Integrating Social Media and Search

Social media as a B2B Marketing technique is an evolution of the marketing tools that preceded it: organic search engine marketing and paid search advertising.  But combining these techniques can provide tremendous uplift in results and ROI.

My sister blog B2C Marketing Insider recently ran this article called Where Search Meets Social: Integrating Social Media into Organic and Paid Search Can Generate Exponential ROI written by Kent Lewis, President and Founder of Social Media and Marketing agencies Anvil Media and Formic Media. The article has become one of the most popular we have ever done. And so with the author’s permission I am summarizing it here for our B2B audience.

In the past I spoke about The 4 Most Common Mistakes in B2B Content Marketing and described the importance of understanding and analyzing keywords. Kent calls social media “essentially the world’s largest focus group.” He suggests you use the common tools of the trade like Twitter, Facebook and Google Alerts as well as more advanced sources like Google trends and Customer Service data.

These tools can all be used to monitor industry and competitive conversations. This way you will begin to understand what keywords are being used and in what context they are being used in. These insights will guide the content you need to create for an effective campaign.

Next, the article suggests you use social profiles to link back to your company site or campaign landing pages. Google Local Business results within Google Maps offer a unique opportunity to claim your business listing and provide relevant traffic back to your corporate website. It is important to utilize quality content in these listings such as videos, customer testimonials and other relevant content along with key business contact details. 

While the benefits of this approach are clear, B2B marketers must also be aware of the risks.  Negative reviews can seriously hurt your brand so it is important to monitor these listings in real-time to catch and respond to any negative comments.

Social media can also help on the paid search side. As with organic search, social monitoring can assist with keywords, messaging and content direction. And the insights from paid search efforts can go back into your social campaigns as well.

So while the marketing techniques for search and social may be slightly unique, the basic fundamentals are all the same. Analyze keywords. Create content based on top terms. Run the content where your prospects are searching. Monitor and repeat.  With this approach you will reap the rewards of understanding your audience and providing them value which they will return in the form of leads and sales.

Summary by: Michael Brenner*

*This post originally appeared on B2C Marketing Insider and has been summarized with the permission of the author.