Toronto Web Marketing in the Age of Social Media
Social media is taking the world by storm with over 83% of online consumers taking advantage of the different types of social media available. It was only a matter of time before marketers followed them to this incredibly rich customer source, but marketers are increasingly frustrated by the lack of return on their investment in social media marketing. For some reason they can’t make the information they collect from social media work for them. So what is the solution? We, at our Toronto SEO company, know how marketers can avoid losing out on one of the largest consumer markets available today while still maintaining the integrity of their customer relationships. Curious yet?
It needs to be understood that in order to fully utilize the power of social media, marketers need to be able to integrate the information they collect into their organization’s pre-existing decision-making processes. So, what are some of the obstacles to integrating this information?
Obstacles in the Way of Web Marketing Success
Some of very basic problems encountered when attempting to use the information obtained through social media into pre-existing layers of an organization include not only poor integration of social media and traditional marketing methods, but a lack of measurement for the value of social media information, hit or miss tactical campaigns that don’t contribute to ongoing marketing methods, failure to engage potential customers one-on-one, a continual dependence on the old mass-marketing techniques that are no longer applicable in the internet world and, perhaps most importantly, a failure to chart clear marketing returns on social media input.
Charting the Channels
To be able to take advantage of the power of social media, integration of all an organizations marketing efforts – including social media insights – must be achieved. To do so requires applying relevant marketing tactics from both a traditional approach as well as through digital channels.
The most important thing to understand about channels is that you need to be able to understand and engage customers – and the old tried and true methods of the traditional approach are not necessarily going to get you where you to go in today’s digital age.
It used to be that a marketer’s only choices were those of broadcasting (both television and radio) outdoor marketing, print marketing, and direct marketing. In digital marketing the channels change from day-to-day and some digital and social medial channels will fall by the wayside, but you have to be open to the new channels that are taking their place.
In order to market effectively you can’t be wasting your time on specific channels, but instead you need to be consistent in methods for interacting with your customers and potential customers.
Some of the methods you can use to interact with your customers and potential customers include maintaining methods for tracking your customer’s interactions and means of capturing their input as well as identifying new approaches and channels that may be coming to the forefront. You will need to coordinate your marketing efforts across all the available channels and be able to weave social media information in with information gleaned from traditional marketing channels in order to build a strong marketing fabric.
In order to create this extra strong marketing fabric you need to not only improve customer awareness by creating manageable profiles on customer behaviors that you glean from social media, but be able to centralize decision making to engage segment audiences based on not only social but on demographic information in order to pinpoint the best marketing opportunities. But most importantly, you need to be able to coordinate all of the channels that you use – both traditional and digital – so that they work together seamlessly.
Technological Solutions
There are a number of technological solutions for coordinating the multiple marketing channels that you will be using in your new approach. You can ensure customer awareness by using ad clickthroughs, measuring site traffic and direct mail responses, charting blog pingbacks; make use of cookies, instrument widgets and tracking codes to capture potential customer interactions. In fact, it is actually advisable to use all of these methods in order to create the most comprehensive over-view of the impact your combined marketing methods are having, especially in the realms of social media.
But it is not enough to simply combine the traditional and digital marketing information. You must then be able to coordinate your decision making process to ensure that the customers get the products that your marketing information shows that they are looking for. You must also be able to identify the persons or groups who act as opinion leaders or who influence others to purchase certain products so that you know who to target with your advertising campaigns.
And last but not least, you need to be able to target these opinion leaders with personalized messages by multiple marketing channels so as to ensure that you capture their attention by means of direct mail, email, social sharing links and even pop up web offers.
Taken together, these strategies will not only make certain that your social media marketing campaigns are fully documented and valued, but that, combined with traditional marketing approaches and integrated into decision making processes, that they will become a strategic part of your marketing approach.
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