Internet Marketing: 3 Steps to Connect the Dots

Blogging.  Twitter.  LinkedIn.  YouTube.  Facebook.  Are you doing all of these?  Some of these?  Wondering how to pull it all together into a cohesive package and customer experience?   You’re not alone.  The brave new world of Internet Marketing has created lots of self-appointed experts who are happy to publish and share their advice, experience, and even training — much of it for free.  Indeed, there’s a wealth of expertise available for anyone willing to put in the time to learn, experiment and launch all these new approaches.

Don’t forget, however, when you’re feeling enamored with all these new possibilities, that your diverse efforts need to hang together in the eyes of your target audience.   Wherever your potential customer sees your company on the Web, the image you portray should use consistent themes and words, should carry the same message, and should link to your other presences across the Web.   

So, where to start?   And how best to connect all your dots?  I’m going to keep this short and let the picture tell the story.   Here’s the basic idea:

Integrated Marketing Campaign: It all starts with content

1. Start with your target keywords.  Presumably you’ve done some research and know the keywords your customers use most frequently to search for your offerings.  Let these be your guiding light for content creation and plan your blog posts around topics that allow you to highlight your top keyword phrases to help the search engines rank your pages for those terms.

2. Author a blog.  There’s lots of  advice available on how to do this, and there’s no better way to control your online brand and reputation than to post frequently, engage with other bloggers, and establish your presence in your industry’s blogging ranks.   Then treat your blog as the hub of your social media marketing efforts.

3. Use the other social media channels — Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc — as vehicles for reaching out to colleagues, friends, industry followers, customers, prospects, partners, and anyone else you want to establish your brand and reputation with.   Then use your networking outreach to syndicate your blog posts out to your contacts and connections, and link them back to your blog and website.  This will give you a consistent, integrated brand across the web and help interested followers find and know you quickly and easily.

My final word on this is — don’t make it all about you or your company.  Certainly, share your news, announcements, insights, and other thoughts that help position your company, products, and brand.  But that’s only part (and, in fact, should be less than 40%) of what’s appropriate to share in the social media realm.  The focus of social media is sharing value and engaging with others.   Self-promotion is frowned upon and may even turn your followers away.   It’s critical, therefore, to do lots of reading and following others in each of the social media channels before you launch your own campaign.

Here are some other sources for how to best integrate your online marketing campaign:

Jeremiah Owyang:  Web Strategy Mix: Google Buzz vs. Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Twitter

From ThinkTraffic Blog: If Content is King, Promotion is Prime Minister

Jeffbulas’s Blog:  5 Key Steps to Mastering the Social Media Marketing Landscape