The CEO & CMO’s Guide to Social Media ROIHow Listening and Engagement Leads to a Better Social Media ROI

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LEVERAGING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SEARCH ENGINE MARKETINGA Guide to Integrating Social Media With SEO/SEM

n the good old days, interactive marketing was about using online ads to drive traffic to your website. Yesterday’s banner and pop-up

ads evolved into today’s search placement strategies and now includes both search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Interactive marketing has been complicated by the addition and exponential growth of social media, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more.

To create a strong online brand image, you need a comprehensive mix of all the right elements, including a robust brand website, aggressive search engine marketing, and social media pages with engaged audiences. More importantly, you need an integrated strategy that addresses all these areas.

Sure, you’ve been spending on search and you’ve embraced social media, but are all the elements of your interactive marketing coming together to work effectively for you?

For most marketers, these elements have been compartmentalized into designated silos with separate messages, promotions, and even different “languages”. In this paper, you’ll see why interactive integration is imperative and how to leverage social for best business results – results that can increase the traffic to your

Abstract brand site, improve your search engine marketing, boost conversion rates, and create a cohesive brand experience across all channels.

First came the website. It’s a necessity. After all, how else can your customers find your company online?

Next came the means by which to drive traffic to the website: first with un-targeted banner and pop-up ads, and later, with more effective, keyword-based

ads designed to reach targeted users on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These search

placements evolved into search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-

click ads that appear in search engine results

pages (SERPs), and search engine optimization (SEO): the process of crafting your webpages to

improve visibility and page-rank

within the organic SERPs. Interactive marketing

has become more complicated with the exponential growth of social media, and presents new challenges to maintaining brand status and consumer awareness.In general, though, you feel good about your interactive marketing.

A Brief History of Online Marketing1

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Your web designers manage the brand website. Your SEM firm or team manages your PPC campaigns and facilitates both off-site and on-site SEO, creating new content, posting product news in your company’s and other relevant blogs, and including back-links to your product website. Lastly, you have a social media manager who maintains your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, all of which have a substantial number of friends, followers and connections, respectively. These profiles are consistently updated with new product information, industry news, promotional offers and opportunities for your customers to ask questions and offer input on your products and services.

You have a comprehensive mix of all the elements necessary to create a strong online brand image, but there’s still a problem. All of these elements have been compartmentalized into their designated silos. While the independent metrics seem promising, you still aren’t sure how one element of the interactive marketing mix affects the others.1 And therein lies the problem.

You wouldn’t let your offline marketing campaign launch before you carefully coordinated the print ads, TV and radio spots, point of purchase materials and direct mail to ensure they’re presenting a cohesive brand experience. So why do the various elements of your interactive marketing operate independently? Why is the association of your “brand” and a common medium the only thing that ties them together?

You’ve embraced social media as a marketing tool, but have you made the connections between those media and your search engine marketing?

With the help of today’s social media monitoring software, you can leverage your social media efforts to improve your search engine marketing, increase the traffic to your brand’s website, generate higher conversion rates, and create a cohesive brand experience across all these channels.

Consider a few of Google’s Top 10 Ranking Factors and how the proliferation of social media can influence a search engine’s organic search results:

• High Quality Links - Blogs, Facebook posts, Tweets and YouTube Shares are littered with links. These links are embedded with and/or surrounded by topic-relevant keywords: depending on the context, they can bestow significant credibility—think News-source blogs or Influential industry leaders’ profiles.

• Keyword in the Domain Name - A no-brainer for anyone who has created an account on Facebook or Twitter: you can actually elect to have your social media domain contain the name of your business, your slogan or your unique selling proposition.

• Unique, Optimized Content - Content is key when it comes to SEM, and with

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Why integrate SEO, SEM & Social?2

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an infinite amount of space and millions of content creators who maintain blogs and regularly investigate developments in their field, social media far outpaces traditional content providers in uncovering the latest and greatest on the web.

• On-Page Optimization – While social media marketers have no control over the domain hosting or meta tags on the back-end of their social profiles and pages, they can pack keywords into the content, photo captions, and links found within the site.

Social media can do much more than simply affecting the results of a search engine. As one example, Facebook’s recent integration efforts have resulted in “social sharing” buttons across over 2.5 million websites. These buttons allow visitors to instantly share purchases online content, promotions and videos with their Facebook friends. More importantly for marketers, this integration lets visitors place an inbound link from Facebook to any article, content or purchase they “like”. This lets social media users actually contribute to your search engine optimization without ever leaving your website. Facebook has provided a way for your brand to receive free search engine optimization from the very customers you are trying to reach!

