Before we dive into how Social Media Marketing can greatly assist any online marketing effort, let’s first define some overall goals for an online marketing campaign:

Doing more with online marketing goals-

You want to Increase:

• Website traffic (number of unique visitors & returning visitors)
• Page views
• Ad Exposure
• Conversion and Sales

Down to some specifics, you want to:

• Improve number of qualified visitors
• Increase number of leads
• Reduce the cost of leads
• Increase online inquiries
• Improve overall online user experience

More specifically for your company, product, or service, you want to:

• Grow brand awareness
• Create positive brand engagement
• Find business and networking opportunities

Those are some hefty goals, but guess what? Social Media Marketing efforts can deliver powerful results and help you reach all your online marketing goals.

5 Benefits of Social Media Marketing:

1) The power to engage the “right” kind of audience

There is great value that can come from engaging key influencers in the social media and blogosphere. Having meaningful and useful content about your company/product/service floating in the social media world can help bolster your search marketing goals.

Search engine results give users company information, as well as reviews, editorials, and additional “social” content from social media sites. Having frequent, quality, editorial links in the social web can give you the upper hand from competitors who are not as “social.”

Ex. If you type in a search for your business, the first page results from Google may include an interesting blog article, a popular Facebook Fan page, or even a funny YouTube video related to your business, generating positive reviews and high search page rank (that is, if you practice SMM correctly).

2) Low barrier of entry:

You can start to establish your “social media” profiles within one day.

• Create a Facebook Fan Page
• Create a MySpace Account
• Create a Youtube Channel Page
• Start a company blog, start Twittering
• Create great content and distribute it to Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit

And of course, to have a successful social media marketing campaign, you must OPTIMIZE. Practice social media monitoring, create positive user engagement, and ultimately establish meaningful relationships with your users so that they will return to your site.

Below is an illustration of a general SMM cycle:

3) Immediate feedback

In social media, the feedback loop is direct, personal, and fulfilling. Once you’ve created your social media profiles, you can begin adding friends to your Facebook and MySpace pages, following users and having users follow you back on Twitter, seeing number of video views, with comments and star ratings on your YouTube page, and so forth on as many social networks you sign up for, essentially to be recognized, listened to, and engaged in web social interaction.

4) Traffic and Conversion

Yes, there is ROI. Social sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and popular blogs and microblogs (Twitter) can drive thousands of visitors to your website. With SMM, you can create a positive “branded experience” for visitors, which can increase conversion rates. (Given that you have a great site with a strong call-to-action). With analytics and the emergence of a ton of social media monitoring tools, you can easily measure your ROI with SMM.

Useful links for Social Media Research and Monitoring-

Social Media monitoring tools:

http://socialmention.com/

http://howsociable.com/

http://addictomatic.com/

 

Trend/buzz tracking tools:

http://www.trendrr.com/

http://google.com/trends

http://buzz.omgili.com/graphs.html

http://ekstreme.com/buzz

 

Blog Research tools:

http://technorati.com/search?advanced

http://blogsearch.google.com/

http://www.blogpulse.com/

http://www.icerocket.com/

 

Blog trend tracking:

http://www.trendpedia.com/

http://blogpulse.com/trend

5) Great complement to other marketing efforts:

Social Media Marketing won’t interfere with any other methods of driving traffic to your website.

In fact, SMM is usually focused on community specific goals, such as creating brand awareness. With social media monitoring and optimization, it can help you understand user brand engagement and create positive brand association. SMM can fit perfectly with your existing advertising campaign with online search engine marketing or other traditional advertising media.