Effective integration of social media into an email and other online campaigns can go a long way toward helping a company intensify the impact of its marketing while becoming more relevant to its prospects and current customers.

This will create new opportunities for email list growth, extend campaign reach and harness social insights to energize inform-targeting campaigns. Indeed marketers must align with email vendors that have social campaign capabilities so they can mine social conversations and add social metrics to their email dashboards in order to ingrain social into their email strategies.

It is important to create a social network combined with email as a dynamic means of adding fresh content to networks while creating marketing synergy.

Effective social media campaigns are designed to be disseminated through social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producers.

Utilizing social media outlets is a method to disseminate content in a way in which users can opt in to receive, send and recycle desired information and that it has the ability for direct communication, content sharing, and has become in effect a very powerful search engine.

Social media can help businesses compete in the following ways:

-Exposure

-Increased Web Traffic

-Relevant Visitors

-SEO Benefits

-Targeted Pay Per Click

-Strategic Partnerships

-Community Building

-Brand Monitoring

-Customer Service

-Customer Feedback

-Helps to Build Email Database

It is time well spent for a business to devote a portion of their day engaging in social media, create integrated strategies and track their results. The first basic steps are:

1.Create a strategy, determine purpose, and assign content sources.

2.Determine which networks to start with.

3.Assemble marketing collateral and brand each network to be consistent with your website. (Don’t forget your URL!)

4.Disseminate content and build your networks.

5.Analyze reports and track website visitors.

6.Adjust strategies, fine tune and reach out to others.

Social Networking Setup

Determining which networks are best suited to your business should dictate the starting point. The idea is to reflect the brand identity, link the network to the primary website, and establish the look and feel of the network that is consistent with the organizations, logo, color scheme, and messaging.

Content Creation

This involves creating social media content that is consistent with the theme and tone of the marketing message. Messages should focus on events, products, services, announcements, news and more.

Dissemination

Once the networks and content have been created, it is time to disseminate the messages. Messaging will be repeated in specified intervals using slightly different keywords, language and tone until best results have been determined.

Community Building

Good social networking is a two-way street that involves aggressive relationship building where an organization will find other organizations that communicate with a targeted market. Woodbury believes that by befriending some of these existing networks, clients can deliver their message to a highly targeted pool of prospective, simply by befriending a strategic partnership.

Test, Measure and Refine to Optimize your Efforts and Investment

Reporting is Vital! Understanding the results of your efforts can create repeatable mechanisms that can be integrated into multiple networks. Knowing what is working and adjusting accordingly is a continual process when discussing social media.

A Formula for Social Media Setup

The setup could include creation of over 20 networks with a portal capable of disseminating posts to multiple networks. Each setup should include backgrounds, logos, about us content, etc.

Content Creation

Once the networks have been set up, a steady stream of content awaits these new social media networks. If necessary retain a capable consultant to work with your team to develop content strategies, standards and targets to focus on prior to dissemination.

Dissemination

Once the content has been created, it is time to disseminate the messages appropriately. This includes fitting relevant keywords, optimizing content and distributing the messages in a way that maximizes usefulness within the social communities.

Blog and Article Strategy

Successful blogs and articles are both art and science. A consultant can help to plan strategy, design an interface, create content, develop posting procedures and establish posting standards that can maximize any piece’s effectiveness.

Community Building

Any effective social media campaign will develop strategic relationships and mechanisms that can disseminate marketing messages more frequently, or with targeted qualifications.

Tracking

Using the latest tracking technologies, we can track each message sent out using the social media portal. This can provide insight as to which content is working and what products or services may be popular.

Paid Marketing

Paid social media marketing is one of the hottest emerging fields in online marketing at this time. Be first to the market in your industry and capitalize on social ad placement, which can often outperform traditional pay per click campaigns.

Monitoring

Want to hear what others are saying about you? Monitoring services are available that allow access to data using specific keywords over multiple platforms to gather relevant postings, comments, complaints, positive reviews, and more.

Training

Prefer to do it yourself? Seek out training sessions. This could help make you a social media master in no time at all.

Important Things to Remember:

-Creating a strategy is vital to maintaining focus.

-If you are looking for fast results, consider a social media pay per click campaign.

-The main goal should be to drive targeted traffic to a website.

-Social media takes time to work, it requires continuous efforts to be successful.

-Branding should be consistent.

-Reporting, analysis and adjustment is key.

Author Bio: FireDrum Internet Marketing, with headquarters at 7898 E. Acoma Dr., Ste. 210, Scottsdale AZ 85260, can be reached at 480-699-1524, http://www.firedrum.com or info@firedrum.com.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: free email marketing, email marketing, email marketing software, email newsletters, email marketing