Читать книгу Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies - Michelle Krasniak - Страница 23

Social media is only part of your online marketing. Online marketing is only part of your overall marketing. Don’t mistake the part for the whole.

Consider each foray into social marketing as a strategic choice to supplement your other online-marketing activities, which may include

 Creating and managing a marketing-effective website: Use content updates, search engine optimization (SEO), inbound link campaigns, and event calendar postings to your advantage.

 Displaying your product’s or service’s value: Create online press releases and email newsletters. Share testimonials and reviews with your users and offer affiliate or loyalty programs, online events, or promotions.

 Advertising: Take advantage of pay-per-click ads, banners, and sponsorships.

Social media is neither necessary nor sufficient to meet all your online-marketing needs.

Use social media strategically to

 Meet an otherwise unmet marketing need.

 Increase access to your target market.

 Open the door to a new niche market.

 Move prospects through the conversion funnel.

 Improve the experience for existing customers.

For example, the website for Fluid IT Services (www.fluiditservices.com) links to its Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn sites, as well as its blog (www.fluiditservices.com/blog), to attract its audience. For more information on overall online marketing, see Stephanie Diamond’s book, Digital Marketing All-In-One For Dummies (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

To get the maximum benefit from social media, you must have a hub site, the site to which web traffic will be directed, as shown in Figure 1-9. With more than 2 billion websites online, you need social media as a source of traffic. Your hub site can be a full website or a blog, as long as the site has its own domain name. It doesn’t matter where the site is hosted — only that you own its name, which appears as www.yourcompany.com or http://blog.yourcompany.com. Though you can link to http://yourcompany.wordpress.com, you can’t effectively optimize or advertise a WordPress address like this. Besides, it doesn’t look professional to use a domain name from a third party.

Consider doing some sketching for your own campaign: Create a block diagram that shows the relationship between components, the flow of content between outlets, and perhaps even the criteria for success and how you’ll measure those criteria.

Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com

FIGURE 1-9: All social media channels and other forms of online marketing interconnect with your hub website.