come December 25 – hopefully big, shiny ones wrapped with bows – but if the Power Digital Marketing team has anything to say about it, all of our digital marketing wishes will be fulfilled.