Marketing today builds upon search engines and extends to social media. To capitalize on that and increase brand awareness, one has to generate traffic and engage users with an effective social media marketing strategy. So, how does one integrate social media marketing with your existing marketing strategy?
Social Media Marketing plays an important role in any modern marketing strategy and is highly effective in driving major traffic to your website and managing online brand reputation. While you can place content in these media to create brand awareness and reach target audience, likes and shares on Facebook and other such sites help gauge receptivity from the audience. People also tend to spread social media articles they read.
Each business has its own relevant social media platforms-Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest. And along with that, there is a customized strategy for each kind of business.
Blogging
Blogging is a new age marketing tool that has proven to be very effective. Marketing blog posts are designed to build traffic and increase media shares. Posts contain keywords that will provide maximum marketing impact.
Social Shares
Articles, posts, ads, videos and such marketing content is shared across platforms with related keywords. These pop up in a search engine because of the keywords used.
Social Media Profile Optimization
A lot of ground work is required to build a proper social media profile for a brand. The ideal profile contains proper page titles, descriptions, socially optimized blog installation, social alerts, custom Facebook tabs, tagging, keyword-rich posts, inbound linking, effective branding and custom graphics and functionality. This is the basis of social media marketing.
Premium Content Creation
It is essential that one shares high quality content in the first place. These include info-graphics, e-books, white papers, graphic tips and videos.
Paid Social Media Ads
Paid ads appear on social media pages when users login to these forums. A good strategy to identify target audience and then place such ads is necessary here. A good strategy here includes multivariate testing of multiple ad images and copy combinations on Facebook, identifying the best performing ads and then optimizing the ads for lowest CPL (cost per like).
Contests
Contests work like no other marketing tool can. They engage users and create awareness. But to make it effective, a lot of thought has to go into it to create the contest idea , develop custom graphics and functionality, promote it, measure performance and customize it to maximize the social reach of the contest.
To make sure search engine results are integrated with social media presence, there has to be coordination amidst a lot of marketing elements. There are a lot of experts who do this today and they specialize in doing this. It is not very different from traditional marketing methods but it requires a lot of ground work to customize traditional marketing to suit internet sensibilities. Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing are closely interlinked to bring in awareness and also to divert traffic into the site.
Here is more on Social Media Marketing.