Ten Steps: Defining Social Media Marketing

The Internet is not just a different advertising channel, but an entirely new and unique culture with a multitude of online communities. Although there are many folks that think social media marketing is just the latest fad, it is not. The reality is, it is changing how we do business.

Although traditional marketing and new media strategies continue to morph, the Internet has emerged into a tremendous platform for direct and open communications among the media, businesses, and individuals worldwide.

Many of our new clients need some basic education on what we recommend, why and how we do what we do. We have been using these ten steps in most of our proposals for quite some time now.

Search engine optimization, social media marketing and online PR tactics include:
1) Fully analyze your situation, including competition, market, etc.
2) Conduct keyword research to determine the keywords associated with your name most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings and create a keyword strategy to map the keywords to specific website pages.
3) Optimize the pages of the website, www.meridianlasercare.com.
4) Create a blog and ghostwrite apx. -1 to 2 posts per week recommended.
5) Social Media Marketing: Create additional site content through writing and publishing articles to disseminate over the Internet
6.) Post and distribute electronic press releases (Using wires such as MarketWire or PRWeb)
7.) Create bookmarked posts to social media sites. (DIGG, Del.ic.ious, Stumble Upon, etc.)
8.) Optimize existing and new content over the next three months and execute the social media PR plan.
9.) Acquire reciprocal links and incoming links via article submissions, electronic press releases and a blog.
10.) Purchase directory listings for your new website to provide additional, high page rank links. Directories include Yahoo! Directory, Superpages as well as any industry specific directories with high page rank. (Yahoo is $299/Year Superpages runs $22/month)

The real truth is that although these basic steps are usually recommended, there is no single template for every client, because every client's situation, website, and place among thier competition is unique. MarCom's Social Media Marketing proposals are customized for each new client, and then throughout the yearly campaign tweak their strategies based on results we are seeing from the tracking results.