Social Media can be a part of successful search engine marketing

There should be no question that social media can be an integral part of search engine marketing. Social media content is content afterall.  At sem[c] we have been cross-linking our clients’ social media and websites for years. The prime business goal for a business, that will do the work necessary to best utilize social media (and it’s a lot of work), is to have good, real, frequently updated and optimized content on their website and an active and very interactive social profile. Each will drive traffic to the other. In both cases the strategy is based on the fact that sales are positively influenced by the amount of qualified traffic looking at your content. Each type of content serves a distinct and different purpose. Each type of content has costs and benefits.

You should think of your website as a repository of everything there is to know about your business. You should assume that by the time a prospect interacts with you they will have read everything on your website that is important to them. You really want to be in the short list of possibilities when a prospect is looking for what you sell. To be successful at this you need to develop a contemporary looking website with good, original content. The SEO process as practiced by sem[c] will help you to do this in a way that will get you found AND make it clear to a prospect what’s in it for them. A link to your social media will allow the prospect to see what other people are saying.  The costs are monetary: website development, hosting, domain name and time: content generation and organization.

You should think of social media as both part of the validation process when prospects are investigating your business and a potential source of traffic to your website when a prospects finds you via their social network. If someone gets interested in your business because of one your mutual friends they will want to know more and will visit your website. The great thing about social media is that it has little in upfront technical costs. The real cost comes in time. To get the most value out of your social media you will need to create content in an attractive way.  The goal is to get people to react to that content which allows you to interact with them. This is the most important task in maintaining social media and it works even in the case of “negative” comments. In fact, like in the old saw that there is no such thing as bad pr, any comment in your social media, no matter how bad it is, can send a powerful message about your business.

Social media can be a great tool in your online marketing toolkit.

The latest and greatest?

Groupon has become a huge phenomenon for B2C businesses. By combining old-fashioned coupons with social networking, Groupon has created a new genre by offering these businesses some great benefits: a very large audience, qualified offer recipients and a fast infusion of cash shortly after the offer runs. This doesn’t sound like it has a lot of downside, does it?
The problem can occur when all those happy Groupon customers want what they have paid for in advance all at the same time. The flood of requests can overwhelm most small to medium sized businesses. If the business can’t deliver their new Groupon customers what they’ve already bought when they want them these new customers are going to be disappointed.  Disappointed customers are not inclined to continue using a vendor who has disappointed them.

What this scenario reveals is a risk of providing a lot of goods or, more likely, services at a deep discount with a lessened possibility of a significant lifetime value that repeat customers offer a business.

The point of all this is not to avoid new opportunities like Groupon or other social networking approaches but to understand the risks so that a proper strategy that benefits your business is developed and implemented properly.

sem[c] works with its clients to harness their internal strengths to make this aspect of Internet marketing work to the business’ best advantage.

To find out more about how we work for your business, visit our website, email us, call us and tell your friends!