Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Online Marketing in the New Year

People are always asking us if we do viral advertising, or online advertising. People often think of this as a separate entity ... separate from traditional advertising. But in reality it is all one and the same -- lead generation. That is truly what MarCom New Media is in the business to do. We help get our clients leads that turn into new customers and revenues. It's what marketing and advertising has always been all about.

Today, we just use new technologies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make your website show up on the first pages of the engines like Google when people search for what they want. MarCom does SEO basically in two ways: onsite optimization on your website, and offsite via links BACK to your website. This isn't all that different from direct marketing. The direct mail piece was targeted to you, and if you called the company who mailed it, that was a lead generated.

Customers are more sophisticated and demanding these days. We all like to go online and chat about things. And in order to find you online, we now use what is called Social Media Marketing where we target and interact with other people, share ideas and opinions. It is really just like to oldfashioned "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Social media is the online technologies and practices that we use to share ideas, opinions insights, experiences and perspectives with other people. There are online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, while social media technology includes an assorted array of online communications hubs driven by users: Internet forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and videos. And there’s also picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, and music-sharing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit. This includes writing unique content embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

MarCom, a Los Angeles Internet marketing company, has been testing social media marketing strategies in this space for many years, and it all started with forum posting, back around 2000. Now we ghostwrite blogs for clients, shoot video shorts, manage podcasts and conduct creative viral email campaigns.

SMM is about being social so this offsite work includes research, and a social media strategy with specific tactics for getting involved and having two way conversations with target audiences. We want to create pages that provide links back to your website, for inbound traffic and links. We also want these pages to rank well in the search engines under your key words and phrases. This ultimately will build traffic, and bring you return on investment (ROI.)

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