Despite the often-rocky relationship between the online powerhouses, Google, the world’s largest search engine, could hardly ignore the force behind the Facebook phenomenon. This recognition is reflected in recent changes to the search algorithms at Google as well as Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Both search engines now take social media signals into consideration when ranking sites on their SERPs. In a 2011 survey of Search

Ranking Factors (SRF) conducted by SEOmoz, it was found that Page Level Social Metrics weigh in at 7.22% of SRFs. More to the point, the experts surveyed in the SEOmoz study predicted that Social Signals, both at the Page Level and the Domain Level, will continue to increase in importance in the coming years. As Google and Bing place higher levels of importance on the influence of these growing media, it’s easy to see why integrating your search and social marketing initiatives will soon become imperative in order to maintain the status of your online brand.Search engine marketing campaigns can be difficult to get started. Selecting the keywords and keyword phrases for which to optimize and purchase on a pay-per-click basis is easier said than done. Marketers often have a handful of keywords and keyword phrases that they associate with their brand, products, and services, but these terms may not be very relevant to the brand in the consumers’ minds. If the marketer’s set of keywords have a low search volume, then it is likely that their customers find their site with entirely different search terms. Conversely, if the keywords have a very high search volume, as is common in very competitive verticals, the number of search terms, the ad position, and/or the number of impressions delivered per search may be limited by budget or the sheer volume of competition.

Finding the most relevant mix of keywords

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and phrases, which have both sufficient search volume and offer an efficient cost-per-click, can prove costly and time consuming. This is one area where social media, if correctly monitored, can prove invaluable to the process. The organic conversations taking place on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs are teeming with the keywords and phrases your customers and your competitors’ customers use in their everyday communication when referring to brands, products and services. “Listening” to these conversations provides an array of relevant keywords that will serve as a great starting point for an SEM campaign.

According to eMarketer.com, many companies are looking to achieve a greater return on investment in their paid advertising efforts, and are embracing the integration strategy in order to maintain a cohesive brand experience across all of their media channels. This trend should start with the integration of social media and search marketing. By monitoring online “buzz” through social media monitoring technology, you’ll be able to tailor your search marketing to changes in the way your customers discuss your brand online, including social media mentions, keyword search volume, and more. You’ll also be able to see customer response to new advertising, promotions, and product launches in real-time—and be able to quickly avoid costly mistakes and inappropriate marketing strategies.

Monitoring social media mentions of your brand as well as your competitors’ is a strong starting point for search engine marketing. While search volume sources like Google AdWords will show you the highest-volume and most-frequent keywords in your industry, those same keywords and phrases are the most competitive—and therefore the most expensive—to purchase on a PPC basis. They are also the most difficult to “rank for” by using SEO strategies. However, monitoring social media mentions of your products and brands (as well as those of your competitors) provides a wealth of quantitative data to lay the groundwork for your SEM strategy. Your search engine marketing takes on a new level of relevance when you can match your SEO and PPC campaigns to authentic language that’s already being used in reference to your products and product category.Social media provides a wealth of new data that can be harvested directly from

Boost Your SEM With Social Media3

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Having accurate, up-to-the-minute keyword analysis helps uncover related questions and topics your customers are interested in. Source: MutualMind.

the customers you hope to reach and whose loyalty you seek. Unlike traditional search marketing references, social media provides both quantitative and qualitative data. While consumers may frequently associate a particular keyword or keyword phrase with your brand, if the sentiment is negative, it would be counterproductive to optimize for that keyword. Sentiment patterns found in social media monitoring can indicate alternative keywords or phrases associated with more positive consumer sentiment.

By using social media effectively, you can significantly boost the performance of your search engine marketing. Using the right kind of social media monitoring tools will help you streamline and refine the integration of your Search and Social efforts and lead to a better ROI for both. Social media monitoring has many benefits for businesses of any size. These include:

• Keyword and Keyword Phrase Insights. Social media can help identify relevant keywords with less competition—saving money with every click.

• Authenticity & Relevancy. Social media monitoring will let you pick up on the language used in natural conversation online—leading to meaningful campaigns and promotions your customers appreciate.

• Keyword Tracking… Before Spending On PPC. Social media analytics let you test out keywords and see what works before starting a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

• Improves SERP Ranking, Even As Algorithms Change. As the major search

Maximize the ROI of Search + Social4

engines alter their SERPs to account for social media, it’s clear that having a strong social media presence can only help your brand’s ranking—and will be even more important in the future.

• Measures Brand Experience Across Multiple Channels. This lets you view the full scope of your marketing efforts and understand how they’re being seen by others—giving you the ability to make quick, precise adjustments to your marketing strategy.

