Lessons Learned at the MIMA Summit 2011

I am proud to be a Minnesotan. Few around the country know that Minnesota is home to one of the most vibrant interactive marketing communities in the world. We are homegrown and groomed thanks to long-established organizations like the Advertising Federation of Minnesota and the newer Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA). Last week MIMA held their annual summit with speakers from around the world. Below are a few nuggets from the conference I feel apply particularly well to the financial and healthcare industries.

• Avinash Kaushik gave us all a wake up call when he challenged our current strategies of measuring website ROI in terms of visitors and page views and challenged us to move towards metrics that measure true visitor loyalty such as conversation rate, amplification rate, applause rate and economic value. He does a great job outlining these on his blog.
• One of the few sites Avinash gave praise to was Ameriprise Financial Advisors for really thinking through the user experience on their advisor locator. They have taken the standard find a branch, ATM, physician, etc. locator a step further by adding standard geolocation technology to automatically recommend financial advisors in a visitor's area with astonishing precision.
• This one is going to seem obvious. However, I bet many of us neglect to do this when we are benchmarking our results. When using Web analytics to track your success, make sure to put it in the context of your main competitors. Avinash had a great example using the Google trends for Blackberry search stats after a Blackberry marketing campaign that looked REALLY good. He then overlayed it to a major competitor, the iPhone, and it was a completely different story. Take away: don't measure metrics and results in a vacuum!
• Speaking of focusing on conversions rather than page views... Blue Shield of California was highlighted for focusing on conversions with their online quote application that gives the consumer the information they need when they need it. There is no jumping through hoops or waiting to see official premiums.
• There is a ton of buzz about mobile apps these days. Especially for Apple and Android. The consensus at the summit seemed to be that organizations should avoid the hype of building and supporting multiple native apps. Many conversations revolved around the fact that Apple is targeting top household incomes and there are bigger players, including, but not limited to Android, making moves in lower income markets that are seeing major growth. Unless you have a cult following of iPhone and/or Android users, consider building that mobile banking or ER wait time app as a mobile optimized website for now.
• Using Facebook for your financial institution or hospital? If you are, consider using search history to mine data for your social media strategy. There is a plethora of information about community members unavailable directly via Facebook. You can discover much of this information by using custom queries on Google. To get a flavor for what I mean, try doing the following search Site:Facebook.com/notes "keyword" (replace keyword with a word that is big news in your community right now). This will pull up data on Facebook pages that you would otherwise never know about.
• In regard to email, Dela Quist, a popular speaker on email measurement, came all the way from England to share his wisdom about the explosive growth of email marketing. One of many takeaways was to be careful with personalization. The more personalized you get, the higher the risk of offending people when a mistake is made. My advice, avoid any personalization with subject lines and only personalize to great detail when you are positive your data is clean and there is a clear benefit to personalizing.

Happy interactive marketing to all of my friends from the great state of Minnesota!

- @brianbierbaum

This blog post was originally published on the Priority Blog at priorityresults.com/blog. Priority Integrated Marketing is now BlueSpire Strategic Marketing.