Effective business marketing strategies are about utilizing a broad spectrum of marketing opportunities so that no potential customer is missed. Ideally, by taking advantage of multiple systems and utilizing proven technology to reach your targeted audience, you’ll theoretically be able to maximize your reach and draw in targeted business from multiple avenues in a way that those focused too heavily on one campaign often fail to do.
Two of the most common strategies in today’s online environment are email marketing and social media marketing. Both are designed to target relevant customers, but both do so in very different ways:
- Social Media is about individualized outreach and communication. It involves a combination of personalization and marketing skill, and relies on the ability to gather followers with your content.
- Email Marketing – in this case, the list builders – is about attracting as many people as possible to what you offer. You do this with content marketing, valuable newsletters and information, and the ability to gain genuine interest from individuals focused on the content you’re hoping to share.
While there are some similarities between them, they both use very different tools to get there. Social media has an extremely short shelf life, while email marketing can run on its own. Email marketing tends to be a bit less personal in terms of content, but social media needs constant monitoring and updating to provide you with any benefits.
Using Social Media and Email Marketing to Complement Each Other
Ideally, you’ll use both, along with any other SEO or online strategies you’re running. When you run more than one strategy at a time, you have the opportunity to leverage each strategy in order to make the other more successful. Consider the following:
- Polling Your Social Media for Newsletters – The goal is to get those on your social media account interested in your newsletters, since that’s where the money is. One way to do this is to ask your social media account for information that you’ll only provide in newsletter form. For example, asking your audience “what questions do you have about X? – Answers will be featured at an upcoming newsletter, found here (URL).” This gets users interested in signing up for a newsletter if they haven’t already to answer common questions.
- Prizes – Keeping both newsletter users and social media users interested in both can be a challenge. You can do this by offering prizes or drawings to those that have both. Do this by giving a code in social media and a code in the newsletter. By providing both of those codes, the user can enter for some type of drawing. There are numerous variations for how you can go about this, but the strategy can be very effective for keeping people signed up for both accounts.
- Teasers – Coming up with new social media content can be difficult. That’s why when you already have content writing completed for some type of email or newsletter, you can turn the first paragraph or two into social media post, and write that the remaining information can be found in your emails. Users that want to find out more about what you’re promoting will sign up, and your list will grow.
- Stale Content – Sometimes content becomes stale in your newsletters. But it may be valuable for your social media accounts. You can post various bits of information about it in social media in order to keep the content useful and keep your followers updated.
- Monitoring Trends – Those that run an effective social media campaign often find that their followers start to share a lot of information about themselves, or how they interact with your business. You can use that information to write up newsletter content that is most likely to attract signups, especially those targeted for especially profitable areas for email advertising systems.
The key to online success is not just about email marketing, social media, SEO, content marketing, or anything else for that matter. The key to online success is the idea that you’re doing everything well, and that you’re able to maximize the potential of each individual system. Above are some examples of how social media and email marketing can be used to complement each other, and when they’re combined with other online advertising strategies, your company will puts itself in a strong position for success.
Micah Abraham is lead content writer for Great Leap Studios. Learn more about content marketing at www.greatleapstudios.com.