Marty Weintraub will be speaking on “Social? Psychographics? Data? SEO? PR? Content? PPC? What the hell is Marketing Now ANYWAY!” at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

See Marty Weintraub speak at SearchFest 20161) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m an entrepreneur, author, speaker, musician and founder of Aimclear®, a driven marketing agency dominant in audience targeting, customer acquisition and classic creative values. My job title is “Founder.”

Aimclear made the prestigious Inc. 500/5000 list in 2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (fastest growing privately held US companies) and should make it again for the fifth straight year. My job is to advise Aimclear’s agency vision, services, content, creative…hands-on and work directly with select clients. It’s my pride and joy that our little (34 people) company-that-can was thrice named a top 100 workplace by Minnesota Business Magazine. Because we have such a kick ass team, I got the credit and was thrice honored as a “Top 25 Most Influential PPC Expert” and 2013 US Search Personality Of The Year. One my favorite jobs is to judge and present at The US Search Awards and European Search Awards. Aimclear won multiple 2015 US Search Awards including “Best Use Of Social In A Search Campaign” for our work with Airbnb.

I get out of the office to speak a lot on the international conference circuit. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of appearing in front of hundreds of search & social marketing conference audiences, from Jerusalem to Sydney. Aimclear’s credits include eBay, Airbnb, Dell, Eurail, Firestone, Amazon, Victaulic, Martha Stewart Omni, Intel, Travelocity, Macy’s, GoDaddy, 3M, SecondLife, Siemens, The Washington Post and numerous others.

I’ll be keynoting PPC Hero Conference, SMX Munich and others this year. I count SearchFest and the Portland community as a a total favorite, having a number of friends, clients and deep Oregon history…and then there’s the wine :).

With my team’s incredible support, I wrote two books: “Killer Facebook Ads”? and “The Complete Social Media Community Manager’s Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success” on the Wiley/Sybex label. Aimclear gets a lot of ink, having been cited & quoted in respected publications including WSJ, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, MediaPost, Adage and others.

My hobbies are food, wine, photography, travel, cooking and antique electronics. Aimclear hails from the great State of Minnesota.

2) If you were to explain what psychographic targeting is and why it is important to someone outside our industry, how would you do it?

Psychographics are about who people actually are at the deepest personal level. This includes interests, affinities, proclivities, biases, politics, issues, sexuality, occupations, habits, freaky shit, relationship status, income, net worth and just about any other aspect of a human, thousands upon thousands of attributes. Search marketers who also target psychographic sand merge the data, target both the inquiry and the credential. In other words, using psychographics we marry the identity and queries tendered by audiences.

One super cool evolution is that psychographics now include pretty radical “Intender” data. Essentially marketers can target users based on what big data says their GOING TO or ABOUT TO purchase. From cars to travel, cosmetics to clothing, Internet data rocks.

3) What are some of the top mistakes companies are making in social media and how should they correct them?

Here are some of the top mistakes we see:

Buying social pay per click and abandoning the program based on the CPA (cost per action) of the first touch. In reality, it often takes a retargeting pass after the first touch. Drive users into your site using social psychographics (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Affinity Ads, etc.) and then run RLSA search to the audiences for the lowered CPA.

Creating amazing content that nobody sees. While there is some P2P organic visibility in social, it’s important to amplify organic success with paid (organic looking) social psychographic content amplification.

Not qualifying users based on ability to pay. Psychographic data includes a veritable bouquet of positive and negative financial qualification layers. These layers include net worth, liquid net worth (cash in the mattress), income, lines of credit, premium credit card usage, luxury brand affinities, etc.