Social media marketing should never be done in a vacuum. Though it’s a powerful marketing tool, social media really performs the best when it’s part of a larger strategy. Here’s how to integrate social media marketing into the rest of your marketing plan.
Integrating Social Media and Paid Traffic
It’s difficult for paid traffic to help social media. However, social media can be a big help for paid traffic. Perhaps the most powerful way you can use social media and paid traffic is by using your social media profile as social proof. If anyone sees:
That’ll boost your conversion rates drastically. Use the Facebook widget or the Twitter widget to “show off” your followers and your likes.
Note: if you’re a newer brand, wait until you have a more established social media presence to use this strategy.
Integrating Social Media and SEO
Unlike paid traffic, social media and SEO is a two-way street. They both help one another.
Your social media helps SEO in a few different ways. First, your follower list can be a fantastic source of backlinks. If you see another blogger or website owner following you, reach out to see if they’d be willing to link to you.
Google also uses social media metrics to conduct their rankings. If you have a lot of tweets, likes, comments and shares, that on its own will improve your SEO.
The flip side is also true. Getting people from search engines to your site is one of the most powerful ways to grow a social media audience. Make sure you have social media buttons on all your posts to make it easy for people to share your content. Encourage readers to share your content whenever possible.
Integrating Social Media and Sales
How do you use social media to sell things?
First, use social media to build trust. Give away valuable content and keep people interacting with you. Keep your name in front of them. This doesn’t directly result in sales, but affects conversion rates across the boards.
Use social media to pre-sell ideas and problems. This is especially important when you’re leading up to an event or product launch. For example, let’s say you’re launching a new Facebook ad spy tool. You might use social media to talk about why competitive intelligence is so important, and how they could use that data to their advantage.
After a couple weeks of “priming” your audience, you send them to your sales page using your email newsletter. The actual hard hitting sales message is usually best done by email rather than social media. Though if you have a lot of trust built up, it’s fine to go for the sale ever once in a while as well.
