Integrating Social Media Marketing

I had a series of interesting conversations these past few days with several individuals about the importance of integrating traditional marketing techniques with social media marketing. As I work with a series of different B-to-B clients, I notice that one company typically excels at traditional marketing techniques while another excels at social media. Many organizations are looking for the right marketing talent to integrate the best practices of each.

Marketing Sherpa published a good article this past week about Social Medias Place in the Elite Marketing Trio, which you should read to make sense of the remainder of my post. Here is the chart with the results of a survey asking marketers to rank the importance of social media. I voted (unofficially to myself) and chose that in a pure integrated marketing model, social media marketing can (1) complement existing tactics, (2) be a standard marketing tactic and (3) have its own budget line item. The answer for your organization will have something to do with the target audiences and products/services that your team is marketing.

For example, with a company that has multiple products or lines-of-business (LOBs) targeting different segments and/or audiences - you might choose a social media marketing tactic exclusively for one segment and perhaps integrate with existing tactics when targeting another segment/audience. Your choices may be driven by (1) your desired outcomes, (2) where a segmented audience is in the lead nurturing cycle (or the impact on brand as an influencer or thought leader), (3) how 'social' your audience is and (4) your budget and the need to balance and execute more comprehensive marketing tactics (including social media) to your top priority segments/audiences, while spending less dollars via social media exclusively for segments that are a secondary focus.

I think it is also important to note that the "trio" analogy the author discusses talks to interactive marketing tactics and if a non-marketer reads this article, it can leave an impression that oversimplifies the power (and complexity) of marketing. While interactive marketing tactics are important, there is more to marketing/lead generation than dropping emails, SEO and social media particularity for enterprise software companies. Most enterprise software companies have multiple "messages" and target audiences as discussed above. For those organizations targeting C-suite executives and Vice Presidents, in particular, marketers need to integrate an array of different marketing mediums including direct (dimensional) mailings, executive events (such as a breakfast event, cocktail hour, dinner, etc.), email, webinars, SEO/SEM, social media, tradeshows/conferences/thought leadership events, telemarketing, etc. - those that entice more "face-to-face" interaction and relationships.

The good news with this survey is that marketers realize that social media is here to stay. I think it would be interesting to survey non-marketing executives to get their point of view. I sometimes think that all the hype about social media marketing is confusing non-marketers who already grapple with what marketing really is....

Here are some relevant links/sites on this topic:

http://elektrik.com/blog/2009/07/integrated-marketing-strategies-are-even-more-important/

http://masterful-marketing.com/social-media-marketing-one-component-of-marketing-plan/