Relating social media to other online strategies

Before I explain, let's identify some typical strategic objectives:

• Generate traffic and and links
  
• Improve search engine rankings for targeted key phrases
  
• Build awareness amongst your target market
  
• Increase your subscriber base or generate a lead
  
• Build trust amongst your customers
  
• Sell a product
  
• Help users move through the sales cycle
  
• Build influence in the market place
  
• Support your crisis management communications strategy
  
• Learn new things about customers
  
• Identify relevant online networks

Different strategies address different objectives

As we can tell, most of these objectives are relevant to most businesses; however, it's important to understand that different online strategies address different objectives. As an example, social media may be great to build influence or learn new things about customers but would need the support of search engine optimization (SEO) to sell a product or generate a lead. It's not to say that social media cold not address these objectives; having the two working in a combined fashion just makes it all the more successful.

So back to the three important web marketing pillars…

The foundation to any online strategy should be a corporate website. It's what some would call the starting point for customers who are interested in your company – for instance, where they get their news about your company and your product and service offerings. Pay a lot of attention to this because, if anything else, this is the most important online real estate you will own. It's what pulls everything together and what supports all your other strategies.

The second important online pillar is what I call “traditional digital media”. Examples of this includes affiliate marketing, response-driven advertising, pay per click, search engine optimisation and WebPR, to name some. When used properly, these strategies offer a very targeted, ROI-driven manner of reaching out to consumers and drawling them closer to a predetermined goal.

The third – yes, third – pillar is social media. I put this one last because well-executed social media needs the support of some of the above in order to be more effective than its isolated application. Unlike the other two pillars, the social media arm of the online strategy is about leveraging relationships and networks for the purposes of engaging in open dialogue with and amongst target markets, to create influence within the market and to discover new business-relevant information and trends.

Each supports the other

As you can see, if we look at these three pillars, each supports the other very nicely. However, there's a very real problem amongst this industry… and I may get criticised for saying this: very few people understand how each of these three pillars work together, why each is needed for the other to succeed, and, most importantly, how to leverage the combined efforts to tap into new opportunities.

Surprisingly, there's a lesson to be learnt from traditional media; various elements working together to deliver on brief. Why should online be different?

• Originally published as as www.cosmedia.co.za/how-does-social-media-relate-to-other-online-strategies/