Relating social media to other online strategies

Online success depends on something very important – it requires a multi-tactic approach. I like to consider online strategies as a solution made up of three important web marketing pillars that each work together to achieve strategic objectives, namely a corporate or brand website, ROI-driven web marketing and influence-focused social media.

Before I explain, let's identify some typical strategic objectives:

* Generate traffic and and links
* Improve search engine rankings for targeted key phrases
* Build awareness amongst your target market
* Increase your subscriber base or generate a lead
* Build trust amongst your customers
* Sell a product
* Help users move through the sales cycle
* Build influence in the market place
* Support your crisis management communications strategy
* Learn new things about customers
* Identify relevant online networks


Different strategies address different objectives

As we can tell, most of these objectives are relevant to most businesses; however, it's important to understand that different online strategies address different objectives. As an example, social media may be great to build influence or learn new things about customers but would need the support of search engine optimization (SEO) to sell a product or generate a lead. It's not to say that social media cold not address these objectives; having the two working in a combined fashion just makes it all the more successful.

So back to the three important web marketing pillars…

The foundation to any online strategy should be a corporate website. It's what some would call the starting point for customers who are interested in your company – for instance, where they get their news about your company and your product and service offerings. Pay a lot of attention to this because, if anything else, this is the most important online real estate you will own. It's what pulls everything together and what supports all your other strategies.

The second important online pillar is what I call “traditional digital media”. Examples of this includes affiliate marketing, response-driven advertising, pay per click, search engine optimisation and WebPR, to name some. When used properly, these strategies offer a very targeted, ROI-driven manner of reaching out to consumers and drawling them closer to a predetermined goal.

The third – yes, third – pillar is social media. I put this one last because well-executed social media needs the support of some of the above in order to be more effective than its isolated application. Unlike the other two pillars, the social media arm of the online strategy is about leveraging relationships and networks for the purposes of engaging in open dialogue with and amongst target markets, to create influence within the market and to discover new business-relevant information and trends.

Source:http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/21944.html