**by Shellie Foriska**
B2B Marketers, stop guessing and start monitoring! Social Media, that
is. By monitoring social communities, you can better understand where
conversations are taking place, by whom, and the topics being
discussed. Learn more about your customers' needs, wants, issues and
frustrations � then integrate these findings into your search
marketing program. This can help strengthen your brand and improve
overall online performance.
Here are 4 tips on how to start integrating social media monitoring
into your search strategy:
1. Utilize social media monitoring tools
Social monitoring tools allow you to track conversations, authors,
type of platforms (blogs, wikis, social networks, video sharing sites,
etc.), demographics, geo-graphics, keyword tags, and more.
There are many different social monitoring tools that have various
options and price ranges. To narrow the lengthy list, here are a few
tools I recommend you explore further: Radian6, Techrigy, Trackur, and
BuzzMetrics from Nielsen. At minimum, free tools like Google Reader or
Google Alerts should be utilized to monitor basic mentions within news
and blog sites.
2. Analyze social keyword tags
Understand the types of keyword tags people actually apply to social
mentions, like blog posts or social bookmarks. This data will enhance
your keyword targeting strategy for both SEO and PPC.
Search marketers have the ability to analyze search volume and
searcher behavior through keyword research tools and web analytics.
Now, with the integration of social media monitoring, keyword
targeting can be even more fine-tuned.
I recommend that you analyze the specific words and phrases that your
audience uses in social communities when discussing your products,
services, solutions and issues. Then, integrate these words and
phrases into your page titles, website content, PPC campaigns and ad
copy.
3. Gain customer insights
Your customers and prospects are discussing their needs, wants,
frustrations and problems. If you listen, you can learn a lot about
how to improve your website and your search marketing program.
For example, are customers posting messages indicating that they
can't find product information? If so, maybe you need to enhance your
website navigation, re-organize content, or create additional content
to make product literature more accessible.
Are customers and prospects looking for tutorials or demos? It may be
time to make your websites more interactive by including videos and
interactive product demos.
Are prospects blogging about how you compare to the competitors? This
could be an indication that you should add a comparison chart to your
website, possibly promote through SEO and PPC keyword targeting.
You can also proactively respond to social conversations through
search marketing channels.
PPC ads and landing pages can be written to specifically address
problems and concerns and can lead frustrated customers to your
recommended solutions or actions.
SEO programs can be modified to incorporate popular social language
into page headings and copy/text.
Marketers can create link bait content, discussing typical problems
and frustrations. Post blogs as teasers to this content, then link to
the full page on your site. Others will do the same if it's relevant,
useful content.
4. Better focus local and regional search programs
Some social media monitoring tools allow you to track where
conversations and social mentions originate. This should be integrated
with your Web Analytics data to improve search marketing targeting
strategies.
Companies can use this geographic data to understand which regions
are most active in social conversations. For instance, you may
discover numerous blog posts related to your solutions coming from
France. Does this align with your PPC targeting and budgeting
strategy? Your SEO priorities?
By analyzing social media geographic data you can refine your search
marketing targeting strategy. This can be accomplished at the country,
state, metro, city, or even the neighborhood level.
Proactively integrate social insights into search marketing
As marketers continue to tap into social communities it's essential
to proactively integrate the gained insights into your search
marketing strategy.
Specifically, to get started, you should take these four steps: 1)
utilize social monitoring tools, 2) analyze keyword tags, 3) gain
customer insights from market conversations, and 4) improve your local
targeting and budget allocation process.
Listen and learn!
Capitalize on the benefits of social monitoring to improve the
effectiveness of your search marketing program.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Shellie Foriska
<http://searchengineland.com/author/shellie-foriska/>
is an Account Director at Smart Search Marketing
<http://www.smartsearchmarketing.com/>
, a B2B Search Engine Marketing agency, where she is responsible for
managing clients' Search programs integrating organic, paid search,
and conversion improvement teams and strategies.
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