When leaders at Location3 Media signed up to attend the 2012 International Franchise Association Conference they decided to come prepared. Not just with an excellent booth, but with primed prospects ready to discuss the benefits of working with a Google-certified agency. An integrated digital marketing campaign was developed to increase Location3’s brand awareness with conference attendees. The results? A major decrease in cost per lead, two 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards and invaluable insights to help improve client campaigns

“Running campaigns for ourselves serves two purposes: brand awareness and education. The IFA campaign taught us a lot about integrating earned, owned and paid strategies for maximum results. This not only benefitted our business development team, but also provided some fresh insights that we’re excited to pass on to clients,” said Alex Porter (@porter32), president of Location3.

The case study, Selling Before the Sale:  A Pre-Conference Strategy Pays Off, was submitted to the 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards in two categories and received awards in both.

The first award is a Silver Key in the Digital Marketing: Integrated Online Campaign category. This category requires a minimum of three different digital medias. To promote the brand in conjunction with the IFA Conference, a campaign was developed that included paid search marketing, display advertising and both paid and unpaid social media marketing efforts. New strategies included using dynamic, three-tab SpongeCell display ads that allowed conference visitors to view the Local Search Traffic video, download a franchise whitepaper and set a calendar reminder to visit the Location3 booth at the event. Through the combination of these efforts, Location3’s IFA conference page was viewed 2,374 unique times.

The second award is also a Silver Key in the Social Media: Integrated Social Media Campaign category, which requires the integration of three or more social media channels. The IFA campaign utilized Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Location3’s blog. Location3 placed a tip on the check-in service Foursquare to remind conference attendees of the company’s booth number when they checked in to the conference. The Promoted Tweets campaign resulted in a traffic spike on the IFA blog post, 80 percent of which were new site visitors.

Most importantly, the business development team came away from the IFA conference with quality leads. Overall, Location3’s marketing campaign resulted in a more than 21% increase in lead quality, 186% increase in lead volume and 45% decrease in cost per lead.

The 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards celebration will be held in the main hall of the Denver Art Museum on Friday, May 4th. The awards are judged by a panel of marketing professionals representing the different sides of the marketing community, both agency and corporate. The judges all have extensive B2B marketing experience. They score entries on four categories: creativity, production, selling proposition and results.

Location3 has received recognition from BMA Colorado in previous years as well. The interactive Local Search Traffic commercial won the 2011 Silver Key Award and a WildBlue Communications local search campaign won the 2007 Gold Key Award.

For more information, contact Angie Pascale: apascale { at } location3.com | 720.881.8528 | @angiepascale.

Social Sources

I’m finding this new report to be the most helpful. This helps to identify all of your social traffic sources in a way that not even a really thorough advanced segment could. In the below screenshot, you can see traffic from a wide array of sources, some of which I may not have thought to include in an advanced segment. What a great way to find new social opportunities!

Social Pages

Although this report is not as thorough as the social pages report already provided by Google Analytics in an older update, it is a very nice, more succinct snapshot of which pages have the most interaction with social networks.

Old Social Pages Report

While this report is an oldie at this point, I still feel it is worth reviewing in the context of these other new reports. This is very similar to the new social pages report, except that it breaks down the social interaction by the actions you are tracking on your website, which to me is a little more insightful.

The new social pages report is also including social interactions with other social sites it is partnering with even if you don’t have their button installed on your site (i.e. if it is being shared on Blogger even though users aren’t clicking on Blogger share buttons on your site), but at the moment I don’t see a great way to break it down by which social source is interacting with which page. It would be great to see a “Secondary dimension” drop-down option in these reports just like you can do with 99% of the other reports in Google Analytics, so that you can view sources for these interactions. We are submitting this suggestion to Google and hopefully will see a solution in the next round of updates.

Any other features you’d like to see in these new reports?

Mock up of a Brand Timeline, as featured on Mashable.

Facebook will be announcing timelines for brand pages during their fMC conference next week. This has been a much anticipated announcement, after the full rollout out timelines for personal pages in December. While nothing has been confirmed as to the functionality and features of brand timelines (Facebook has been very hush hush), speculations about in the industry. Below are some key features and recommendations that we anticipate:

Historical Posts

As with the launch of timeline for users, brands should be aware of historical posts, which with the new timeline will be much easier for users to see. This may involve going back and editing statements, posts, specials or other messages that a brand may wish to sweep under the rug. This also opens the door for a creative element showcasing a company’s history. For example, Coca-Cola could go back to 1892 with posts about the history of the company.

Timeline Layout

One of the first items of business will be implementing a cover photo. The dimensions are 850px by 315px. As with personal cover photos, there are some pretty neat things you can do to integrate the profile photo and cover photo, like is shown in the image below.

Let Your Audience Know

Preparing fans with the change is always a good idea. A simple post explaining the new changes, how the brand looks forward to adapting to it and maybe even an “excuse the mess as we tidy up a bit.” It may also be helpful to explain to fans where the new links are and where they can find information about the company in the new format.

Content

Your content calendar may need to be reexamined as well. The new timeline may allow brands to feature posts. This will make the post extend across the page and could possibly show up more readily when looking in historical-view. From what we have seen, the dimensions of images are the same as the cover photo, but may even allow for something larger. We will not know for sure until brand timelines are announced, and we have the chance to play with the new functionality and layout.

Additionally, timelines will be very photo heavy. This will play a big role in Facebook content creation for brands, and should be something you consider when developing your content calendar.

App Development

Apps are a big focus on the new timeline and brands should think about current apps they are associated with as well as new apps they may create. For instance, if a brand is using Pinterest, they can link the Pinterest app on Facebook to their account showcasing their pins. They may think outside the box and setup a Spotify account while creating playlists their fans can connect to. For some brands, they may also create original apps, such as a shopping app. Users can share what they “like” or “love” or “have to have” (brands can now customize the phrases or gestures) from a brand’s app. Where these apps will be situated on the page is not currently known, but it’s safe to anticipate that they will be predominately displayed.

Beginning to prepare now with the advice above will help you stay ahead of the game. Brand timelines will be announced at fMC next week, but that does not mean all brands will have access immediately. It is likely that a few key brands (read: heavy advertisers) will get access initially, and then access will gradually become available to other brands, much like the timeline with timelines for personal pages. However, as with most other Facebook changes, isn’t best to expect the unexpected because functionality, features and launch rollout may change in the course of this week.

Thanks to Social Media Manager Neil Robertson (@neilrobertson) for piecing together the majority of this blog post.