Social media marketing
Worldwide, social network ad spending is expected to grow by 81 percent, to $2.2 billion in 2008 from $1.2 billion last year (eMarketer, December 2007). In the U.S., social media ad spending will grow 55 percent this year, and this growth is more than double the growth eMarketer projects for the total U.S. online ad market. Social media marketing can help you reach a more relevant and targeted audience compared to traditional websites, in addition to touching the hard-to-reach youth audience. One of the best ways to reach targeted consumers is through social media optimization (SMO) and contextual paid search campaigns.
Social Media Optimization: SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site or blog, but you must sharpen and update your optimization skills to the max. Your task is to create white-hot content that will spread virally and naturally, collecting links galore. Good things take time, e.g., sometimes your content can fall flat or even backfire with a negative force. You must know how to target your content on the right social media news sites and how to leverage the influentials and bloggers who will link to your content. Planning is critical.
Your content must be timely and resonate with the audience to gain top interest. You can post on your site or blog, write articles for online publications, or even post a video. If you use a blog, be sure to tag properly and submit to social news sites. You also must be a community participant, commenting on related blogs, answering comments to your blog, and rewarding positive comments with links. While you must budget for the time and resources necessary for an SMO campaign, the benefits will be substantial when performed properly.
Contextual Paid Search: Another social media marketing tactic is to use AdSense ads on forum sites where consumer-generated media (CGM) is posted online. Tons of CGM is posted about products on the forum pages of product verticals, and this content can be targeted for contextual advertising in places where your target audience members might naturally visit in their normal course of internet activities. It's a natural to reach this audience through search because people solving problems and seeking information on the web start their quest on search engines.
For example, let's say someone conducted a Google search for "network printer problems." One of the top links returned might be Microsoft's Windowsbbs.com. The Windows BBS is a product site where you can get quality, free information. There are also industry verticals where all your industry information is available in one place. Each product or industry vertical contains worldwide information and direct access to qualified databases of products and suppliers. Just about every product or industry vertical has a specialized site for its major products or suppliers. Some examples include automobiles, refrigerators and televisions on the product side or computers/software, telecommunications and real estate on the industry side.
Most of the users accessing product content on these verticals come through search engines where they conduct long tail queries like "HP printer problem" or "Ford Fiesta rear axle problem," etc. Discussion forum topics are often highly visible in the SERPs for these queries.
While regular forum users and techies might not be prospects, the information seekers will likely be consumers of all types who might respond to a contextual ad depending on their needs. An ad for "printer problems" by the Geek Squad on the Microsoft BBS might attract some interest from the hundreds of daily posters looking for answers on this bulletin board.
You need to be informed on where people are talking about your product (Google News, Yahoo News, etc.), and then reach these people in a way that's both cost-effective and non-obtrusive. What better way than Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or Microsoft adCenter? Additionally, many industry verticals have their own PPC advertising programs, which can be more targeted and cost-effective than PPC on major search engines. Keep in mind testing is mandatory to determine paid search performance and ROI.
General search engines have greatly improved contextual search by improving the quality of their publisher networks and providing more precise targeting criteria. Recently, Google announced it would use cookies through its DoubleClick technology to enable frequency capping (avoid ad over-exposure), frequency reporting (number of viewers and times ads are viewed), improved ad quality (performance improvement) and view-through conversions (how many users visited the site after viewing the ad).
Social media marketing through SMO and contextual paid search can give your site an edge in today's marketing environment. Another emerging medium that can generate traffic and conversions is online video.
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