Integrating Video, Social Media, SEO and Other Marketing Strategies

The challenges of marketing today are increasing by the moment. Most businesses and business owners are becoming more savvy with traditional techniques of internet marketing, particularly SEO strategies. The competition for positioning for keywords directed to the core success of most businesses multiplies constantly.

In the dynamic market for internet exposure, most businesses are better served to integrate a range of marketing services alongside their core SEO strategies. Everything from Twitter and LinkedIn to video, email and event marketing should be used in combination with the core SEO strategy, and none of the components should be treated as less important than the SEO strategy itself.

Here's why. With the advent of social media, and particularly Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, the marketplace of friends and family, the closest and most important marketing circle to you, grew exponentially and became much easier to touch. This does not mean they became much easier to sell to, at least in most business models, but they became much easier to touch.

Touching your friends and contacts of Facebook and LinkedIn means you have potentially hundreds or thousands of followers out there helping you reach the businesses and consumers that comprise your untapped market. All of which begs the question: have you even attempted to reach your market in this way? Most business owners have not, and haven't really even considered it.

Facebook and LinkedIn then are the foundation-level, building blocks of effective integrated marketing. But it should be remembered that they are not the only building blocks, and probably are not even the most important. In fact, it's very good to keep in mind that for most businesses, Facebook will have some but not great reach to consumers, and almost no B2B marketing potential, and conversely LinkedIn has considerable (mostly still untapped) reach to businesses, and very little value in marketing to consumers.

There are effective ways to utilize both and it is wise and valuable to retain accomplished skilled advisors to help you design and deploy an effective strategy with Facebook and LinkedIn as part of a larger integrated strategy to ignite your marketing efforts.

From the foundation building up, it is wise to consider how you can, should and need to draw in that core audience to enlist them as your ambassadors. It isn't easy, and it is much more subliminal than you might think. Though direct mail is a rapidly dying enterprise in itself, direct contact with your core audience remains critical. E-newsletters are widely under-utilized but vitally important to building success in your business. However many people actually read your newsletter, the ones who do are seeing you take the firsthand opportunity to broadcast the most positive aspects of your own business - it is the opportunity to evangelize Your Co. LLC or Inc. to anyone who will allow you access to their inbox.

There are three critical components to building success with newsletters: (1) the volume of readers you can reach, (2) the message you express, and (3) the frequency of your touch on your audience.

The first demands incorporating an effective strategy to add as many new readers as you can to the list you email. The second, messaging, is a quality control issue. It involves everything from appearance to proper editing for spelling and grammar to the tone and content of your newsletter. The last component, frequency, is tricky. But if you are to err in frequency, it is better to touch too often than not enough - out of sight out of mind is a problem for any business - don't let it happen to you.

Our firm specializes in helping businesses with issues like these and working to schedule the appropriate impulses for the message you need to deploy. We can help you with all aspects of integrated marketing, including effective usage of e-newsletters for your business.

No commentary on social media would be complete without discussing Twitter - or now, Pinterest. Any use of social media can be effective. The most important thing to note about Twitter, however, is that it reaches a very large audience very quickly. It also builds backlinks to any site linked that are recognized by Google, and has a powerful ability to help drive SEO. But it is also the most difficult social medium to harness and control. It is truly viral - it analogizes the world of physical viruses on the internet quite neatly, by going to whatever host it can infect and spreading rapidly. It is the ebola of social media - which is not to say it id deadly to its host, but rather it will go from place to place very rapidly and successfully. Twitter needs to be utilized regularly and consistently to spread the word about your business to as many new and previously unknown users as possible.

Pinterest is a little different. It has some of the same viral qualities as Twitter. But it also has more direct contact within closed circles of friends and allies, and it is designed to share visual media rather than text.

Which brings us to video. It is inexpensive and efficient to market your message on the internet using video today. People are nearly twice as likely to respond to a video message than a written message. The medium needs to be exploited where and how it can. Vimeo becomes more competitive with YouTube each month - and thus there are multiple outlets that can and should be used for messaging through video. It is as, if not more important, than any other marketing tactic you can deploy on the internet today. Inspiris specializes in creating video messages to incorporate with other outlets for marketing over the internet.

Blogs remain very effective as well and vitally important. They are the text version of video and reach the reader audience that still dominates the internet user market.

In using video, newsletters, blogs and social media to reach your target audience, you need to create opportunities to advance and close on the business you're seeking. The last, vital piece of the marketing puzzle is to get in front of the crowd and potential buyers of your products or services. Webinars, seminars, networking events, meetups, one-one or one-group meetings, are the typical follow up tactics to deploy in an integrated approach. You can also market through audio programming, like internet radio.

In the end, the goal is to create a marketing agenda integrating many of all of these tactics together. Build toward an end goal - perhaps a monthly seminar or webinar. Then chronologically assemble your campaign to bring the best audience you can reach to your event.

Starting with a blog article tied to a video portraying the same message as the article in a different medium, blasting out links to both through e-news content and adding related links to it, while specifically identifying the time and place the event will be held. Then employing Facebook or LinkedIn to help enlist co-promoters for your event. Follow this with daily tweets, and other social media hits on point. And for my money, promote it with a big audio message on internet radio, bringing in a special program guest with specific knowledge of the topic you'll address.

Integrating marketing techniques is very powerful. Don't let the opportunity to make sense of all the money and time you spend on marketing get lost in a patchwork approach to building your success - tie up the ends and make them work together for you!

If you would like assistance in effectively building and integrating your company's marketing efforts, please contact the author, Andrew Thompson via email or by calling Inspiris Advisors at (317) 604-1276 today!