Online Marketing strategy must take note of Search and Social

There are many ways to bring in traffic to your website.  Many agencies out there are encouraging companies to buy banner ads from other relevant websites simply because it is a very effective traffic attraction strategy, and of course there is a good margin of profit to make too!  While the banners are really effective, they can only be temporary short-termed solutions.  That’s because it is exhaustive to the company budgets, and to maintain that kind of marketing expenses can be really detrimental to company profits.  For example, it’s like making a 5-series of stories on TV advertisements… After which, all the marketing budgets have been spent… What’s next?  More money to spend?

I think the two main things to take note in your online marketing endeavors are Search and Social only.  I am referring to the free ways of search marketing strategy, as well as social media marketing strategy.

Search

The real reason behind several websites’ success is because of Google’s ability to bring in traffic to their websites massively.  And those visitors are genuinely looking for the kind of information that you are providing, or else they will only blame Google for the wrong search results.  Hence, Google’s success is only because of their relevancy in their search results.

And it’s normal to see the majority of the visitors are new to your website because of Google’s help.  If you have more returning visitors than first-time visitors, you must be really successful in building a loyal community within your website.  Hence, your role on the website is to be able to retain the visitors to keep visiting you.

Social

Social media is the next thing to take note of today.  As the number of web visitors are increasingly using social media more than the search engines, it is becoming a viable strategy to go to the place where the crowd is.   And now the fact that more and more people are choosing to spend their time on the Internet more than television and newspapers/magazines, most of them are actually going in to look for their friends in the social media!  (And of course to do other things such as reading news.)

And what do you know?  YouTube is the second most popular search engine!  (Not Yahoo!)  Another thing to note is that people are starting to think that it is not necessary to have a website of their own, and it is enough to start a Facebook page for their own business.  With this kind of mentality going on, it’s almost impossible for social media not to grow continuously unless you close the social media company…

Search + Social

It is interesting to note that the search and social are joining forces.  With Google, you can search real time information from social media.  And in Facebook, you will see how Bing has been used in their search engine box.  Everybody is looking for ways and means to integrate with each other with the help of RSS… See how powerful RSS has become!

For more information about search and social, I would recommend you to see Lee Odden’s keynote on SEO and Social web!  Have a read and do let me know your thoughts!