The Convergence of Search, Social, and Content Marketing at SES San Francisco

Here on the last day of SES San Francisco, we had a panel of folks discussing the convergence of search, social, and content marketing.  Depending on your view of these three topics, you see them as either forming the trifecta of online marketing or the unholy trinity of time suck.  Determining which one it is for your company is an important first step.

Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connect pointed out that at the start of any conversation about marketing a company needs to assess it’s resources.  If you don’t have the bandwidth to do all of these things, you need to pick your battles wisely to gain the maximum return on your investment.  Having said that, if you do think you have the resources to manage all three, here are some of the great tips the panel provided to get you started:

• Traditional links from one site to another could be giving some ground to links within social media such as twitter, etc. Get in the game with social monitoring and responses!

• Mine your social channels for customer testimonials and keywords -- get in your customer’s psyche -- start to paint a mental picture of content that would interest them.

• Thank your customers on social channels; your mother was right – good manners really are welcome everywhere.
• Social sharing widgets post-purchase are great for extending the conversation beyond that customer.
• Including media (images and video) makes content you produce more likely to be shared (remember the kitten ad baseline we talked about yesterday? Applies here too).
• Optimize everything you produce for search and share. Period.
• Prioritize creating content with the customer in mind rather than making content solely based on keyword lists.  Get in your customer’s head and setup camp. It might be scary sometimes, but you need to be there.
• Guest blog posts are a great way to not only get additional content but possibly future links for free.
• Fish where the fish are.  Are you customers on forums talking?  You should be too.  Are they on Youtube?  Get there if the numbers make sense.
• Write topically about things that your customers care about. Mine social for what that might be.  You may have to sift through some gibberish but, hey, welcome to Facebook.
• What cluster behaviors can you identify in your customers? Identify the top ones and incorporate into your SEO, Social, and Content efforts.  Do a lot of your customers like to bird watch and you sell binoculars?
• User generated content contests can be great to augment your content if you don't have time… gto for best blog post about a product, best review, video, etc.  Get creative here and figure out the level of customer participation required versus potential payoff to ensure a degree of success.
• Measure everything!

So, whether or not you take all of this advice, some of it, or none of it remember that your time is important, your funds are limited, your employees are sensitive to going home on time, and your spouse and kids want to see you again someday, so choose wisely.

Best of luck and thanks for reading,

Phil Greenwood, Global Web and Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising