What it means to integrate search and social into marketing
Search marketing and social marketing are far too often neglected when it comes to full marketing campaigns. They are treated as separate entities, and because of this they fail to pinpoint the same targeted audiences and carry the full marketing message.
This can result in some highly visible and embarrassing flubs.
Are you missing the mark in leveraging search in your marketing campaigns?
Consider this example: You’re a motorcycle manufacturer. You’re latest campaign uses the tagline “let it ride” in print material, email marketing, and TV commercials. This campaign gains a significant amount of interest and, like many marketing campaigns, search spikes happen and people search in Google for [let it ride] after seeing your ads.
But your motorcycle brand does not appear in those search results. This is a missed opportunity. Whatever does appear in search results (when it’s not you) is beyond your control. Oftentimes others will optimize cheap and sleazy content for your campaign terms. Or, forums where people are talking about your campaign (which could be negative) may appear or – if you’re lucky – the search results will just be completely irrelevant sites. Either way you've missed an opportunity.
Highly publicized and expensive campaigns often miss the mark in search. Some do remember to do a paid search campaign, but aren’t optimized for organic search, where 80% of people click. This is a very common missed opportunity.
Are you leveraging the power of community around your campaigns?
Like SEO, marketing campaigns also often neglect to integrate social channels into the overall strategy and execution. A highly publicized campaign around “let it ride” may be the big buzz in online community conversations everywhere, but brands aren’t tuned into the conversations, missing opportunities to create brand evangelists out of advocates or defend the brand when needed. And in some cases the campaign message simply doesn’t make it to the social channels due to internal disconnects.
How's Your Pony can help
Integrated marketing projects are highly customized based on your specific issues, company size, campaign types, organizational structure, etc., but generally involve:
- AUDIT: Audit of current search and/or social integration into full multi-channel marketing campaigns.
- STRATEGY: Strategy, tools, training and resources for successfully integrating audience-driven search and/or social channels into full multi-channel marketing campaigns.