• Measures Market “Buzz” for Specific Products & Services. Social media lets you discover exactly how your customers feel about your products—even opening up opportunities to provide great customer service or uncover issues before they escalate.

• Competitive Intelligence. A high-performance social media monitoring platform will also let you investigate the keywords and phrases your competitors are using—allowing you to use their market research for your own campaign.

MutualMind Removes Noise To Find Actionable Information.MutualMind, an enterprise social media management system, lets companies drill down on specific keywords as they appear across social media channels. The unique filtering system sorts through thousands of brand mentions and quickly categorizes them by keyword, channel, and consumer sentiment—saving the time and effort of manually sorting and analyzing each of your social media channels.

How MutualMind Can Help5

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MutualMind Combines Quantitative and Qualitative Information into Useful Reports.MutualMind’s customizable reports show you not only the frequency with which your brand, products, keywords and services are mentioned, but also determines the sentiment in which they were referenced, on a per-channel basis. These reports can help show you where to apply future efforts to improve your interactive brand experience.MutualMind Detects Search Patterns.

In a real-time monitoring study of the 2011 Super Bowl ad spots, MutualMind software was able to immediately determine which ads garnered the most “buzz,” see how many mentions each ad received, and ascertain whether the sentiment behind the brand and campaign mentions was positive, negative or neutral. When applied to a specific brand, this powerful listening capability allows ad agencies to make adjustments in ad length, tag lines or other edits that will generate more “buzz”— leading to a significant improvement in response rate when the ad next airs.

MutualMind Provides Key Business Insights for Marketing Teams.

The data collected through MutualMind’s proprietary software allows for customized reports that can demonstrate how well your offline marketing elements drive traffic to social media and search engines. By monitoring the number of times a commercial is viewed on YouTube or shared across Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, you can see how your broadcast elements compel consumers to share and discuss your brand in social media.

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Key Takeaways

• Integration of Search Engine Marketing and Social Media is imperative.

• Monitoring Social Media is the first step to integrating your interactive marketing.

• Your Social Media success directly affects the success of your Search Engine Marketing.

• Social Media Monitoring software, such as MutualMind, provide quantitative and qualitative data that can be used to improve your Search Engine Marketing Strategy.

• Full integration of your marketing efforts will improve your search engine marketing, increase traffic to your brand site and generate higher conversion rates while building a cohesive brand experience across all channels.

Sources1. eMarketer.com, (2011), “Companies Integrating Market-

ing Efforts, Questioning Effectiveness,” eMarketer.com,

May 26, available at:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008407, Vis-

ited May 30, 2011.

2. Facebook Statistics, (2011), Facebook.com, available at:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statisticsVisited

May 25, 2011.

3. http://www.seoservicesu.com/blog/2011/04/google-top-1

0-ranking-factor-or-how-to-get-google-top-10-ranking/

4. Stein, Gary, (2011), available at:

http://www.clickz.com/print_article/clickz/column/207546

1/serp-position-goes-fold

5. Crispin Sheridan, (2011), “SEO + Social Media + Blog-

ging: When Will Big Business Catch Up?” ClickZ.com,

June 1, available at:

http://www.clickz.com/print_article/clickz/column/207502

6/seo-social-media-blogging-business-catch, Vis-

ited June 15, 2011.

6. Chalton, Graham, (2011), “The Future of Social

Search: the experts’ view,” Econsultancy.com,

June 15:

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7643-the-future-o

f-social-search-the-seo-experts-view-2 Visited

June 15, 2011.

7. Fishkin, Rand, (2011), “2011 Search Ranking

Factors,” SEOmoz.com, available at:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-fact

ors#overview , Visited June 15, 2011.

8. Resource Nation, (2010), “Search Engine Optimi-

zation: Optimize Online – How to Build your Page

Rank,” ResourceNation.com, available at:

http://changetheworld.tradepub.com/free/w_reso1

3/ Visited June 20, 2011.

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Join the conversation your customers are already having.

MutualMind brings detailed, up-to-the-minute measurements and analysis to your entire social media campaign, giving you the clear, actionable insights your business needs to leap ahead. Built from the ground up to empower campaigns of all sizes, MutualMind’s proprietary software maps consumer sentiment across the Web, filters out the noise, and delivers relevant metrics and information directly to you.

MutualMind’s proprietary social intelligence engine integrates both listening and engagement insights with built-in, best-in-class tools for managing multiple social channels, one-click engagement and followup, team-based collaboration, and social customer relationship management.

To learn more about how your business can unlock the social web, visit MutualMind.com.