Our SEJ Summit Dallas event was held on March 31st, and we were happy to have Warren Lee, VP of Marketing at Nationstar Mortgage, on our AMA panel. Warren spoke at length about paid and organic search, a common (and useful!) topic at our SEJ Summits so far this year.
Which reminds me: our next event, SEJ Summit Chicago, is less than two weeks away! We still have a few FREE tickets available for our Chicago event, courtesy of our partner, Searchmetrics. Request an invite today!
#PROTIP: Because our content is enterprise-focused, if you are a consultant but work with big, enterprise brands, mention them in your job title/company when requesting an invite.
Without further adieu, here’s my interview with Warren.
1. You’re VP of Marketing at Nationstar Mortgage. Can you give our audience 3 main responsibilities of your job and why they are important?
I’m focused on helping a portfolio of business under the Nationstar umbrella improve in the areas of: growth, customer experience, and innovation. All of these areas require marketing leadership to support meaningful outcomes for our customers and lines of business by fostering innovative technology solutions, data based insights, and operational excellence with the organization.
2. Usually VPs of Marketing have a large breadth of experience in many areas of marketing. What is your favorite area, and why?
My favorite area of digital marketing has been SEO because it cuts across so many marketing disciplines which has helped me develop marketing experience across PPC, social media, content marketing, and addressable marketing like email and retargeting. SEO at its best is all about delivering relevant results for consumers, so this leads to a better understanding of your customers and target audience, which can yield results across all marketing efforts. SEO, or search in general, is one of the best measures of intent, which can help guide marketing strategy and automation to the benefit of the consumers.
3. A lot of your past online columns have been about SEO. What are 3 aspects of SEO that you think enterprise marketers should focus on in 2015?
Enterprise SEO practitioners would do well to apply SEO data to inform content strategies, and as marketing automation and personalization continue to evolve, Enterprise SEO practitioners should focus more on integrated marketing strategies. Specifically, SEO does a great job of capturing demand when a consumer is searching, but the search marketer often loses the consumer after the session is over.
Compared to email or retargeting, where a marketer can push their message to the consumer whenever they want, the SEO practitioner is often limited to engage with consumer during a search session. SEO practitioners should look towards how technology can help them remain in touch with their audience long after the query session is over.
4. A few SEJ columnists have discussed how crucial it is to have an integrated marketing strategy. What are 2-3 channels of digital marketing you think are most successful when they are all implemented together?
SEO plus email and SEO plus paid social and SEO plus retargeting are three of the best opportunities to drive meaningful integrated marketing results. If we have time during the sessions I’ll go into more detail on how to deploy specific tactics against these types of strategies, if not, I’ve been meaning to submit an article to SEJ on this very subject as well.
5. One of the things I love about our industry is that it’s always changing. What is the main area of digital marketing that you think is still “behind” (e.g. more people need to embrace or it’s not as useful as it one day will be)?
I feel as though Google is innovating faster than the tools are for SEO practitioners, which makes the job of SEO harder and harder. SEO tools are behind when it comes to tracking how Google personalizes results and how Google has changed with the hummingbird change.
Thanks for the insight into what you do, Warren!
Don’t forget, you can request your free ticket for our Chicago event, happening on April 15th at the Hard Rock Hotel. You can also come see us in London, Silicon Valley, NYC, and Atlanta later this year.
Featured image via Shutterstock.
