Do You Have An Integrated Online Strategy?
March 2, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
While many of us in the online marketing field work day-in and day-out on our own online marketing strategies and those for our clients, It’s never been more important to have an integrated online marketing strategy as the scope for branding is so large now that you have to be on top of all these social portals to keep hammering your brand which is what eventually will give you long-term business success and a loyal customer or user-base.
Let’s face it, when planning out a real marketing strategy for your business, specially online, you have to have your short-term strategy and goals, and your long-term strategy and goals. Short-term is always aimed at quick traffic and conversions, long-term is more based on branding, user base, etc. Us online marketers deal with different channels on a daily basis such as promoting our businesses through Pay-Per-Click (Google, Yahoo, MSN) or SEO (Google, Yahoo, MSN) or Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, etc. You may think every business is doing this, but that’s not the case, and if you ARE already doing this, and you’re ahead and if possible, you should push these channels even more and integrate them as much as possible.
The idea for this post came from an article today posted on MediaPost by Kaila Colbin titled, “Why An Integrated Strategy Will Always Outperform.”
“…My friend Richard Cardran is one of those people whose insights are like a mini-MBA every few minutes. Twitter’s fine, says Richard, as is Facebook, YouTube, and all the rest of them. Where they really start to get exciting, though, is where you interconnect everything, where you start to leverage the network effects made possible by having access to so many different channels for relatively little cost.
This is a concept I hammer again and again with my social media clients. Forget about just trying to drive traffic to the destination site. We need to reframe our definition of success, so that instead of a destination site we have an online brand ecosystem, and wherever a customer or potential customer comes into contact with our brand, they’re treated to the totality of the brand experience.
And just as the social media foundation paved the way for the traditional media coverage, and just as the results of the traditional media coverage were then embraced and supported by the social media infrastructure, search is supported by all your other marketing activities.”
I was reading the comments on this article which I really suggest you reading the entire piece, and a very interesting comment by a user:
“It’s great to see that you SM and SEO gangs are coming to see what we brand marketers have been saying for a long time. Multiple media, used correctly, will outperform any single media every time. Jay Levinson (the guy who invented the Marlboro man) has said for years that it takes 9-12 touches before anyone will act on your behalf; and that any one particular target market member might see 1/3 of your outreach attempts. So, the math is easy (even for us marketers!); it takes 27-36 outreaches before you touch anyone 9-12 times. Doing over multiple channels works better, IF the touches are branded strongly enough that each one is recognizable as coming from the advertiser–poorly branded touches don’t count. Now the the fan frenzy over SEM and SM seems to be dying down, we’ll see that these are simply new channels to be added to the other marketing tools in the toolkit; each tool has its appropriate uses, benefits, values, proper uses, etc.”
I think that comment is right on point. ALTHOUGH, I DISAGREE with SEM dying down, I don’t see that as the case, but we do see more attention toward other areas such as conversion marketing, affiliate marketing, etc.
