Integration in Social Media and Internet Marketing
At the start of any calendar year predictions for the year ahead fill our inboxes and newsfeeds. One report rose to the top of the masses. Awareness Networks released its annual 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictionsfilled with insights from 34 business and marketing leaders. It’s written for marketing strategists, brand marketers, consultants and those working in agencies and covers several aspects of our new marketing world.
One word within this report jumped out repeatedly and was hammered home by Robert Collins (@RobertCollins), Founder and Host of Social Media Breakfast when he named the top challenge for 2012 - “Integration - Integration – Integration.”
Here’s what others had to say about integration:
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Steve Rubel of Edelman predicts, “Next year will be the year that business gets religious about integration. Social media in a vacuum is not enough. It needs to be tightly integrated with traditional PR, advertising and CRM. The noise in social will reach such a breaking point that integration will be required to stand out.”
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“More businesses will actively engage with all the stages of inbound marketing,” predicts Laura Fitton of HubSpot. “Right now there’s too much focus on social media marketing and content marketing. True inbound marketing involves knowing which tactics work – which pieces of content, calls to action, forms and emails generated the most leads. It’s integrating your SEO efforts together with your content generation and sharing, with your advertising, your lead nurturing, your analytics, measurement and A/B testing, with every tool you use and everything you do as a marketer.”
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Fitton also pointed out the importance of tools to help integrate the full marketing process and measure meaningful outcomes. “Tools that truly support inbound marketing, giving marketers the ability to see which sources of traffic deliver leads and customers. I personally look forward to the day when waving your arms and quoting numbers like followers, traffic and number of ‘likes’ is frowned upon and replaced with a meaningful, inbound marketing approach.”
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“2012 is the year brands will begin to integrate social data with CRM and web analytics data in meaningful ways,” says Mike Lewis, a senior analyst at Ovum, Chairman of ILD Corp. and @OfficeArrow ; Author of Social Media Leadership: How to Get Off the Bench and Into the Game.. “This integration will answer the ROI question, as integration will allow brands to finally see and track their overall social media impact on bottom-line results.”
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“We can talk about the reach and the power of social networks presence. We can talk about integrating traditional and social for the best impact. But until we have tools that allow us to measure the right things at the right time in the right and integrated way, we won’t know what that impact is,” observes Ekaterina Walter, Intel Social Media Strategist and blogger.
At Vision Marketing integration of a variety of marketing strategies and channels has always been a priority. Yet in order to provide a fully integrated and efficient process for ourselves as well as our clients, we use a number of tools to make the process hum.
The integration tools that we rely on to provide a fully integrated Inbound Marketing process are Hubspot working in combination with Salesforce to provide the pow
er of CRM with content driven lead generation, nurturing and conversion. Together these two tools offer some powerful analytics and means to A/B test and measure performance and results.
We’ve found Hootsuite to be an efficient platform for managing and monitoring social media accounts. Listening and response to community engagement is as important as posting content.
These are not the only tools available; the marketplace is filled with options for small to very large enterprises.
What are you doing to make integration a priority within your marketing process?
