Social media marketing

Useful, compelling, personalized and unique content is increasingly important to get the attention of prospects and customers and build dialogues with them. By integrating social media in your marketing mix, you can strengthen the impact and reach of your campaigns and interact with your connections and their networks. All it requires is share-worthy content.

Selligent Interactive Marketing has been offering social sharing functions for a while now with a quite unique feature: they enable you to follow the social sharing power of all your recipients through the whole life cycle of the content they have shared!

Inbound marketing is typically defined as all marketing tactics, techniques and even channels that aim to “pull relevant prospects and customers towards a business and its products online”. This focus on the pull makes techniques, such as direct mail, trade shows, or telemarketing fall under the category “outbound marketing”.

It is really not a very scientific categorization since, in reality, inbound and outbound marketing is rather used to express an evolution whereby inbound techniques (such as blogging, social media marketing, etc.) are more embraced by marketers, among others because the cost-per-lead appears to be lower but most of all because potential customers use more inbound channels in the buying journey they increasingly control.

For a lot of online marketers, traffic to the website is still the Walhalla and the ultimate measure for their activities. This is obviously wrong: what counts in the end is the conversion, the value of the visitors for your business and their engagement.

A while ago I wrote about the mismatch between the expenses made to gain traffic against those made to optimize conversion on Dave Chaffey’s SmartInsights blog, making the case for conversion optimization. I then referred to the rather sensational fact that, via Bryan Eisenberg, I had found out that for every 95 US$ that companies spend on traffic generation, only one dollar is spent on conversion improvement.

However, traffic obviously remains an important element. Without visitors to your website or blog there’s not really a point in having one. And so it’s important to know where traffic, the start of conversion on your website, comes from.

Last week I discovered, like many others, the results of a survey on our content sharing behavior by social sharing tool ShareThis, in cooperation with Starcom MediaVest Group.

The American Marketing Association and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have released a new survey, shedding more light on the trials and tribulations for CMOs trying to integrate social media marketing into their mix.

They surveyed over 400 marketers and report that over the next 12 months, social media spending will rise by almost 10% in marketing budgets and will almost double over the next five years with an increase of 18.1%.

According to the report, B2C and B2B service companies are planning the biggest increases since they have a larger portion of their budget set aside for social marketing compared to product companies. The survey also indicates they plan bigger percentages in the next 12 months and 5 years.

These results paint a much different picture than the August 2010 CMO survey did. At that time it was the other way around with product companies increasing their spends and service companies decreasing theirs.

It may be a case of product companies being faster out of the gate with social media marketing and now, after spending some time and effort in the channel, they are settling their budgets down a bit.