Ideas for Remarkable Online Marketing by @KunalKripalani

I previously stated that social media is one way to disaggregate your customer database so you're not completely reliant on email. 

Your customers' habits are changing. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

This chart from Morgan Stanley shows that social networking usage has now surpassed email usage.  Disaggregation is important.

Source: Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley
Corroborating Source: 2009 Marketing Trends by StrongMail

Furthermore, with this shift in behaviour, comes a shift in marketing budgets. Forrester estimates Social media spend of US$3.1 billion by 2014 versus only US2.1 billion for email.

We are past the tipping point.  Social media can be more effective than email because:

1. You can offer seamless experiences that keep the prospect on one channel and medium throughout the sales funnel, thereby reducing friction.
2. Overcome the noise associated with email marketing and reach prospects through a channel of their preference.  People who ignore your emails may listen to your message via an alternative channel.
3. The perception of a brand on a social network, is a brand that listens.  a brand that cares about me. And that asset - that social capital will deliver you customers that are worth more than those who you are not connected with on social networks.
4. It's easier for a recipient to share your message within a social network, than from an email client.
5. It's faster and easier for you to create a brief (and more easily consumable) post rather than produce a much longer html newsletter.
6. There are more relevant targeting opportunities than was possible with email segmentation, at least in the early stages of the customer lifecycle.

What's critical to remember, is that the tone of social media communications and it's approach is starkly different to email messaging. It's typically shorter and contains more rich media.  It's also a more passive message,  entertaining and has a level of personalisation that is unseen in email marketing.  It's ideally suited for targeting a niche group of subscribers who are interested buyers and / or influencers who are likely to think your message is remarkable enough to share it with their friends.

Here's how you can start integrating social media into your email marketing.

A couple of days ago I wrote about 5 ways social media can enhance your SEO efforts.This is good stuff, but:

SM and SEO certainly overlap, but I still see too many people operating in silos...Neither effort will succeed unless it's part of a larger marketing and analytics strategy." @AndrewCMiller

Wise words. So, SEO is only a fragment of an overall search marketing strategy, which in itself is part of a larger stragetic drive by a business as a means of achieving their goals.  So let's take one step back and look at:

1. Why you might use search engine optimisation.
2. How you can use SEO to achieve business goals.

1. SEO should form part of a strategy to achieve business goals like,

• An increase in brand awareness
• An increase in sales / market share
• A reduction in customer acquisition costs.
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Reducing customer service queries

2. The business benefits of high organic search rankings are the result of a well formulated and sustained SEO effort.

"SEO needs to be iterative and evolutionary. It should learn from itself and its PPC sister to become more targeted and relevant to the intended audience."@RyanDeShazer

So it follows that SEO does not deliver free traffic, because it requires time to first implement your strategy and then also to sustain it. That's human resources working with an analytics package. There are ofcourse opportunities to reduce the financial investment by using automation tools like Wordstream, but let's not get sidetracked.

You want to make sure people who need what you have are able to find you more easily than they can find your competitors.

We want them to visit our website, to place orders, fill out applications and subscribe to our mailing lists.  You need to know what keywords are driving tangible results and we need to measure our progress month to month and quarter to quarter.

If you are an SEO newbie, you need to read Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.  For the rest of us i've created a 35 point Search Engine Optimisation Checklist to increase your visibility and rankings.  I also recommend reading about Conversion Optimisation to guarantee the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. The landing pages that prospects clickthrough to are critical.

Talk SEO with me @KunalKripalani