5 Tips for a Winning Trifecta: Search Marketing, Social Marketing and Email Marketing

Wikipedia defines trifecta as “a parimutuel bet in which the bettor must predict which horses will finish first, second, and third in exact order.” The good news is that when you are running a digital marketing program you don’t need to be quite so precise in order to win the bet as long as you are properly using three key tactics: Social Marketing, Search Engine Marketing & Email Marketing. And in fact, if you upgrade your usage of just one, you can make the others work more effectively as well.

Over the past couple of decades, the way we track down a good B2B vendor has changed completely. Where once we sifted through magazines or asked industry forums, now almost everything happens through online searches. In recent years, multitudes of social marketing channels like Slideshare, Facebook, or LinkedIn groups, have emerged to create a rich source of interest-specific content. These channels not only offer a value added source for news and product information, but are also a great way to listen into peer reviews and conversations.

As a B2B marketer today, it is almost impossible to run an effective digital marketing campaign without an integrated approach for using the trifecta of search marketing, social marketing and email marketing. Sifting through the mass of information on the topic, I’ve found that we can distil the key ingredients of a successful digital campaign into five key picks:

1. Picking the right content strategy- It is vital to plan a content calendar would stretching out for at least a six to twelve month cycle, and identify what products or solutions will be promoted, and when. It’s easy to get sucked into the habit of creating content for content’s sake, but without a cohesive content marketing strategy and calendarized plan it is almost impossible to get high ROI from digital campaigns.
2. Picking the right tactics- Once you have figured out your content framework, then you need to work out how best to promote the content that you would like your prospects or customers to consume. Content types and approaches differ widely for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest. Slideshare or YouTube can have high worth as value added tools, but need to be clearly aligned with content strategy in order to make an impact.
3. Initiating search optimization- While there is value in spending advertising budget on paid search, organic search can yield much better results and broaden the funnel to include people who may not be ready to buy, but are ready to engage with your content. Therefore, when a content calendar is being developed, it is important to understand what key words you are going to focus on for the next six to twelve months – not just today - and optimize around that longer term objective.
4. Being socially prudent- More is not more when it comes to social marketing. The goal is not to push random content and dilute the engagement. We need to be strategic about separating substance from noise. Substance, for example, would be a success story, and noise would be a low-priority version update announcement that doesn’t align with your overall solution marketing message. So, when you build your social marketing network, you need to be clear about how you will deploy content via each channel. Your content will drive user or reader engagement, which in turn will build your relationship with a future customer.
5. Optimizing the balance - You can leverage different social marketing channels to promote solutions and products, while still mapping them to defined keywords and an overall content strategy. Make room within your plan for tightly defined tactical activities as well as more strategic, long-term communications. The one-off approach might be an email prospects to a webinar or an event or announce a buy one get one free promotion. Or introduce a weekly or monthly newsletter offering value added content to potential and current buyers.  Just remember to tie in these approaches with your search and social marketing game plan. Also be sure to invite readers to sign up with your social marketing. This will increase your search engine ranking - especially when you align with your keywords strategy and content distribution.

ZINFI’s Partner Marketing Management (PMM) platform can substantially enable a vendor to provide a set of integrated tools to their channel partners, allowing them to run digital marketing campaigns by leveraging the winning trifecta search marketing, social marketing and email campaign.

In a future post, I’ll talk more about how to accelerate building the sales funnel by coupling these tactics with tele-prospecting and telemarketing.