There’s two major challenges which every online marketer is faced with, this regardless of what product, service or industry segment that they’re involved in. The first is how to get more targeted “buying” visitors that need to know about their brand, thus creating Brand Awareness. The other is attempting to keep their particular brand in the minds of their current consumers. Those are the customers who may have previously purchased from them and knows their particular brand and they want to keep them loyal.
Since these challenges are forever a moving target, the role of the online marketer never seems to be completed. There are those who are not aware of your product or brand, as well as those who may have been customers in the past, but there’s no real guarantee that they’ll ever come back. So keeping that in mind, how can properly using search engine marketing along with social media tactics help in the ongoing process which is customer acquisition and retention.
Search Engine Marketing And Social Media
Online marketing and more specifically SEO marketing should be viewed as a customer acquisition method, while social media marketing can be viewed as a way to retain as well as engaging your existing customers while promoting brand recognition.
Maintaining a powerful online web presence, which is constantly fueled by effective search as well as social media strategies, can take a brand, any brand, to the next level of recognition by maximizing its reach as well as maintaining positive brand sentiment.
The businesses who are dedicated to both search as well as social media tends to see synergistic effects where the results are greater when they are combined. With the widespread adopted usage of search engines along with all of these social networking sites among the consumers, it just makes a lot of sense to use both of these channels.
SEO Marketing Strategy
As a SEO marketing strategist, one of the most obvious levels of success which businesses has while utilizing SEO is when their particular brand happens to be well represented on the Internet.
By “well represented,” there’s a well defined comprehensive presence of social media, a successful popular blog, relevant unique content which is disseminated throughout the Internet, engagement on message boards and forums etc.
These are the online businesses which consistently thrive in SEO success, achieving as well as maintaining high ranking targeted keywords which your competition spends their efforts on to rank.
One of the keys to their online success is quite simple. Search Engine Optimization has always been based on signals. Signals such as the importance of a particular page on a site and its relevance on a certain niche subject. And now more important than ever, these search engines are now paying extreme attention to signals or indicators from areas other than these sites which are attempting to rank on a targeted keyword.
Search Engines Are Mainly For Customer Acquisition
The value of Search Engines are just primarily a tool for customer-acquisition. This is an extremely powerful method in which consumers will actively search for detailed information on products or services and are then matched with sites which are looking to reach these individuals.
The entire search channel, which involves paid search advertising methods as well as natural search optimization results, is a critical component for any online marketer. For these search engine channels to be effective, it needs to be viewed from the proper perspective.
The “search” will usually begin with a user typing in their particular search query. They will then immediately receive the information based on their keyword entry, which is a list of relevant sites that the search engines feel matches the users request.
This is common knowledge and may even sound mundane, but some marketers fail to understand the vital importance of the search process or the effects that it could have on their marketing strategy.
Gaining optimal success with search engines begins with understanding that it is not solely dependent on specific SEO tactics or spending huge on PPC, but how the SERPs or search engine results pages behaves. When the users decide to conduct a search, they’ll instantly arrive at a page, not an organic or a paid page, but a Search Engine results page.
So what this means as an end game for businesses is that they should be maximizing the search engines result pages for their specific search terms at the most effective and inexpensive method possible.
Perhaps this holistic view helps online marketers to understand that they don’t have to reduce their PPC spending just because their organic rankings happens to be higher and thus driving in more sales.
You need to ensure that you’re maximizing your ROI, and since customers will click on both paid as well as organic search listings, it may be important to just maintaining an online presence in both.
Search engines are not just vitally important for generating new leads or sales, but also extremely important for protecting as well as building your brand. Lately, online marketers has begun to realize that the management of their online reputation around their brand is equally important as their offline PR efforts.
This has led to the prominence of reputation based management services, online digital based PR agencies and strategic social media marketing monitoring services. These management services not only apply to just existing customers, but also to those new consumers who may not know your particular brand or exposed to it for the very first time.
Fully Maximizing Social Media
Social media marketing is obviously the trendy “in-thing” right now, and because of its prominence, rightly so. It is the exact mechanism which facilitates the engagement with brands as it touches practically every aspect of the online consumers experience.
Today, almost every business or organization, artists and athlete has some type of social media presence. They are all actively attempting to engage their immediate audience as well as attracting new fans by using this medium.
But when it really comes down to it, most of the businesses or personalities admit that even though they do put up a Facebook page or set up a Twitter account, they are not exactly sure what to exactly do with it.
The goal to maximize web presence optimization should be to increase reach along with promoting value of each and every online interaction that you do with your brand. This applies more particularly to social media presence than anything else.
Ways Which Social Media Affects Your Web Presence
1. Using social media allows you to take the exact pulse of your end customers as well as your target audience. By monitoring the activity on social media around your particular brand, whether it’s on your Facebook page or your Twitter account or even on sites which are out of your control, you’re able to gain extremely valuable insights on the mindset of your customers. This information becomes critical when you’re attempting to drive effective engagement with your audience by using social media as well as the other channels.
2. Social media will allow you to actively communicate as well as engage with your end target audience. It will also do so in a way which hasn’t really been done in the past. Using Social Media will also enable you to be able to find individuals who happen to of had a “poor” experience with your direct competition and you can reach out to them.
3. Social media can help in making your brand go absolute viral. Using YouTube, Facebook or Twitter has made as well as broken many brands. The ease in which relevant content can be shared today presents significant opportunities to the savvy marketer. Deliberately and strategically developing a strong social media presence which is combined with other online campaigns as well as tactics can potentially lead your brand’s content to go viral and exponentially boost brand awareness.
4. Social media is able to improve your search engine presence. Google, Yahoo and Bing has all indicated that signals or presence on social media sites such as Facebook “Shares” or Twitter “Tweets” around a specific brand can affect organic search rankings. So it’s really no surprise that brands which has made significant investment into social media strategies are enjoying stronger organic search rankings. Social media not only affects organic search rankings directly, but it also results in the placement of videos or Tweets which routinely find themselves intermixed with more “traditional” listings on the popular search engines.
What businesses and online marketers need to do is focus their attention on web presence, and this does not refer to just search engine rankings or social media such as Facebook “likes” or accumulating Twitter followers.
Ultimately, all of these online businesses are looking to increase revenue, and the best method to do so with search as well as social media marketing is to look at these different channels in how they can impact their business goals, and then this also means looking at their final effects on their overall web presence as well.